The case has been recorded of an English lady of good social position who fell in love with an undertaker at her father’s funeral and insisted on marrying him.  It is known that some men have been so abnormally excited by the funeral trappings of death that only in such surroundings have they been able to effect coitus.  A case has been recorded of a physician of unimpeachable morality who was unable to attend funerals, even of his own relatives, on account of the sexual excitement thus aroused.  Funerals, tragedies at the theater, pictures of martyrdom, scenes of execution, and trials at the law-courts have been grouped together as arousing pleasure in many people, especially women.  (C.F. von Schlichtegroll, Sacher-Masoch und der Masochismus, pp. 30-31.) Wakes and similar festivals may here find their psychological basis, and funerals are an unquestionable source of enjoyment among some people, especially of so-called “Celtic” race.  The stimulating reaction after funerals is well known to many, and Leigh Hunt refers to this (in his Autobiography) as affecting the sincerely devoted friends who had just cremated Shelley.

It may well be, as Kiernan has argued (Alienist and Neurologist, 1891; ibid., 1902, p. 263), that in the disturbance of emotional balance caused by grief the primitive instincts become peculiarly apt to respond to stimulus, and that in the aboulia of grief the mind is specially liable to become the prey to obsessions.

“When my child died at the age of 6 months,” a correspondent writes, “I had a violent paroxysm of weeping and for some days I could not eat.  When I kissed the dead boy for the last time (I had never seen a corpse before) I felt I had reached the depths of misery and could never smile or have any deep emotions again.  Yet that night, though my thoughts had not strayed to sexual subjects since the child’s death, I had a violent erection.  I felt ashamed to desire carnal things when my dead child was still in the house, and explained to my wife.  She was sympathetic, for her idea was that our common grief had intensified my love for her.  I feel convinced, however, that my desire was the result of a stimulus propagated to the sexual centers from the centers affected by my grief, the transference of my emotion from one set of nerves to another.  I do not perhaps express my meaning clearly.”

How far the emotional influence of grief entered into the following episode it is impossible to say, for here it is probable that we are mainly concerned with one of those almost irresistible impulses by which adolescent girls are sometimes overcome.  The narrative is from the lips of a reliable witness, a railway guard, who, some thirty years ago, when a youth of 18, in Cornwall, lodged with a man and woman who had a daughter of his own age.  Some months later, when requiring a night’s lodging, he called at the house, and was greeted warmly