I had never had so happy a summer before as the one when I was a Brother of Pity.  I heard Nurse saying to Mrs. Jones that “there was no telling what would keep children out of mischief,” for that I “never seemed to be tired of that old black rag and that ridiculous face.”

But it was not the dressing-up that pleased me day after day, it was the chance of finding dead bodies with no friends to bury them.  Going out is quite a new thing when you have something to look for; and Godfather Gilpin says he felt just the same in the days when he used to collect insects.

I found a good many corpses of one sort and another:  birds and mice and frogs and beetles, and sometimes bigger bodies—­such as kittens and dogs.  The stand of my old wooden horse made a capital thing to drag them on, for all the wheels were there, and I had a piece of blue cotton-velvet to put on the top, but the day I found a dead mole I did not cover him.  I put him outside, and he looked like black velvet lying on blue velvet.  It seemed quite a pity to put him into the dirty ground, with such a lovely coat.

One day I was coming back from burying a mouse, and I saw a “flying watchman” beetle lying quite stiff and dead, as I thought, with his legs stretched out, and no friends; so I put him on the bier at once, and put the blue velvet over him, and drew him to the place where the mouse’s grave was.  When I took the pall off and felt him, and turned him over and over, he was still quite rigid, so I felt sure he was dead, and began to dig his grave; but when I had finished and went back to the bier, the flying watchman was just creeping over the wheel.  He had only pretended to be dead, and had given me all that trouble for nothing.

When first I became a Brother of Pity, I thought I would have a graveyard to bury all the creatures in, but afterwards I changed my mind and settled to bury them all near wherever I found them.  But I got some bits of white wood, and fastened them across each other with bits of wire, and so marked every grave.

At last there were lots of them dotted about the fields and woods I knew.  I remembered to whom most of them belonged, and even if I had forgotten, it made a very good game, to pretend to be a stranger in the neighbourhood, and then pretend to be somebody else, talking to myself, and saying, “Wherever you see those little graves some poor creature has been buried by the Brothers of Pity.”

I did not like to read the burial service, for fear it should not be quite right (especially for frogs; there were so many of them in summer, and they were so horrid-looking, I used to bury several together, and pretend it was the time of the plague); but I did not like not having any service at all.  So when I put on my cloak and mask, and took my spade and the bier, I said, “Brothers, let us prepare to perform this work of mercy,” which is the first thing the real Fratelli della Misericordia say when they are going out.  And when I buried the body I said, “Go in peace,” which is the last thing that they say.  Godfather Gilpin told me, and I learnt it by heart.