Alice MacDonald Kipling

“ On either side were the huge furnace fires of the black country shedding a lurid light far into the darkness; and the heaps of refuse, which looked grey and dead in the daylight, were now so many glowing hillocks of rod-hot embers. It was more like a dream than any waking sight I had ever had; and more like a vision of purgatory, or even a worse place, than like a dream. The train stopped, and upon inquiring the name of the station, I found that I had passed the station of ———, where I ought to have left the train, and where my friend had arranged to meet me with a carriage. ”

“ Returning at night he found Mary comfortably clothed, and looking less pale and ill. His housekeeper told him that she had been dressed like a child, having apparently no idea of assisting herself at all.
It would be impossible to describe minutely how intelligence dawned, and grew swiftly in the poor girl's mind. It was not a gradual growth from infancy, but came in fitful snatches. The greatest change came first, when her face brightened from its sweet, blank vacancy of expression at Astley's approach, and then she began to wait upon him like a loving child. ”

“ Though he was not hard-hearted, it was not unnatural that in time he should grow so much accustomed to the sight of his “subjects” as to feel nothing but a momentary pity as he put aside the clustering curls of infancy, or uncovered the face of a man struck down in the glory of his years.
One night, as many nights before, the stealthy visit was paid, and Astley took his lamp to examine the new subject. Neither strong man nor tender child this time, but a young and beautiful woman. ”

“ Richard Astley, in common with the rest of the profession, availed himself of their services, and many times in the black night his door was opened to those who did not knock, but who were expected and waited for, and who, entering silently, stealthily deposited a dread burden upon the table prepared for its reception. Old and young, men, women, and children, all in turn lay upon that grim table, and Astley’s skilful instruments cut their way to secrets that were destined to benefit the living. ”

“ Two years passed, and Mary had developed so rapidly that she was much like other women in knowledge and acquirements, but she had no memory of anything before her trance. Astley told her the whole story, and urged her to try to recall something of the time before, but it was in vain, her memory was clean gone. And the present time was so happy that they cared little for the past. She was something belonging so entirely to him, even her life she owed to his care, and loved him so intensely, there being no one in the world whom she knew or loved beside, that he could not fail to be very happy ”

“ Night has veiled many sights of woe, the clouds of night have many times been pierced by cries of anguish, bitter cries for faith and patience, going up above the stars right to the feet of God, but night never shrouded deeper woe than this, bitterer cries never pierced the shuddering darkness. ”

“ The flat, black ground, intersected by canals, upon whose foul and muddy water slow barges laden with coal or iron are drawn by lean horses, and even in some cases by women with scarcely a trace of their sex visible in dress or feature,—the short wide chimneys pouring forth smoke and flame, the machinery for working coal pits, and the débris from them and from the furnaces, all go to make one of the dreariest pictures conceivable. ”

“ By the doors of these desolate and ruinous dwellings little children are seen, looking like little savages, even to the colour of their skin, playing their dreary play among the cinders which cover the roads. ”

“ In these days of constant railway travelling, when a distant town is often practically nearer than a neighbouring village, many who have never visited the black country have obtained a general idea of its characteristics while passing through it ”

“ At a time when the difficulty of procuring subjects for anatomical study was very great, and when to procure them honestly was impossible, as the prejudice against dissection was so strong that no one was willing to submit the body of any one connected with him to examination, it is well known that there were men who made it their business to obtain, at no small risk, bodies, generally those of the newly-buried, which they sold to surgeons, medical students, or indeed to any one who stood in need of the ghastly commodity. ”

“ Perhaps the huts or hovels—built sometimes of mud, sometimes of mud and brick, and always more or less fallen or falling into decay—inhabited by the pitmen and other workmen of the place, are the saddest sight of all. ”

“ I married an English girl with your wife’s hair and eyes; her height, too, and with her sweet voice. I brought her over here directly after our marriage, and we lived the happiest life in the world for two years—and then she died.”
Astley was silent. He could think of no words of consolation that would not be a mockery to a man who had lost such a wife as Mary.”
“Died,” Holt continued, after a pause, “while I was away from her. ”

“ This class, known as “body snatchers” and “resurrection men,” has died out, since there is happily now little prejudice against what has been triumphantly proved to be a necessary branch of scientific study ”