Had they put my name on the coffin-lid?
I wondered.

Yes, there it was--painted on the wood in coarse, black letters, "FABIO ROMANI"-- then followed the date of my birth; then a short Latin inscription, stating that I had died of cholera on August 15, 1884.

That was yesterday--only yesterday! I seemed to have lived a century since then.
I turned to look at my father's resting-place.

The velvet on his coffin hung from its sides in moldering remnants--but it was not so utterly damp-destroyed and worm-eaten as the soaked and indistinguishable material that still clung to the massive oaken chest in the next niche, where SHE lay--she from whose tender arms I had received my first embrace--she in whose loving eyes I had first beheld the world! I knew by a sort of instinct that it must have been with the frayed fragments on her coffin that my fingers had idly played in the darkness.

I counted as before the bits of metal--eight bits length-wise, and four bits across--and on my father's close casket there were ten silver plates lengthwise and five across.