[The Innocents Abroad Part 2 of 6 by Mark Twain]@TWC D-Link bookThe Innocents Abroad Part 2 of 6 CHAPTER XIV 4/15
They showed us a cast of his face taken after death, the bullet that killed him, and the two vertebrae in which it lodged.
These people have a somewhat singular taste in the matter of relics.
Ferguson told us that the silver cross which the good archbishop wore at his girdle was seized and thrown into the Seine, where it lay embedded in the mud for fifteen years, and then an angel appeared to a priest and told him where to dive for it; he did dive for it and got it, and now it is there on exhibition at Notre Dame, to be inspected by anybody who feels an interest in inanimate objects of miraculous intervention. Next we went to visit the Morgue, that horrible receptacle for the dead who die mysteriously and leave the manner of their taking off a dismal secret.
We stood before a grating and looked through into a room which was hung all about with the clothing of dead men; coarse blouses, water-soaked; the delicate garments of women and children; patrician vestments, hacked and stabbed and stained with red; a hat that was crushed and bloody.
On a slanting stone lay a drowned man, naked, swollen, purple; clasping the fragment of a broken bush with a grip which death had so petrified that human strength could not unloose it -- mute witness of the last despairing effort to save the life that was doomed beyond all help.
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