A GRIM SIGHT.

Thames Star, Volume XIV, Issue 4407, 17 February 1883, Page 2

A GRIM SIGHT.

The great curiosity at the Monastery of the Mount St. Bernard is the morgue. If the day is a little warm, the Brother, who attends to visitors, hesitates a bit before opening the door of the wooden | house just outside the chief building. He first drives away the dogs who come prowling about, snuffing the air suspiciously, and has them shut into their room opposite the huge refectory. Then he marshals the little' company of international tourists in a line before the mysterious door. The keen mountain air rushes in, and presently you are conscious of a faint, sickly odour—not strong enough to be repulsive, but eminently suggestive of death. Then, as you stand there peering with strained eyeballs into the darkness, you become vaguely conscious that the face is looking at you. I defy anyone who is possessed of the smallest grain of imagination to see that mysterious face growing slowly out of obscurity, without a sudden sinking of the heart and a'cnill, which no effort of the will can suppress. It is, the face of a woman —and yet*of a ghost; a kind of corporeal presence divested of life, and yet so horribly like life that you are almost afraid the bony and skinny frame to which it belongs will arise and stretch out its dreadful arms, and drag you down into the depths which you so instinctively shun. The good Brother does not say anything; he watches the effect of this curious spectacle upon - you. Pretty soon you can discern that the face belongs to the body of a woman—and that . this woman is clasping to her breast the form of a, tiny babe. The mother is seated on the ground, and appears to be dazed by the light pouring down into her darksome habitation. Bat.'oh! B the horror of her face ! Here is death without decay ; here, in this wondrous air, on this pass more than eight-thousand feet above the sea level, putrefaction is unknown ; and bodips found iti the snows in winter—or after the white shroud has melted away from the bosom of Nature of the spring—are preserved entire so long as the monks care to keep them. The grimness of the spectacle is enhanced by the fact that nearly every boiy> found is contorted, twisted, strained and knotted in fantastic shapes. Now and then one which bears all the appearance of tranquil sleep is brought in; bat ia most cases there are indications, that man and woman, in their battle with Nature, fought hard and desperately and re« fused to be overcome until- every particle of force was exhausted.'; The brethren gather up the bodies with tender care and place them in the dead-house in the usually vain hope that some relatives may come to recognise them. Where is the father of the child which this^ strange spectral mother clasps in her*^ arms ?• What was the history of the woman who had thus wandered in the wild winter from the Rhone Valley towards the kinder and warmer, Italian slopes P Perhaps her husband was with her—and perhaps his body now lies at the bottom cf some precipice where even the "pious monk of St. Bernard" cannot find him—or perhaps he is here in the dead-house. The peasants rarely carry any paper which can completely identify them, and sometimes, the unfortunates found dead in the pass here' led such wandering lives—going to Switzerland for harvest work in the summer and to Italy when the winter nips—that their passports even give no due to their birthplaces or native villages.—Exchange.