It seemed upon further inquiry that there was little reason to
anticipate an early death for any one of ourselves, and this being so,
we rather liked the idea of someone else's being put away into the
churchyard; we passed, therefore, in a short time from extreme
depression to a no less extreme exultation; a new heaven and a new
earth had been revealed to us in our perception of the possibility
of benefiting by the death of our friends, and I fear that for some
time we took an interest in the health of everyone in the village
whose position rendered a repetition of the dole in the least likely.
Those were the days in which all great things seemed far off, and we
were astonished to find that Napoleon Buonaparte was an actually
living person. We had thought such a great man could only have lived a
very long time ago, and here he was after all almost as it were at our
own doors. This lent colour to the view that the Day of Judgement
might indeed be nearer than we had thought, but nurse said that was
all right now, and she knew. In those days the snow lay longer and
drifted deeper in the lanes than it does now, and the milk was
sometimes brought in frozen in winter, and we were taken down into the
back kitchen to see it.
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