"
"Ah, this is news! So you think it is possible to evoke the dead in some
more tangible form than that of an instructive ghost? You think it
possible for a dead girl--or, as to that matter, for a dead boy, or a
defunct archbishop, or a deceased ragpicker,--to be fetched back to live
again in the warm flesh?"
"All things are possible, Manuel, at a price."
Said Manuel:
"What price would be sufficient to re-purchase the rich spoils of Death?
and whence might any bribe be fetched? For all the glowing wealth and
beauty of this big round world must show as a new-minted farthing beside
his treasure chests, as one slight shining unimportant coin which--even
this also!--belongs to earth, but has been overlooked by him as yet.
Presently this hour, and whatever is strutting through this hour, is
added to the heaped crypts wherein lie all that was worthiest in the old
time.
"Now there is garnered such might and loveliness and wisdom as human
thinking cannot conceive of. An emperor is made much of here when he has
conquered some part of the world, but Death makes nothing of a world of
emperors: and in Death's crowded store-rooms nobody bothers to estimate
within a thousand thousand of how many emperors, and tzars and popes and
pharaohs and sultans, that in their day were adored as omnipotent, are
there assembled pellmell, along with all that was worthiest in the old
time.
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