PAGE 7
Brothers Of Pity
by
When he shut up his book and looked at me he burst out laughing. I meant to have asked him why, but I was so busy afterwards I forgot. I suppose it was the nose, for it had got rather broken when I fell down as I was burying the old drake that Neptune killed.
But he was very kind to me, and I told him all about my being a Brother of Pity, and how I had wanted to bury a robin, and how I had found one, and how he had frightened me by burying himself.
“Some other Brother of Pity must have found him,” said my godfather, still laughing. “And he must have got Jack the Giant-killer’s cloak of darkness for his dress, so that you did not see him.”
“There was nobody there,” I earnestly answered, shaking my mask as I thought of the still, lonely moonlight. “Nothing but two beetles, and I said if they would take care of him they might be Brothers of Pity.”
“They took you at your word, mio fratello. Take off your mask, which a little distracts me, and I will tell you who buried Cock Robin.”
I knew when Godfather Gilpin was really telling me things–without thinking of something else, I mean,–and I listened with all my ears.
“The beetles whom you very properly admitted into your brotherhood,” said my godfather, “were burying beetles, or sexton beetles,[A] as they are sometimes called. They bury animals of all sizes in a surprisingly short space of time. If two of them cannot conduct the funeral, they summon others. They carry the bodies, if necessary, to suitable ground. With their flat heads (for the sexton beetle does not carry a shovel as you do) they dig trench below trench all round the body they are committing to the earth, after which they creep under it and pull it down, and then shovel away once more, and so on till it is deep enough in, and then they push the earth over it and tread it and pat it neatly down.”
“Then was it the beetles who were burying the robin-redbreast?” I gasped.
“I suspect so,” said Godfather Gilpin. “But we will go and see.”
He actually knocked a book down in his hurry to get his hat, and when I helped him to pick it up, and said, “Why, godfather, you’re as bad as I was about Taylor’s Sermons,” he said, “I am an old fool, my dear. I used to be very fond of insects before I settled down to the work I’m at now, and it quite excites me to go out into the fields again.”
I never had a nicer walk, for he showed me lots of things I had never noticed, before we got to the quarry field; and then I took him straight to the place where the bit of soft earth was, and there was nothing to be seen, and the earth was quite smooth and tidy. But when he poked with his stick the ground was very soft, and after he had poked a little we saw some nut-brown feathers, and we knew it was Robin’s grave.
And I said, “Don’t poke any more, please. I wanted to bury him with rose-leaves, but the beetles were dressed in black, and I gave them leave, and I think I’ll put a cross over him, because I don’t think it’s untrue to show that he was buried by the Brothers of Pity.”
Godfather Gilpin quite agreed with me, and we made a nice mound (for I had brought my spade), and put the best kind of cross, and afterwards I made a wreath of forget-me-nots to hang on it.
He was the only robin-redbreast I have found since I became a Brother of Pity, and that was how it was that it was not I who buried him after all.
Many of the walks that Nurse likes to take I do not care about, but one place she likes to go to, especially on Sunday, I like too, and that is the churchyard.