So--thus
runs the tale--some of them laid a wager with certain Doubting
Thomases, also soldiers, that neither by fire nor water, neither
by rope nor poison, could he take harm to himself. Finally they
decided on fire for the test. So they waited until he slept--those
simple, honest, chuckle-headed chaps--and then they slipped in
with a lighted torch and touched him off.
Well, sir, the joke certainly was on those soldiers. He burned
up with all the spontaneous enthusiasm of a celluloid comb. For
qualities of instantaneous combustion he must have been the equal
of any small-town theater that ever was built--with one exit. He
was practically a total loss and there was no insurance.
They still have him, or what is left of him, in that glass case.
He did not exactly suffer martyrdom--though probably he personally
did not notice any very great difference--and so he has not been
canonized; nevertheless, they have him there in that church. In
all Europe I only saw one sight to match him, and that was down
in the crypt under the Church of the Capuchins, in Rome, where the
dissected cadavers of four thousand dead--but not gone--monks are
worked up into decorations. There are altars made of their skulls,
and chandeliers made of their thigh bones; frescoes of their spines;
mosaics of their teeth and dried muscles; cozy corners of their
femurs and pelves and tibiae.
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