PREFACE
oes anybody remember the opera of The Inca, and that heartbreaking episode where the Court Undertaker, in a morbid desire to increase his professional skill, deliberately accomplishes the destruction of his middle-aged relatives in order to inter them for the sake of practise?
If I recollect, his dismal confession runs something like this:
“It was in a bleak November
When I slew them, I remember,
As I caught them unawares...
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