The Midland Railway, on being extended to London, was the occasion of the
removal of a vast amount of house property, also it interfered to a
certain extent with the graveyard belonging to Old St. Pancras Church.
The company had purchased a new piece of ground in which to re-inter the
human remains discovered in the part they required. Amongst them was the
corpse of a high dignitary of the French Romish Church. Orders were
received for the transmission of the remains to his native land, and the
delicate work of exhuming the corpse was entrusted to some clever
gravediggers. On opening the ground they were surprised to find, not
bones of one man, but of several. Three skulls and three sets of bones
were yielded by the soil in which they had lain mouldering. The
difficulty was how to identify the bones of a French ecclesiastic amid so
many. After much discussion, the shrewdest gravedigger suggested that,
being a Frenchman, the darkest coloured skull must be his. Acting upon
this idea, the blackest bones were sorted and put together, until the
requisite number of rights and lefts were obtained. These were
reverently screwed up in a new coffin, conveyed to France, and buried
with all the pomp and circumstance of the Roman Catholic Church.