intruding. A man who has traversed the underlying catacombs need not be
delicate about taking a nip of spirits or a hunch of bread. Both were in
a cupboard in the little domicile, supplied with a porter's chair so
ample as to be the watcher's bed, and a stove where a fire merrily
burned, crackling with billets of pine wood.

The disappearance was the more strange, as on a framed placard, at the
base of which was a row of brazen knobs, there was a formal injunction
for the gatewarder never to go away without his place being taken by
another "from sunset to sunrise and an hour after!"

Claudius knew what those knobs and the instructions portended in this
adjunct to the charnel house. The public mortuary was at the other end
of the wires from those bells; the custom was to attach them to the dead
so that, if their slumbers were not that knowing no waking and they
stirred even so little as a finger, the electric transmitter which they
agitated would sound the appeal.

And now the watcher, on whom perhaps depended the duration of a worthier
life than his, had paltered with his trust, while drinking at the
beer-house or chattering with a sweetheart, the bell might ring
unheeded, and the unhappy creature, falling with the last tremor of
vitality, to obtain a desperate succor, would become indeed the corpse
like which he had been laid out in the morgue.

Claudius smiled grimly and sadly. On what flimsy bases the best plant of
wise men too often rest! The latest power of nature had been harnessed
to do man service in his utmost extremity; science had perfected its
instruments, but one link in the chain was fallible man. The bell would
tinkle--the watcher would be laughing out of earshot--and the life would