attired in most costly raiment, but it walked at noonday, and even
drove! I was inexpressibly annoyed by these reports, and thinking there
might be something more than superstition in the popular belief that
only the spirits of the unburied dead still walk the earth, I took some
workmen equipped with picks and crowbars into the now long unentered
strong-room, and ordered them to demolish the brick wall that I had
built about the partner of my joys. I was resolved to give the body of
Elizabeth Mary such burial as I thought her immortal part might be
willing to accept as an equivalent to the privilege of ranging at will
among the haunts of the living.

In a few minutes we had broken down the wall and, thrusting a lamp
through the breach, I looked in. Nothing! Not a bone, not a lock of
hair, not a shred of clothing--the narrow space which, upon my
affidavit, had been legally declared to hold all that was mortal of the
late Mrs. Turmore was absolutely empty! This amazing disclosure, coming
upon a mind already overwrought with too much of mystery and excitement,
was more than I could bear. I shrieked aloud and fell in a fit. For
months afterward I lay between life and death, fevered and delirious;
nor did I recover until my physician had had the providence to take a
case of valuable jewels from my safe and leave the country.

The next summer I had occasion to visit my wine cellar, in one corner of
which I had built the now long disused strong-room. In moving a cask of
Madeira I struck it with considerable force against the partition wall,
and was surprised to observe that it displaced two large square stones
forming a part of the wall.

Applying my hands to these, I easily pushed them out entirely, and
looking through saw that they had fallen into the niche in which I had