crumbling away of one of the walls. I cleared a little earth from
it, and, finding that it seemed part of a large mass, determined to
investigate it. The workmen I sent for unearthed an oblong vault
some eight feet below the surface, and set in the corner of what
had evidently been the foundation walls of an ancient house. A
layer of ashes and charcoal on the top of the vault showed that
the house above had perished by fire. The vault itself was
perfectly intact, the cement being as good as when first applied.
It had a door, but this we could not force, and found entrance
by removing one of the flagstones which formed the roof. The
air which came up was stagnant but pure, dry and not cold.
Descending with a lantern, I found myself in an apartment
fitted up as a bedroom in the style of the nineteenth century. On
the bed lay a young man. That he was dead and must have been
dead a century was of course to be taken for granted; but the
extraordinary state of preservation of the body struck me and the
medical colleagues whom I had summoned with amazement.
That the art of such embalming as this had ever been known we
should not have believed, yet here seemed conclusive testimony
that our immediate ancestors had possessed it. My medical
colleagues, whose curiosity was highly excited, were at once for
undertaking experiments to test the nature of the process
employed, but I withheld them. My motive in so doing, at least
the only motive I now need speak of, was the recollection of
something I once had read about the extent to which your
contemporaries had cultivated the subject of animal magnetism.
It had occurred to me as just conceivable that you might be in a
trance, and that the secret of your bodily integrity after so long a
time was not the craft of an embalmer, but life. So extremely
fanciful did this idea seem, even to me, that I did not risk the