Page:Doctor Syn - A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh.djvu/198

 the family confessor. As soon as I got into my old bedroom I opened the coffin, lifted out the corpse, strippin' him of his funeral clothes, which I donned. Then I hid the corpse in a dark corner of the room behind a screen and got into the great coffin. Now the lids are not screwed down in China, but merely allowed to rest upon the coffin, so I left a very little chink so that I should not have any fear of suffocation. Presently I hears the priest arrive, and my friend bids him goodnight and leaves him. Well, the fellow possessed more courage than I had credited him with, 'cos he comes promptly into the room, counts out his fresh money on the top of the coffin itself, and then curls himself up alongside it upon the mattress. Just as soon as I heard him beginnin' to breathe heavy I pushed open the coffin lid, callin' upon him by name in most sepulchral tones. He woke up, o' course, and sits up on his side of the bed and looked at the coffin; and then he beheld me a-sittin' up inside the coffin a-lookin' at him, only, o' course, he didn't think it was me, but the dead uncle. Well, he was so frightened that I just had an easy walk over him. I jumped at him, I kicked him, I made him swear that he would return every penny of his false-gotten gains to the merchant, and that if the merchant refused he was to give it to the white stranger that sojourned there, and finally, after thrashing the stuffin' out of him, I popped him bodily into the coffin, jammed the corpse from behind the screen in on top of him, and