Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/294

282 up their last breath after a vain struggle to break out of their coffin! The facts collected by Bruhier and Lallemand in two works that have become classic compose a most mournful and dramatic history. These are some of its episodes, marked by the strange part that chance plays in them. A rural guard, having no family, dies in a little village of Lower Charente. Hardly grown cold, his body is taken out of bed, and laid on a straw ticking covered with a coarse cloth. An old hired woman is charged with the watch over the bed of death. At the foot of the corpse were a branch of box, put into a vessel filled with holy water, and a lighted taper. Toward midnight the old watcher, yielding to the invincible need of sleep, fell into a deep slumber. Two hours later she awoke surrounded by flames from a fire that had caught her clothes. She rushed out, crying with all her might for help, and the neighbors, running together at her screams, saw in a moment a naked spectre issue from the hut, limping and hobbling on limbs covered with burns. "While the old woman slept, a spark had probably dropped on the straw bed, and the fire it kindled had aroused both the watcher from her sleep and the guard from his seeming death. With timely assistance he recovered from his burns, and grew sound and well again.

On the 15th of October, 1842, a farmer in the neighborhood of Neufchâtel, in the Lower Seine, climbed into a loft over his barn to sleep, as he usually did, among the hay. Early the next day, his customary hour of rising being past, his wife, wishing to know the cause of his delay, went to look for him, and found him dead. At the time of interment, more than twenty-four hours after, the bearers placed the body in a coffin, which was closed, and carried it slowly down the ladder by which they had gained the loft. Suddenly one of the rounds of the ladder snapped, and the bearers fell together with the coffin, which burst open with the shock. The accident, which might have been fatal to a live man, was very serviceable to the dead one, who was roused from his lethargy by the concussion, returned to life, and hastened to get out of his shroud with the assistance of those of the bystanders who had not been frightened away by his sudden resurrection. An hour later he could recognize his friends, and felt no uneasiness except a slight confusion in his head, and the next day was able to go to work again. At about the same time a resident of Nantes gave up life after a long illness. His heirs made arrangements for a grand funeral, and, while the performance of a requiem was going on, the dead man returned to life and stirred in the coffin, that stood in the middle of the church. When carried home, he soon regained his health. Some time afterward, the curé, not caring to be at the trouble of the burial ceremonies for nothing, sent a bill to the ex-corpse, who declined to pay it, and referred the curé to the heirs who had given orders for the funeral. A lawsuit followed, with which the papers of the day kept the public greatly amused. A few years ago Cardinal