332 NATURE AND LIFE. 



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, yield- 

 ing to the invincible need of sleep, fell into a deep slum- 

 ber. 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, run- 

 ning 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 neighbor- 

 hood of Neufchatel, 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 de- 

 lay, 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, 



