308 BARON EEICHENBACH'S 



visible to no ordinary eyes, but plainly perceptible to the eyes 

 of sensitive young ladies. 



This grand discovery of the baron, the fails that coronavit 

 his opus, was again the result of a suggestion. At Colmar 

 it would seem there once lived a certain blind poet, called 

 Pfeffel. That blind poet had an amanuensis, whose name 

 was 6 Billing,' and, as befitted the amanuensis of a poet, this 

 young man was endowed with a very delicate organisation. 

 Now it so happened that one day, as the poet and his amanu- 

 ensis were walking side by side in the poet's garden, Billing 

 manifested great unwillingness to step over a certain spot. 

 On explanation being required of him, he confessed that he 

 felt a repugnance to walk over a spot where human remains 

 lay buried : that human remains were underneath he knew 

 so he explained by the testimony of a flickering light which 

 shone on the earth's surface. For a season Billing's words 

 remained unheeded ; at length, however, people, acting upon 

 his advice, dug down until they arrived at a skeleton of a 

 body that had been buried in quicklime. Owing to this 

 proximity of chemical materials, an action was set up ; and 

 as one result of this action, the flickering light Billing had 

 seen upon the surface of the ground. The mouldering re- 

 mains having been exhumed and scattered about, the concen- 

 trated light that was, changed into a diffused light, corre- 

 sponding with places wherein the remains had been strewn. 

 Profiting by this hint, Baron Keichenbach induced one of his 

 sensitive young ladies to take a series of midnight rambles 

 with him in graveyards and cemeteries; the object being to 

 discover whether she could recognise flickering grave-lights 

 comparable to such as the man Billing had seen in the poet 

 Pfeifel's garden. She did so, easily. Not every grave was 

 illuminated to her eyes with this magnetic light, only certain 

 graves, those especially where corpses had recently been 

 laid. Here then, in passing, do we find some little discrepancy 

 between the testimony of the poet's sensitive amanuensis and 



