VAMPIRES. 357 



ship with a local guide, who, during that day of mortal strife, 

 had been present in the amateur capacity of a suttler or 

 canteen-bearer, ministering comforts to the wounded. Gazing 

 from the summit of the huge mound whereon the Belgian lion 

 stands allegorical, in a certain sense, of Belgian bravery 

 I looked down 011 many a grave and many a trophied marble. 

 Thick they were thick those graves, those trophied marbles ! 

 and I bethought me how far more thickly strewn on the 

 evening of the day of strife must have been the writhing 

 wounded, the shattered and gory dead ! I pictured to myself 

 the serried squares, belching their volleys at advancing French 

 columns. I sought to reproduce the scene of men stricken 

 by lead or steel, and suddenly laid low. 'They fell fast 

 enough,' said I ; ' it must have been an awful sight.' 



'Parbleu!' interposed my guide; 'you may think it odd, 

 but I did not see one man fall. They would come on. Then 

 a volley, a bayonet or cavalry charge, a tremendous noise, fire, 

 smoke, and all that ; and when it was over, there they would 

 lie, just like those sheep there, Monsieur ; but, on my honour, 

 not one fellow did I actually see go down.' 



Very well ; Calmet did not record, and assuredly would 

 not wish it to be understood, that revenans, as he calls them 

 or, to be plain, disreputable corpses whom earth rejects 

 can be numbered by the million. He perhaps refers to some 

 scores ; and if nobody has ever caught one of these in the 

 very act of coming out of a grave, what does this prove ? 

 Nothing, to my mind, after what the guide told me at 

 Waterloo. 



The act of munching in a grave, or even coming out of a 

 grave, violates social proprieties truly, but nothing more. It 

 is not every human mind, indeed, that is strong enough, or 

 sufficiently well balanced, to look upon a horrible prodigy 

 unmoved. If revenans, as Calmet denominates them, were 

 more frequent than they are, then probably many spectators 

 might be scared into fits or go mad outright ; but if a disre- 



