322 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. LHarly 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, 
