Then I said “Good-morning” and left, while Mr. Maginn selected a fresh stick to whittle.  Mr. Maginn, however, had one good chance recently to collect fees.

The country around the town of Millburg is of limestone formation.  The town stands, as has already been mentioned, on a high hill, at the foot of which there is a wonderful spring, and the belief has always been that the hill is full of great caves and fissures, through which the water makes its way to feed the spring.  A year or two ago they organized a cemetery company at Millburg, and they located the graveyard upon the hill a short distance back of the town.  After they had deposited several bodies in the ground, one day somebody discovered a coffin floating in the river.  It was hauled out, and it turned out to be the remains of Mr. Piggott, who was buried in the cemetery the day before.  The coroner held an inquest, and they reinterred the corpse.

On the following morning, however, Mr. Piggott was discovered bumping up against the wharf at the gas-works in the river.  People began to be scared, and there was some talk to the effect that he had been murdered and couldn’t rest quietly in his grave.  But the coroner was not scared.  He empaneled a jury, held another inquest, collected his fees and buried the body.  Two days afterward some boys, while in swimming, found a burial-casket floating under the bushes down by the saw-mill.  They called for help, and upon examining the interior of the casket they discovered the irrepressible Mr. Piggott again.  This was too much.  Even the ministers began to believe in ghosts, and hardly a man in town dared to go out of the house that night alone.  But the coroner controlled his emotions sufficiently to sit on the body, make the usual charges and bury Mr. Piggott in a fresh place in his lot.

The next morning, while Peter Lamb was drinking out of the big spring, he saw something push slowly out of the mud at the bottom of the pool.  He turned as white as a sheet as he watched it; and in a few minutes he saw that it was a coffin.  It floated out, down the creek into the river, and then Peter ran to tell the coroner.  That official had a jury waiting, and he proceeded to the coffin.  It was old Mr. Piggott, as usual; and they went through the customary routine with him, and were about to bury him, when his family came forward and said they would prefer to inter him in another place, being convinced now there must be a subterranean channel leading from the cemetery to the spring.  The coroner couldn’t object; but after the Piggotts were gone he said to the jury that people who would take the bread out of the mouth of a poor man in that way would be certain to come to want themselves some day.  He said he could easily have paid off the mortgage on his house and let his little girl take lessons on the melodeon besides, if they’d just allowed Piggott to wobble around the way he wanted to.