which malignity could devise, to discover benignity and mercy in the torturing calamity which has just punished you and your wife for nothing!  But I fancy that it will be harder still when I tell you what I more than suspect—­ha, ha.  It would be really ridiculous, if it were not heart-rending; that your little girl has been actually buried alive; do you comprehend me?—­alive.  For, upon my life, I fancy she was not dead as she lay in her coffin.”

I knew the wretch was exulting in the fresh anguish he had just inflicted.  I know not how it was, but any announcement of disaster from his lips, seemed to me to be necessarily true.  Half-stifled with the dreadful emotions he had raised, palpitating between hope and terror, I rushed frantically back again, the way I had just come, running as fast as my speed could carry me, toward the, alas! distant burial-ground where my darling lay.

I stopped a cab slowly returning to town, at the corner of the lane, sprang into it, directed the man to drive to the church of ——­, and promised him anything and everything for despatch.  The man seemed amazed; doubtful, perhaps, whether he carried a maniac or a malefactor.  Still he took his chance for the promised reward, and galloped his horse, while I, tortured with suspense, yelled my frantic incentives to further speed.

At last, in a space immeasurably short, but which to me was protracted almost beyond endurance, we reached the spot.  I halloed to the sexton, who was now employed upon another grave, to follow me.  I myself seized a mattock, and in obedience to my incoherent and agonised commands, he worked as he had never worked before.  The crumbling mould flew swiftly to the upper soil—­deeper and deeper, every moment, grew the narrow grave—­at last I sobbed, “Thank God—­thank God,” as I saw the face of the coffin emerge; a few seconds more and it lay upon the sward beside me, and we both, with the edges of our spades, ripped up the lid.

There was the corpse—­but not the tranquil statue I had seen it last.  Its knees were both raised, and one of its little hands drawn up and clenched near its throat, as if in a feeble but agonised struggle to force up the superincumbent mass.  The eyes, that I had last seen closed, were now open, and the face no longer serenely pale, but livid and distorted.

I had time to see all in an instant; the whole scene reeled and darkened before me, and I swooned away.

When I came to myself, I found that I had been removed to the vestry-room.  The open coffin was in the aisle of the church, surrounded by a curious crowd.  A medical gentleman had examined the body carefully, and had pronounced life totally extinct.  The trepidation and horror I experienced were indescribable.  I felt like the murderer of my own child.  Desperate as I was of any chance of its life, I dispatched messengers for no less than three of the most eminent physicians then practising in London.  All concurred—­the child was now as dead as any other, the oldest tenant of the churchyard.