This is only a small plot of ground covered with a veritable forest of crosses and surrounded by a low stone wall.  As often happens in Spain, when the cemeteries are very small, it is necessary to dig up one coffin in order to lower another.  Those thus disinterred are thrown in a heap in a corner of the cemetery, where skulls and bones are piled up like a haystack.  As we were passing, Zarco and I looked at the skulls, wondering to whom they could have belonged, to rich or poor, noble or plebeian.

Suddenly the judge bent down, and picking up a skull, exclaimed in astonishment: 

“Look here, my friend, what is this?  It is surely a nail!”

Yes, a long nail had been driven in the top of the skull which he held in his hand.  The nail had been driven into the head, and the point had penetrated what had been the roof of the mouth.

What could this mean?  He began to conjecture, and soon both of us felt filled with horror.

“I recognize the hand of Providence!” exclaimed the judge.  “A terrible crime has evidently been committed, and would never have come to light had it not been for this accident.  I shall do my duty, and will not rest until I have brought the assassin to the scaffold.”

III

My friend Zarco was one of the keenest criminal judges in Spain.  Within a very few days he discovered that the corpse to which this skull belonged had been buried in a rough wooden coffin which the grave digger had taken home with him, intending to use it for firewood.  Fortunately, the man had not yet burned it up, and on the lid the judge managed to decipher the initials:  “A.G.R.” together with the date of interment.  He had at once searched the parochial books of every church in the neighborhood, and a week later found the following entry: 

“In the parochial church of San Sebastian of the village of ——­, on the 4th of May, 1843, the funeral rites as prescribed by our holy religion were performed over the body of Don Alfonzo Gutierrez Romeral, and he was buried in the cemetery.  He was a native of this village and did not receive the holy sacrament, nor did he confess, for he died suddenly of apoplexy at the age of thirty-one.  He was married to Dona Gabriela Zahara del Valle, a native of Madrid, and left no issue him surviving.”

The judge handed me the above certificate, duly certified to by the parish priest, and exclaimed:  “Now everything is as clear as day, and I am positive that within a week the assassin will be arrested.  The apoplexy in this case happens to be an iron nail driven into the man’s head, which brought quick and sudden death to A.G.R.  I have the nail, and I shall soon find the hammer.”