“Did you say coffin?”

“Yes:  I tell you, on my word of honour, that the first time in my life I saw ever Sir Francis Varney, was in his coffin.”

“Then he is a vampyre, and there can be no mistake,” said the admiral.

“Go on, I pray you, doctor, go on,” said Henry, anxiously.

“I will.  The reason why he became the inhabitant of a coffin was simply this:—­he had been hanged,—­executed at the Old Bailey, in London, before ever I set eyes upon that strange countenance of his.  You know that I was practising surgery at the London schools some years ago, and that, consequently, as I commenced the profession rather late in life, I was extremely anxious to do the most I could in a very short space of time.”

“Yes—­yes.”

“Arrived, then, with plenty of resources, which I did not, as the young men who affected to be studying in the same classes as myself, spend in the pursuit of what they considered life in London, I was indefatigable in my professional labours, and there was nothing connected with them which I did not try to accomplish.

“At that period, the difficulty of getting a subject for anatomization was very great, and all sorts of schemes had to be put into requisition to accomplish so desirable, and, indeed, absolutely necessary a purpose.

“I became acquainted with the man who, I have told you, is in the Hall, at present, and who then filled the unenviable post of public executioner.  It so happened, too, that I had read a learned treatise, by a Frenchman, who had made a vast number of experiments with galvanic and other apparatus, upon persons who had come to death in different ways, and, in one case, he asserted that he had actually recovered a man who had been hanged, and he had lived five weeks afterwards.

“Young as I then was, in comparison to what I am now, in my profession, this inflamed my imagination, and nothing seemed to me so desirable as getting hold of some one who had only recently been put to death, for the purpose of trying what I could do in the way of attempting a resuscitation of the subject.  It was precisely for this reason that I sought out the public executioner, and made his acquaintance, whom every one else shunned, because I thought he might assist me by handing over to me the body of some condemned and executed man, upon whom I could try my skill.

“I broached the subject to him, and found him not averse.  He said, that if I would come forward and claim, as next of kin and allow the body to be removed to his house, the body of the criminal who was to be executed the first time, from that period, that he could give me a hint that I should have no real next of kin opponents, he would throw every facility in my way.

“This was just what I wanted; and, I believe, I waited with impatience for some poor wretch to be hurried to his last account by the hands of my friend, the public executioner.