 Friday the
masons were to have come. Thursday night we had a tremendous deluge of rain, and
Friday morning I found my cellar a frog-pond and the walls quite washed down. My
daughter, who had come out to view the disaster with me, called my attention to
a corner of masonry laid bare by the crumbling away of one of the walls. I
cleared a little earth from it, and, finding that it seemed part of a large
mass, determined to investigate it. The workmen I sent for unearthed an oblong
vault some eight feet below the surface, and set in the corner of what had
evidently been the fundation walls of an ancient house. A layer of ashes and
charcoal on the top of the vault showed that the house above had perished by
fire. The vault itself was perfectly intact, the cement being as good as when
first applied. It had a door, but this we could not force, and found entrance by
removing one of the flagstones which formed the roof. The air which came up was
stagnant but pure, dry and not cold. Descending with a lantern, I found myself
in an apartment fitted up as a bedroom in the style of the nineteenth century.
On the bed lay a young man. That he was dead and must have been dead a century
was of course to be taken for granted; but the extraordinary state of
preservation of the body struck me and the medical colleagues whom I had
summoned with amazement. That the art of such embalming as this had ever been
known we should not have believed, yet here seemed conclusive testimony that our
immediate ancestors had possessed it. My medical colleagues, whose curiosity was
highly excited, were at once for undertaking experiments to test the nature of
the process employed, but I withheld them. My motive in so doing, at least the
only motive I now need speak of, was the recollection of something I once had
read about the extent to which your contemporaries had cultivated the subject of
animal magnetism. It had occurred to me as just conceivable that you might be in
a trance, and that the secret of your bodily integrity after so long a time was
not the craft of an embalmer, but life. So extremely fanciful did this idea
seem, even to me, that I did not risk the ridicule of my fellow physicians by
mentioning it, but gave some other reason for postponing their experiments. No
sooner, however, had they left me, than I set on foot a systematic attempt at
resuscitation, of which you know the result.«
    Had its theme been yet more incredible, the
