might be something more than superstition in the popular belief that
only the spirits of the unburied dead still walk the earth, I took some
workmen equipped with picks and crowbars into the now long unentered
strong-room, and ordered them to demolish the brick wall that I had
built about the partner of my joys. I was resolved to give the body of
Elizabeth Mary such burial as I thought her immortal part might be
willing to accept as an equivalent to the privilege of ranging at will
among the haunts of the living.

In a few minutes we had broken down the wall and, thrusting a lamp
through the breach, I looked in. Nothing! Not a bone, not a lock of
hair, not a shred of clothing--the narrow space which, upon my
affidavit, had been legally declared to hold all that was mortal of the
late Mrs. Turmore was absolutely empty! This amazing disclosure, coming
upon a mind already overwrought with too much of mystery and excitement,
was more than I could bear. I shrieked aloud and fell in a fit. For
months afterward I lay between life and death, fevered and delirious;
nor did I recover until my physician had had the providence to take a
case of valuable jewels from my safe and leave the country.

The next summer I had occasion to visit my wine cellar, in one corner of
which I had built the now long disused strong-room. In moving a cask of
Madeira I struck it with considerable force against the partition wall,
and was surprised to observe that it displaced two large square stones
forming a part of the wall.

Applying my hands to these, I easily pushed them out entirely, and
looking through saw that they had fallen into the niche in which I had
immured my lamented wife; facing the opening which their fall left, and
at a distance of four feet, was the brickwork which my own hands had
made for that unfortunate gentlewoman's restraint. At this significant
revelation I began a search of the wine cellar. Behind a row of casks I
found four historically interesting but intrinsically valueless objects:

First, the mildewed remains of a ducal robe of state (Florentine) of the
eleventh century; second, an illuminated vellum breviary with the name
of Sir Aldebaran Turmore de Peters-Turmore inscribed in colors on the
title page; third, a human skull fashioned into a drinking cup and
deeply stained with wine; fourth, the iron cross of a Knight Commander
of the Imperial Austrian Order of Assassins by Poison.

That was all--not an object having commercial value, no papers--nothing.
But this was enough to clear up the mystery of the strong-room. My wife
had early divined the existence and purpose of that apartment, and with
the skill amounting to genius had effected an entrance by loosening the
two stones in the wall.

Through that opening she had at several times abstracted the entire
collection, which doubtless she had succeeded in converting into coin of
the realm. When with an unconscious justice which deprives me of all
satisfaction in the memory I decided to build her into the wall, by some
malign fatality I selected that part of it in which were these movable
stones, and doubtless before I had fairly finished my bricklaying she
had removed them and, slipping through into the wine cellar, replaced
them as they were originally laid. From the cellar she had easily
escaped unobserved, to enjoy her infamous gains in distant parts. I have
endeavored to procure a warrant, but the Lord High Baron of the Court of
Indictment and Conviction reminds me that she is legally dead, and says
my only course is to go before the Master in Cadavery and move for a
writ of disinterment and constructive revival. So it looks as if I must
suffer without redress this great wrong at the hands of a woman devoid
alike of principle and shame.




THE CITY OF THE GONE AWAY


I was born of poor because honest parents, and until I was twenty-three
years old never knew the possibilities of happiness latent in another
person's coin. At that time Providence threw me into a deep sleep and
revealed to me in a dream the folly of labor. "Behold," said a vision of
a holy hermit, "the poverty and squalor of your lot and listen to the
teachings of nature. You rise in the morning from your pallet of straw
and go forth to your daily labor in the fields. The flowers nod their
heads in friendly salutation as you pass. The lark greets you with a
burst of song. The early sun sheds his temperate beams upon you, and
from the dewy grass you inhale an atmosphere cool and grateful to your
lungs. All nature seems to salute you with the joy of a generous servant
welcoming a faithful master. You are in harmony with her gentlest mood
and your soul sings within you. You begin your daily task at the plow,
hopeful that the noonday will fulfill the promise of the morn, maturing
the charms of the landscape and confirming its benediction upon your
spirit. You follow the plow until fatigue invokes repose, and seating
yourself upon the earth at the end of your furrow you expect to enjoy in
fulness the delights of which you did but taste.

"Alas! the sun has climbed into a brazen sky and his beams are become a
torrent. The flowers have closed their petals, confining their perfume
and denying their colors to the eye. Coolness no longer exhales from the
grass: the dew has vanished and the dry surface of the fields repeats
the fierce heat of the sky. No longer the birds of heaven salute you
with melody, but the jay harshly upbraids you from the edge of the
copse. Unhappy man! all the gentle and healing ministrations of nature
are denied you in punishment of your sin. You have broken the First
Commandment of the Natural Decalogue: you have labored!"

Awakening from my dream, I collected my few belongings, bade adieu to my
erring parents and departed out of that land, pausing at the grave of my