"What!" said I, starting up from the bed, "did they disinter me?--the scoundrels!"
"You may well call them scoundrels," said the professor, "for preventing a gentleman from enjoying the pleasure of being buried alive. The deed was certainly most felonious; and if you are at all anxious, I shall have them reported to the Syndic, and tried for their impertinent interference. But to proceed. No sooner did I observe that they had fallen upon you than I said, 'My good men, this will never do. You have brought me here my worthy friend Mr Stadt. I cannot feel in my heart to anatomise him, so just carry him quietly back to his old quarters, and I shall pay you his price, and something over and above.'"
"What!" said I, again interrupting the doctor, "is it possible you could be so inhuman as to make the scoundrels bury me again?"
"Now, Stadt," rejoined he, with a smile, "you are a strange fellow. You were angry at the _men_ for raising you, and now you are angry at _me_ for endeavouring to repair their error by reinterring you."
"But you forget that I was to come alive?"
"How the deuce was I to know that, my dear boy?"
"Very true. Go on, doctor, and excuse me for interrupting you so often."
"Well," continued he, "the men carried you last night to deposit you in your long home, when, as fate would have it, they were prevented by a ridiculous fellow of a tailor, who, for a trifling wager, had engaged to sit up alone, during the whole night, in the churchyard, exactly at the spot where your grave lay. So they brought you back to the college, resolving to inter you to-night, if the tailor, or the devil himself, should stand in their way. Your timely resuscitation will save them this trouble. At the same time, if you are still offended at them, they will be very happy to take you back, and you may yet enjoy the felicity of being buried alive."
Such was a simple statement of the fact, delivered in the professor's good-humoured and satirical style; and from it the reader may guess what a narrow escape I had from the most dreadful of deaths, and how much I am indebted, in the first instance, to the stupid blundering of the resurrectionists, and, in the second, to the tailor. I returned to my own house as soon as possible, to the no small mortification of my cousin, who was proceeding to invest himself with all that belonged to me. I made him refund without ceremony, and altered my will, which had been made in his favour; not forgetting, in so doing, his refusal to let my body remain two days longer unburied. A day or two afterwards I saw a funeral pass by, which, on inquiry, I learned to be Wolstang's. He died suddenly, as I was informed, and some persons remarked it as a curious event that his death happened at precisely the same moment as my return to life. This was merely mentioned as a passing observation, but no inference was deduced from it. The old domestic in Wolstang's house gave a wonderful account of his death, mentioning the hour at which he said he was to die, and how it was verified by the event. She said nothing, however, about the hundred gilders. Many considered her story as a piece of mere trumpery. She had nevertheless a number of believers.