"I cannot tell you till I get a quaich," answered Julia; and the medicine was on the instant administered by Donald, when all doubt on the mysterious subject having been dispelled, her friends lifted her from the coffin, and they set to work after their usual manner, which was no other than indulging in numerous potations. The recollection of Gustavus's threat enabled her to explain everything; and as they sat carousing and singing in great glee, they laughed heartily at the circumstance of Gustavus having buried his wife in a distillery, with the view of curing her of a love of whisky.
GUSTAVUS GETS INTO TROUBLE AND OUT OF IT.
While they were thus as happy as drink and frolic could make any of the sons or daughters of Adam, Gustavus was meditating on the probable effects of his extraordinary remedy for drunkenness, and enjoying already the triumph he anticipated, as the fruits of his ingenuity. He had cooked for himself a good dinner, and, being thus also in good spirits, he counted the hours as they passed, every moment of which was worth to him a grain of gold, in so far as they would purchase a relief from the thraldom and misery in which he had been so long held. He had given her four hours of the grave, and the increasing length of his stride seemed to indicate that he was fast approaching some resolution, which was probably to go and see how his Julia was faring in her dark habitation. He had left the ropes by which she had been let down, in such a position that he could draw her out again with the greatest certainty, so that he was perfectly at ease on the score of her ultimate safety; but all his efforts, he knew, would be worse than endeavouring to make iron swim, to hold an eel by the tail, to dissect cheese mites, or make a cod warble, or any other _opera inanis_, if she were taken out before she awoke and experienced all the terrors of her situation. He therefore gave her an hour or two more, and then sallied forth as grim as Hercules when he went a bull-baiting, to reconnoitre, and ascertain if any indications of her being awake came from the grave (as he expected it would be) of her bad habits and the womb of her regeneration. A very few movements of his immense limbs brought him to the spot; but not an inch of the rope he could find; and, though he pulled aside the bushes, and stared with goggle eyes into the pit, not a glimpse of the coffin could he discover. The affair was marvellous and unfathomable as the wells of Agamemnon; and he stood and stared with mute wonder, at what appeared to be nothing else in the world than bewitched devilry. He looked around him to see if he could find any traces of either the coffin or Julia Briggs; but all was still and hazy, and nothing could he see or hear; so he tried the pit again, and, to search the bottom of it, he took a long stick from a neighbouring tree, and plunged it in, and groped, and sounded; but it was clear that he never struck on wood, nor indeed upon anything but the soft brush stuff with which the Highlanders had again closed up the aperture. He even descended into the hole, as far as he could reach his limbs, while he held on by the bushy side; and he thus ascertained to a dead certainty that the never a bit of a coffin was there, or indeed anything but furze, among which his feet became entangled. Having got out again with difficulty, he fell to roaring and shouting--"Julia M'Iver! Julia M'Iver!" But no answer was returned, save by the echoing wood, which mocked him like the American bird of many voices that laughs at the eloquence of man. No other conclusion could he come to, but that Julia, coffin and all, had been carried off by the prime minister of Oberon, or some other power, that had determined to punish her for her intemperance, or him for his cruelty; and his former love returning, now that he had, perhaps for ever, lost the object of it, he grew frantic as the lover of Briseis, and stamped and strode about the wood, accusing himself as the murderer of his wife, and trembling for his neck, which he had put in a position of jeopardy. To add to his terrors, he sometimes thought he heard strange shouts of mirth, coming from under the ground; and his mind still straying to the land of the court of the pigmy king, he fancied that the thieves were rejoicing in their subterranean abodes, over the triumph they had achieved over a mortal creature. The strength or weakness of superstition has nothing to do with the size of the bones, or the strength of thews and sinews of the individuals over whom it exercises its control; and there was no marvel at all that Gustavus felt undefined terrors laying hold of him, as the darkness of the night increased, and the blackness of the mystery enveloped his brain.