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 observati