then he
asked the Baron how he had discovered the exact position of the
long-concealed tomb of the Countess Mircalla? The Baron's grotesque
features puckered up into a mysterious smile; he looked down, still
smiling on his worn spectacle case and fumbled with it. Then looking
up, he said:

"I have many journals, and other papers, written by that remarkable man;
the most curious among them is one treating of the visit of which you
speak, to Karnstein. The tradition, of course, discolors and distorts a
little. He might have been termed a Moravian nobleman, for he had
changed his abode to that territory, and was, beside, a noble. But he
was, in truth, a native of Upper Styria. It is enough to say that in
very early youth he had been a passionate and favored lover of the
beautiful Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. Her early death plunged him into
inconsolable grief. It is the nature of vampires to increase and
multiply, but according to an ascertained and ghostly law.

"Assume, at starting, a territory perfectly free from that pest. How
does it begin, and how does it multiply itself? I will tell you. A
person, more or less wicked, puts an end to himself. A suicide, under
certain circumstances, becomes a vampire. That specter visits living
people in their slumbers; they die, and almost invariably, in the grave,
develop into vampires. This happened in the case of the beautiful
Mircalla, who was haunted by one of those demons. My ancestor,
Vordenburg, whose title I still bear, soon discovered this, and in the
course of the studies to which he devoted himself, learned a great
deal more.

"Among other things, he concluded that suspicion of vampirism would
probably fall, sooner or later, upon the dead Countess, who in life had
been his idol. He conceived a horror, be she what she might, of her
remains being profaned by the outrage of a posthumous execution. He has
left a curious paper to prove that the vampire, on its expulsion from
its amphibious existence, is projected into a far more horrible life;
and he resolved to save his once beloved Mircalla from this.

"He adopted the stratagem of a journey here, a pretended removal of her
remains, and a real obliteration of her monument. When age had stolen
upon him, and from the vale of years, he looked back on the scenes he
was leaving, he considered, in a different spirit, what he had done, and
a horror took possession of him. He made the tracings and notes which
have guided me to