erable repose, but by something for which I
have neither word nor symbol.

We came at last to three empty couches, immediately beyond which lay the
form of a beautiful woman, a little past the prime of life. One of her
arms was outside the sheet, and her hand lay with the palm upward, in
its centre a dark spot. Next to her was the stalwart figure of a man of
middle age. His arm too was outside the sheet, the strong hand almost
closed, as if clenched on the grip of a sword. I thought he must be a
king who had died fighting for the truth.

"Will you hold the candle nearer, wife?" whispered the sexton, bending
down to examine the woman's hand.

"It heals well," he murmured to himself: "the nail found in her nothing
to hurt!"

At last I ventured to speak.

"Are they not dead?" I asked softly.

"I cannot answer you," he replied in a subdued voice. "I almost forget
what they mean by DEAD in the old world. If I said a person was dead, my
wife would understand one thing, and you would imagine another.--This is
but one of my treasure vaults," he went on, "and all my guests are not
laid in vaults: out there on the moor they lie thick as the leaves of a
forest after the first blast of your winter--thick, let me say rather,
as if the great white rose of heaven had shed its petals over it. All
night the moon reads their faces, and smiles."

"But why leave them in the corrupting moonlight?" I asked.

"Our moon," he answered, "is not like yours--the old cinder of a
burnt-out world; her beams embalm the dead, not corrupt them. You
observe that here the sexton lays his dead on the earth; he buries very
few under it! In your world he lays huge stones on them, as if to keep
them down; I watch for the hour to ring the resurrection-bell, and wake
those that are still asleep. Your sexton looks at the clock to know when
to ring the dead-alive to church; I hearken for the cock on the spire to
crow; 'AWAKE, THOU THAT SLEEPEST, AND ARISE FROM THE DEAD!'"

I began to conclude that the self-styled sexton was in truth an insane
parson: the whole thing was too mad! But how was I to get away from it?
I was helpless! In this world of the dead, the raven and his wife were
the only living I had yet seen: whither should I turn for help? I was
lost in a space larger than imagination; for if here two things, or
any parts of them, could occupy the same space, why not twenty or ten
thousand?--But I dared not think further in that direction.

"You