the
faint phosphorescence of decay that filled the half-dug grave and seemed
the visible manifestation of that faint odor of mortality which tainted
the unwholesome air. The children now sobbed and clung about the limbs
of their elders, dropping their candles, and we were near being left in
total darkness, except for that sinister light, which slowly welled
upward from the disturbed earth and overflowed the edges of the grave
like a fountain.

Meanwhile my sister, crouching in the earth that had been thrown out of
the excavation, had removed her hands from her face and was staring with
expanded eyes into an obscure space between two wine casks.

"There it is!--there it is!" she shrieked, pointing; "God in heaven!
can't you see it?"

And there indeed it was!--a human figure, dimly discernible in the
gloom--a figure that wavered from side to side as if about to fall,
clutching at the wine-casks for support, had stepped unsteadily forward
and for one moment stood revealed in the light of our remaining candles;
then it surged heavily and fell prone upon the earth. In that moment we
had all recognized the figure, the face and bearing of our father--dead
these ten months and buried by our own hands!--our father indubitably
risen and ghastly drunk!

On the incidents of our precipitate flight from that horrible place--on
the extinction of all human sentiment in that tumultuous, mad scramble
up the damp and mouldy stairs--slipping, falling, pulling one another
down and clambering over one another's back--the lights extinguished,
babes trampled beneath the feet of their strong brothers and hurled
backward to death by a mother's arm!--on all this I do not dare to
dwell. My mother, my eldest brother and sister and I escaped; the others
remained below, to perish of their wounds, or of their terror--some,
perhaps, by flame. For within an hour we four, hastily gathering
together what money and jewels we had and what clothing we could carry,
fired the dwelling and fled by its light into the hills. We did not even
pause to collect the insurance, and my dear mother said on her
death-bed, years afterward in a distant land, that this was the only sin
of omission that lay upon her conscience. Her confessor, a holy man,
assured her that under the circumstances Heaven would pardon the
neglect.

About ten years after our removal from the scenes of my childhood I,
then a prosperous forger, returned in disguise to the spot with a view
to