weather had been more than usually hot that day, and the corpse, which
was very much swollen--for, like all gourmands, I had had chronic
disease of the liver--had, in their opinion, already become insanitary.
The boy then burst out crying. It had always been the height of his
ambition, he said, to see someone dead, and he thought it a dastardly
shame on the part of the doctor and chambermaid to wish to deny him this
opportunity.

"The gendarme thinking, no doubt, he ought to have a say in the matter,
muttered something to the effect that children were a great deal too
forward nowadays, and that it would be time enough for the boy to see a
corpse when he broke his mother's heart--which, following the precedence
of all spoilt boys, he was certain to do sooner or later; and this
opinion found ready endorsement. The boy suppressed, my case began to
look hopeless, and the poignancy of my suspense became such that I
thought I should have gone mad. Francois was already persuaded into
setting to work with his pick, and, I should most certainly have been
speedily interred, had it not been for the timely arrival of a village
wag, who, planking himself unobserved behind a tombstone close to my
coffin, burst out laughing in the most sepulchral fashion. The effect on
the company was electrical; the majority, including the women, fled
precipitately, and the rest, overcoming the feeble protests of the
doctor, wrenched off the lid of the coffin. The spell, cast over me by
the occult brains, was now by a merciful Providence broken, and I was
able to explain my condition to the flabbergasted faces around me.

"I need only say, in conclusion, that the discomfiture of the doctor was
complete, and that I took good care to express my opinion of him
everywhere I went. Doubtless, many poor wretches have been less
fortunate than I, and, being pronounced dead by unskilled physicians,
have been prematurely interred. Apart from all the agony consequent to
asphyxiation, they must have suffered hellish tortures through the
agency of spirit brains."

This is the anecdote as related to me, and it serves as an illustration
of my theory that the unknown brain is objective, and that it can, under
given circumstances--_i.e._ when physical life is, so to speak, in
abeyance--be both seen and felt by the known brain. At birth, and more
particularly at death, the presence of the unknown brain is most marked.
And here it may not be inappropriate to remark t