. Then with an effort he turned
and looked round him.

And this is what he saw.

There, three or four paces from him, in the centre of the chamber of
Death sat or rather lay a figure of Death. It reclined in a stone
chest or coffin, like a man in a hip bath which is too small for him.
The bony arms hung down on either side, the bony limbs projected
towards him, the great white skull hung forward over the massive
breast bone. It moved, too, of itself, and as it moved, the jaw-bone
tapped against the breast and the teeth clacked gently together.

Terror seized him while he looked, and, as George had done, he turned
to fly. How could that thing move its head? The head ought to fall
off.

Seizing the rope, he jerked it violently in the first effort of
mounting.

"Hev he got yew, Colonel?" sung out George above; and the sound of a
human voice brought him back to his sense.

"No," he answered as boldly as he could, and then setting his teeth,
turned and tottered straight at the Horror in the chest.

He was there now, and holding the lantern against the thing, examined
it. It was a skeleton of enormous size, and the skull was fixed with
rusty wire to one of the vertebrae.

At this evidence of the handiwork of man his fears almost vanished.
Even in that company he could not help remembering that it is scarcely
to be supposed that spiritual skeletons carry about wire with which to
tie on their skulls.

With a sigh of relief he held up the lantern and looked round. He was
standing in a good-sized vault or chamber, built of rubble stone. Some
of this rubble had fallen in to his left; but otherwise, though the
workmanship showed that it must be of extreme antiquity, the stone
lining was still strong and good. He looked upon the floor, and then
for the first time saw that the nodding skeleton before him was not
the only one. All round lay remnants of the dead. There they were,
stretched out in the form of a circle, of which the stone kist was the
centre.[*] One place in the circle was vacant; evidently it had once
been occupied by the giant frame which now sat within the kist. Next
he looked at the kist itself. It had all the appearance of one of
those rude stone chests in which the very ancient inhabitants of this
island buried the ashes of their cremated dead. But, if this was so,
whence came the un-cremated skeletons?

[*] At Bungay, in Suffolk, there stood a mound or tumulus, on which
was a windmill. Some years