Thursday the excavation for the cellar was at last
begun. It was completed by that night, and Friday the masons were to
have come. Thursday night we had a tremendous deluge of rain, and
Friday morning I found my cellar a frog-pond and the walls quite
washed down. My daughter, who had come out to view the disaster with
me, called my attention to a corner of masonry laid bare by the
crumbling away of one of the walls. I cleared a little earth from it,
and, finding that it seemed part of a large mass, determined to
investigate it. The workmen I sent for unearthed an oblong vault some
eight feet below the surface, and set in the corner of what had
evidently been the foundation walls of an ancient house. A layer of
ashes and charcoal on the top of the vault showed that the house above
had perished by fire. The vault itself was perfectly intact, the
cement being as good as when first applied. It had a door, but this we
could not force, and found entrance by removing one of the flagstones
which formed the roof. The air which came up was stagnant but pure,
dry and not cold. Descending with a lantern, I found myself in an
apartment fitted up as a bedroom in the style of the nineteenth
century. On the bed lay a young man. That he was dead and must have
been dead a century was of course to be taken for granted; but the
extraordinary state of preservation of the body struck me and the
medical colleagues whom I had summoned with amazement. That the art of
such embalming as this had ever been known we should not have
believed, yet here seemed conclusive testimony that our immediate
ancestors had possessed it. My medical colleagues, whose curiosity was
highly excited, were at once for undertaking experiments to test the
nature of the process employed, but I withheld them. My motive in so
doing, at least the only motive I now need speak of, was the
recollection of something I once had read about the extent to which
your contemporaries had cultivated the subject of animal magnetism. It
had occurred to me as just conceivable that you might be in a trance,
and that the secret of your bodily integrity after so long a time was
not the craft of an embalmer, but life. So extremely fanciful did this
idea seem, even to me, that I did not risk the ridicule of my fellow
physicians by mentioning it, but gave some other reason for postponing
their experiments. No sooner, however, had they left me, than I set on
foot a systematic attempt at resuscit