sted, panting, glad of the relief from the waking
nightmare which the darkness encouraged. His weakness could be accounted
for, as his wandering had lasted long; the syncope could not be brief
since nearly thirty hours must have transpired from his rush out of the
variety music-hall.

Before him, for at his back stood the chapel for services, stretched out
the vast cemetery. Some of the cracked, dilapidated tombs dated back to
1600; others marked the addition in 1788 to the original God's-acre. All
was hushed; it was difficult to imagine a phantom where neglect seemed
to rule. It was not in this olden part that descendants of the departed
flocked on All Saints' Day to decorate the mausoleums with evergreens,
plaster images and artificial immortelle garlands. Except for a
screeching-sparrow, which his first steps dislodged, not a sign of life
appeared in this town around which the living city slept as quietly.

His eyes clearing, he believed he descried the gateway and, sure that so
large a _campo santo_ would have a warder in hourly attendance, he made
his way, deviating as the tombs compelled, toward the entrance. To his
surprise, all was still there, and though a lamp burned in the little
stone lodge, it was certainly untenanted. The gate was ajar; there was
no fear of the tenants flitting out bodily for a night's excursion.

Claudius was dying for refreshment and he was not fastidious about
intruding. A man who has traversed the underlying catacombs need not be
delicate about taking a nip of spirits or a hunch of bread. Both were in
a cupboard in the little domicile, supplied with a porter's chair so
ample as to be the watcher's bed, and a stove where a fire merrily
burned, crackling with billets of pine wood.

The disappearance was the more strange, as on a framed placard, at the
base of which was a row of brazen knobs, there was a formal injunction
for the gatewarder never to go away without his place being taken by
another "from sunset to sunrise and an hour after!"

Claudius knew what those knobs and the instructions portended in this
adjunct to the charnel house. The public mortuary was at the other end
of the wires from those bells; the custom was to attach them to the dead
so that, if their slumbers were not that knowing no waking and they
stirred even so little as a finger, the electric transmitter which they
agitated would sound the appeal.

And now the watcher, on whom perhaps depended the duration of