a worthier
life than his, had paltered with his trust, while drinking at the
beer-house or chattering with a sweetheart, the bell might ring
unheeded, and the unhappy creature, falling with the last tremor of
vitality, to obtain a desperate succor, would become indeed the corpse
like which he had been laid out in the morgue.

Claudius smiled grimly and sadly. On what flimsy bases the best plant of
wise men too often rest! The latest power of nature had been harnessed
to do man service in his utmost extremity; science had perfected its
instruments, but one link in the chain was fallible man. The bell would
tinkle--the watcher would be laughing out of earshot--and the life would
sink back into Lethe after swimming to the shore!

The student sighed as he ate the piece of bread broken off a small loaf
and drank from the bottle out of which the faithless turnkey hobnobbed
with the sexton, the undertaker's men and the hearse-coachman.

If the bell should ring, with him alone to hear, ought he hasten out by
the gate providentially open, and leave for the care of heaven alone the
unknown wretch who would have summoned his brother-Christians most
uselessly? The resuscitated man would not be "of his parish," since he
was a wanderer from afar. Let the natives bury their own dead!

At this instant, when philosophy pointed out to the student the unbarred
portals, the bell in the midst of the row rang clearly if not very
loudly. It sounded in his ear like the last trump. Could he doubt that
this appeal was to him exclusively? The removal of the custodian, his
own miraculous escape--all pointed to this conclusion.

But might he not run out and, if he saw the traitorous warder on his
road, repeat to him the alarm? Not much time would be lost, for the gong
still vibrated, and his personal safety ranked above his neighbor's in
such a crisis.

But Claudius' hesitation had been that of physical weakness; confronted
in this way with the problem of fraternity, he did not waver any longer.
On the threshold of safety, he turned straight back into the jaws of
destruction. He had not emerged from that darkness and depth of earth,
to descend into a lower profundity and a denser darkness of the soul.

He glanced at the brazen monitor: its surface still shivered, though his
senses were not fine enough to hear the faint sound. But there was no
delusion; the dead in the morgue had signaled to the world on whose
verge it was balanced.

It cos