vered this chamber of
which you speak, and its contents. I enjoy good fiction."

"In this case," was the grave reply, "no fiction could be so strange as
the truth. You must know that these many years I have been cherishing
the idea of building a laboratory in the large garden beside this
house, for the purpose of chemical experiments for which I have a
taste. Last 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