vered bumping
up against the wharf at the gas-works in the river. People began to
be scared, and there was some talk to the effect that he had been
murdered and couldn't rest quietly in his grave. But the coroner was
not scared. He empaneled a jury, held another inquest, collected his
fees and buried the body. Two days afterward some boys, while in
swimming, found a burial-casket floating under the bushes down by the
saw-mill. They called for help, and upon examining the interior of the
casket they discovered the irrepressible Mr. Piggott again. This was
too much. Even the ministers began to believe in ghosts, and hardly
a man in town dared to go out of the house that night alone. But the
coroner controlled his emotions sufficiently to sit on the body, make
the usual charges and bury Mr. Piggott in a fresh place in his lot.

The next morning, while Peter Lamb was drinking out of the big spring,
he saw something push slowly out of the mud at the bottom of the pool.
He turned as white as a sheet as he watched it; and in a few minutes
he saw that it was a coffin. It floated out, down the creek into the
river, and then Peter ran to tell the coroner. That official had a
jury waiting, and he proceeded to the coffin. It was old Mr. Piggott,
as usual; and they went through the customary routine with him, and
were about to bury him, when his family came forward and said they
would prefer to inter him in another place, being convinced now there
must be a subterranean channel leading from the cemetery to the
spring. The coroner couldn't object; but after the Piggotts were gone
he said to the jury that people who would take the bread out of the
mouth of a poor man in that way would be certain to come to want
themselves some day. He said he could easily have paid off the
mortgage on his house and let his little girl take lessons on the
melodeon besides, if they'd just allowed Piggott to wobble around the
way he wanted to.

There was no more trouble up at the cemetery after that until they
buried old Joe Middles, who used to have the fish-house over the river
at Deacon's. They entombed the old man on Thursday night. On Friday
morning one of the Keysers was walking down on the river-bank, and he
saw a man who looked very much like Mr. Middles sitting up in a canoe
out in the stream fishing. He watched the man as he caught two or
three fish, and was just about to conclude that it was some unknown
brother of Mr. Middles, when the fish