read like the widening, darkening wings of
an enormous spectral bird, whose brooding voice was the drone of the
waves as they came nearer and nearer. Then I began to think of what
lay before me, of the strangeness and wildness of my life.

Then I recalled, with a shudder I could not repress, those sepulchral
chambers beneath the church, which, owing, I believe, to the
directions in an ancestor's will, had been the means of saving it
from demolition after a large portion of the churchyard bad been
condemned as dangerous. Raxton church is the only one along the coast
that can boast a crypt: all the churches are Perpendicular in style,
too late for crypts; a fact which is supposed to indicate that Raxton
was, in very early times, a seaside town of great importance; for the
crypt is much older than the church, and of an entirely different
kind of architecture. It was once a depository for the bones of
Danish warriors killed before the Norman Conquest; it extends not
only beneath the chancel, as in most cases, but beneath both the
transepts. The vaulting (supported partly on low columns of
remarkable beauty and partly on the basement wall of the church) is
therefore of unusual extent. The external door in the churchyard is
now hidden by drifted sand and mould. Many years ago, to give place
to the tombs and coffins of my family, the bones of the old Danes
were piled together in various corners; and the thought of these
bones called up the picture of the abode of 'Nin-ki-gal,' the Queen
of Death,

Ghosts, like birds, flutter their wings there;
On the gate and the gate-posts the dust lies undisturbed.

Then my mind began to make pictures for itself of my father lying in
his coffin. I have, I think, already said that his body had been
embalmed, in order to allow of its being conveyed from Switzerland to
England. Therefore I had no dread of being confronted by that
attribute of Death alluded to by D'Arcy which is the most cruel and
terrible of all--corruption. But then what change should I find in
the _expression_ of those features which on the day of the interment
had looked so calm? A thrill ran through my frame as I pictured
myself raising the coffin-lid, and finding expressed upon the face,
in language more appalling than any malediction in articulate
speech--the curse!

At about ten o'clock I mounted the gangway and waited behind a
deserted bungalow built for Fenella Stanley till I should hear the
Odd-Fel