iated in a fire, whom I succeeded in
reviving by placing burning coals under the clavicles, but who could
only call her mother, and died almost immediately, in spite of the
administration of internal stimulants and electricity for inducing
contractions of the diaphragm and heart.

And even if I should succeed in bringing him back to health and
strength, was not he condemned by court-martial? Did not humanity forbid
my rousing him from this repose akin to death, to deliver him to the
horrors of execution?

I must confess that in the presence of this organism where life was
suspended, my ideas on reanimation took, as it were, fresh hold upon me.
I had so often desiccated and revived beings quite elevated in the
animal scale, that I did not doubt the success of the operation, even on
a man. By myself alone I could not revive and save the Colonel; but I
had in my laboratory, all the instruments necessary to desiccate him
without assistance.

To sum up, three alternatives offered themselves to me. I. To leave the
Colonel in the crenellated tower, where he would have died the same day
of congelation. II. To revive him by stimulants, at the risk of killing
him. And for what? To give him up, in case of success, to inevitable
execution. III. To desiccate him in my laboratory with the quasi
certainty of resuscitating him after the restoration of peace. All
friends of humanity will doubtless comprehend that I could not hesitate
long.

I had Sergeant Garok called, and I begged him to sell me the body of the
Colonel. It was not the first time that I had bought a corpse for
dissection, so my request excited no suspicion. The bargain concluded, I
gave him four bottles of kirsch-wasser, and soon two Russian soldiers
brought me Colonel Fougas on a stretcher.

As soon as I was alone with him, I pricked one of his fingers: pressure
forced out a drop of blood. To place it under a microscope between two
plates of glass was the work of a minute. Oh, joy! The fibrin was not
coagulated. The red globules appeared cleanly circular, flattened,
biconcave, and without notches, indentations or spheroidal swellings.
The white globules changed their shape, taking at intervals the
spherical form, and varying their shapes again by delicate expansions. I
was not deceived then, it was a torpid man that I had under my eyes, and
not a dead one!

I placed him on a pair of scales. He weighed one hundred and forty
pounds, clothing included. I did not c