oise that
accompanied our rapid advance. I and my host were too much preoccupied
for conversation, and our attendants maintained a respectful silence. A
few minutes brought us to the low, gray walls and bleak hedgerows that
surrounded the pretty old church, and all its melancholy and picturesque
memorials.

"Mervyn's tomb lies there, I think, sir," he said, pointing to a corner
of the church-yard, in which piles of rubbish, withered weeds, and
brambles were thickly accumulated under the solemn, though imperfect
shelter of the wintry trees.

He exchanged some sentences with our attendants in Welsh.

"Yes, sir, that's the place," he added, turning to me.

And as we all approached it, I bethought me that the direction in which,
as I stood upon the stile, I had heard the voice on the night preceding,
corresponded accurately with that indicated by my guides. The tomb in
question was a huge slab of black marble, supported, as was made
apparent when the surrounding brambles were removed, upon six pillars,
little more than two feet high each. There was ample room for a human
body to lie inside this funeral penthouse; and, on stooping to look
beneath, I was unspeakably shocked to see that something like a human
figure was actually extended there.

It was, indeed, a corpse, and, what is more, corresponded in every trait
with the infernal phantom which, on the preceding night, had visited and
appalled me.

The body, though miserably emaciated, was that of a large-boned,
athletic man, of fully six feet four in height; and it was, therefore,
no easy task to withdraw it from the receptacle where it had been
deposited, and lay it, as our assistants did, upon the tombstone which
had covered it. Strange to say, moreover, the feet of the body, as we
found it, had been placed toward the west.

As I looked upon this corpse, and recognized, but too surely, in its
proportions and lineaments, every trait of the apparition that had stood
at my bed-side, with a countenance animated by the despair and malignity
of the damned, my heart fluttered and sank within me, and I recoiled
from the effigy of the demon with terror; second only to that which had
thrilled me on the night preceding.

* * * * *

Now, reader--_honest_ reader--I appeal to your own appreciation of
testimony, and ask you, having these facts in evidence, and upon the
deposition of an eye and ear witness, whose veracity, through a long
life,