t? and
where, doctor, did you first see this Varney the vampyre?"

"In his coffin."

Both the admiral and Henry gave starts of surprise as, with one accord,
they exclaimed,--

"Did you say coffin?"

"Yes: I tell you, on my word of honour, that the first time in my life I
saw ever Sir Francis Varney, was in his coffin."

"Then he is a vampyre, and there can be no mistake," said the admiral.

"Go on, I pray you, doctor, go on," said Henry, anxiously.

"I will. The reason why he became the inhabitant of a coffin was simply
this:--he had been hanged,--executed at the Old Bailey, in London,
before ever I set eyes upon that strange countenance of his. You know
that I was practising surgery at the London schools some years ago, and
that, consequently, as I commenced the profession rather late in life, I
was extremely anxious to do the most I could in a very short space of
time."

"Yes--yes."

"Arrived, then, with plenty of resources, which I did not, as the young
men who affected to be studying in the same classes as myself, spend in
the pursuit of what they considered life in London, I was
indefatigable in my professional labours, and there was nothing
connected with them which I did not try to accomplish.

"At that period, the difficulty of getting a subject for anatomization
was very great, and all sorts of schemes had to be put into requisition
to accomplish so desirable, and, indeed, absolutely necessary a purpose.

"I became acquainted with the man who, I have told you, is in the Hall,
at present, and who then filled the unenviable post of public
executioner. It so happened, too, that I had read a learned treatise, by
a Frenchman, who had made a vast number of experiments with galvanic and
other apparatus, upon persons who had come to death in different ways,
and, in one case, he asserted that he had actually recovered a man who
had been hanged, and he had lived five weeks afterwards.

"Young as I then was, in comparison to what I am now, in my profession,
this inflamed my imagination, and nothing seemed to me so desirable as
getting hold of some one who had only recently been put to death, for
the purpose of trying what I could do in the way of attempting a
resuscitation of the subject. It was precisely for this reason that I
sought out the public executioner, and made his acquaintance, whom every
one else shunned, because I thought he might assist me by handing over
to me the body of some condemned and e