o handle such cattle? if you've a sore
about you, and his blood touches you, who's to say you won't be a
vampyre, too!"

"No, no you won't," said an old woman.

"I won't try," was the happy rejoinder; "I ain't a-going to carry a
wampyre on my two legs home to my wife and small family of seven
children, and another a-coming."

There was a pause for a few moments, and then one man more adventurous
than the rest, exclaimed,--

"Well, vampyre, or no vampyre, his dead body can harm no one; so here
goes to get it out, help me who will; once have it out, and then we can
prevent any evil, by burning it, and thus destroying the whole body.

"Hurrah!" shouted three or four more, as they jumped down into the hole
formed by the falling in of the materials which had crushed Marchdale to
death, for it was his body they had discovered.

They immediately set to work to displace such of the materials as lay on
the body, and then, having cleared it of all superincumbent rubbish,
they proceeded to lift it up, but found that it had got entangled, as
they called it, with some chains: with some trouble they got them off,
and the body was lifted out to a higher spot.

"Now, what's to be done?" inquired one.

"Burn it," said another.

"Hurrah!" shouted a female voice; "we've got the wampyre! run a stake
through his body, and then place him upon some dry wood,--there's plenty
to be had about here, I am sure,--and then burn him to a cinder."

"That's right, old woman,--that's right," said a man; "nothing better:
the devil must be in him if he come to life after that, I should say."

There might be something in that, and the mob shouted its approbation,
as it was sure to do as anything stupid or senseless, and the proposal
might be said to have been carried by acclamation, and it required only
the execution.

This was soon done. There were plenty of laths and rafters, and the
adjoining wood furnished an abundant supply of dry sticks, so there was
no want of fuel.

There was a loud shout as each accession of sticks took place, and, as
each individual threw his bundle into the heap, each man felt all the
self-devotion to the task as the Scottish chieftain who sacrificed
himself and seven sons in the battle for his superior; and, when one son
was cut down, the man filled up his place with the exclamation,--"Another
for Hector," until he himself fell as the last of his race.

Soon now the heap became prodigious, and it required an ef