de; "why, you cowardly sneaking set
of humbugs, you're half afraid, now."

"Afraid--afraid!" cried everybody: "who's afraid."

"Ah, who's afraid?" said a little man, advancing, and assuming an heroic
attitude; "I always notice, if anybody's afraid, it's some big fellow,
with more bones than brains."

At this moment, the man to whom this reproach was more particularly
levelled, raised a horrible shout of terror, and cried out, in frantic
accents,--

"He's a-coming--he's a-coming!"

The little man fell at once into the grave, while the mob, with one
accord, turned tail, and fled in all directions, leaving him alone with
the coffin. Such a fighting, and kicking, and scrambling ensued to get
over the wall of the grave-yard, that this great fellow, who had caused
all the mischief, burst into such peals of laughter that the majority of
the people became aware that it was a joke, and came creeping back,
looking as sheepish as possible.

Some got up very faint sorts of laugh, and said "very good," and swore
they saw what big Dick meant from the first, and only ran to make the
others run.

"Very good," said Dick, "I'm glad you enjoyed it, that's all. My eye,
what a scampering there was among you. Where's my little friend, who was
so infernally cunning about bones and brains?"

With some difficulty the little man was extricated from the grave, and
then, oh, for the consistency of a mob! they all laughed at him; those
very people who, heedless of all the amenities of existence, had been
trampling upon each other, and roaring with terror, actually had the
impudence to laugh at him, and call him a cowardly little rascal, and
say it served him right.

But such is popularity!

"Well, if nobody won't open the coffin," said big Dick, "I will, so here
goes. I knowed the old fellow when he was alive, and many a time he's
d----d me and I've d----d him, so I ain't a-going to be afraid of him
now he's dead. We was very intimate, you see, 'cos we was the two
heaviest men in the parish; there's a reason for everything."

"Ah, Dick's the fellow to do it," cried a number of persons; "there's
nobody like Dick for opening a coffin; he's the man as don't care for
nothing."

"Ah, you snivelling curs," said Dick, "I hate you. If it warn't for my
own satisfaction, and all for to prove that my old friend, the butcher,
as weighed seventeen stone, and stood six feet two and-a-half on his own
sole, I'd see you all jolly well--"

"D----d