r
ambition, the insolence of the underling had received both his own
punishment and his master's.

We know quite enough of Sir Francis Varney to feel assured that he would
rather consider it as a good jest than otherwise of his footman, so that
with the suffering he endured at the Bannerworths', and the want of
sympathy he was likely to find at home, that individual had certainly
nothing to congratulate himself upon but the melancholy reminiscence of
his own cleverness.

But were the mob satisfied with what had occurred in the churchyard?
They were not, and that night was to witness the perpetration of a
melancholy outrage, such as the history of the time presents no parallel
to.

The finding of a brick in the coffin of the butcher, instead of the body
of that individual, soon spread as a piece of startling intelligence all
over the place; and the obvious deduction that was drawn from the
circumstance, seemed to be that the deceased butcher was unquestionably
a vampyre, and out upon some expedition at the time when his coffin was
searched.

How he had originally got out of that receptacle for the dead was
certainly a mystery; but the story was none the worse for that. Indeed,
an ingenious individual found a solution for that part of the business,
for, as he said, nothing was more natural, when anybody died who was
capable of becoming a vampyre, than for other vampyres who knew it to
dig him up, and lay him out in the cold beams of the moonlight, until he
acquired the same sort of vitality they themselves possessed, and joined
their horrible fraternity.

In lieu of a better explanation--and, after all, it was no bad one--this
theory was generally received, and, with a shuddering horror, people
asked themselves, if the whole of the churchyard were excavated, how
many coffins would be found tenantless by the dead which had been
supposed, by simple-minded people, to inhabit them.

The presence, however, of a body of dragoons, towards evening,
effectually prevented any renewed attack upon the sacred precincts of
the churchyard, and it was a strange and startling thing to see that
country town under military surveillance, and sentinels posted at its
principal buildings.

This measure smothered the vengeance of the crowd, and insured, for a
time, the safety of Sir Francis Varney; for no considerable body of
persons could assemble for the purpose of attacking his house again,
without being followed; so such a step was