not attempted.

It had so happened, however, that on that very day, the funeral of a
young man was to have taken place, who had put up for a time at that
same inn where Admiral Bell was first introduced to the reader. He had
become seriously ill, and, after a few days of indisposition, which had
puzzled the country practitioners, breathed his last.

He was to have been buried in the village churchyard on the very day of
the riot and confusion incidental to the exhumation of the coffin of the
butcher, and probably from that circumstance we may deduce the presence
of the clergyman in canonicals at the period of the riot.

When it was found that so disorderly a mob possessed the churchyard, the
idea of burying the stranger on that day was abandoned; but still all
would have gone on quietly as regarded him, had it not been for the
folly of one of the chamber-maids at the tavern.

This woman, with all the love of gossip incidental to her class, had,
from the first, entered so fully into all the particulars concerning
vampyres, that she fairly might be considered to be a little deranged on
that head. Her imagination had been so worked upon, that she was in an
unfit state to think of anything else, and if ever upon anybody a stern
and revolting superstition was calculated to produce direful effects, it
was upon this woman.

The town was tolerably quiet; the presence of the soldiery had
frightened some and amused others, and no doubt the night would have
passed off serenely, had she not suddenly rushed into the street, and,
with bewildered accents and frantic gestures shouted,--

"A vampyre--a vampyre--a vampyre!"

These words soon collected a crowd around her, and then, with screaming
accents, which would have been quite enough to convince any reflecting
person that she had actually gone distracted upon that point, she
cried,--

"Come into the house--come into the house! Look upon the dead body, that
should have been in its grave; it's fresher now than it was the day on
which it died, and there's a colour in its cheeks! A vampyre--a
vampyre--a vampyre! Heaven save us from a vampyre!"

The strange, infuriated, maniacal manner in which these words were
uttered, produced an astonishingly exciting effect among the mob.
Several women screamed, and some few fainted. The torch was laid again
to the altar of popular feeling, and the fierce flame of superstition
burnt brightly and fiercely.

Some twenty or thirty persons,