hey liked, and without at all
disturbing himself, coolly told them to have done with their jesting.

I know not if the historian who wrote the life of St. Germain
l'Auxerrois[312] had in his eye the stories we have just related, and
if he did not wish to ornament the life of the saint by a recital very
much like them. The saint traveling one day through his diocese, was
obliged to pass the night with his clerks in a house forsaken long
before on account of the spirits which haunted it. The clerk who read
to him during the night saw on a sudden a spectre, which alarmed him
at first; but having awakened the holy bishop, the latter commanded
the spectre in the name of Jesus Christ to declare to him who he was,
and what he wanted. The phantom told him that he and his companion had
been guilty of several crimes; that having died and been interred in
that house, they disturbed those who lodged there until the burial
rites should have been accorded them. St. Germain commanded him to
point out where their bodies were buried, and the spectre led him
thither. The next day he assembled the people in the neighborhood;
they sought amongst the ruins of the building where the brambles had
been disturbed, and they found the bones of two men thrown in a heap
together, and also loaded with chains; they were buried, prayers were
said for them, and they returned no more.

If these men were wretches dead in crime and impenitence, all this can
be attributed only to the artifice of the devil, to show the living
that the reprobate take pains to procure rest for their bodies by
getting them interred, and to their souls by getting them prayed for.
But if these two men were Christians who had expiated their crimes by
repentance, and who died in communion with the church, God might
permit them to appear, to ask for clerical sepulture and those prayers
which the church is accustomed to say for the repose of defunct
persons who die while yet some slight fault remains to be expiated.

Here is a fact of the same kind as those which precede, but which is
attended by circumstances which may render it more credible. It is
related by Antonio Torquemada, in his work entitled _Flores Curiosas_,
printed at Salamanca in 1570. He says that a little before his own
time, a young man named Vasquez de Ayola, being gone to Bologna with
two of his companions to study the law there, and not having found
such a lodging in the town as they wished to have, lodged them