"You _have_ found a curiosity," observed Oliver, quietly. "That is a
mummy."

"No--'tis a man," exclaimed Roger, in some agitation. "At least it is
something like a man. Is not this like an arm, with a hand at the end
of it?--a little dried, shrunk, ugly arm. 'Tis not stiff, neither.
Look! It can't be Uncle Stephen, sure--or Nan!"

"No, no: it is a mummy--a human body which has been buried for hundreds
and thousands of years."

Roger had never heard of a mummy; and there was no great wonder in that,
when even Oliver did not rightly know the meaning of the word. All
animal bodies (and not only human bodies) which remain dry, by any
means, instead of putrefying, are called mummies.

"What do you mean by hundreds and thousands of years?" said Roger.
"Look here, how the arm bends, and the wrist! I believe I could make
its fingers close on mine," he continued, stepping back--evidently
afraid of the remains which lay before him. "If I was sure now, that it
was not Stephen or Nan ... But the peat water does wonders, they say,
with whatever lies in it."

"So it does. It preserves bodies, as I told you. I will show you in a
minute that it is nobody you have ever known."

And Oliver took from Roger's hand the slip of wood with which he had
been working, and began to clear out more soil about the figure.

"Don't, don't now!" exclaimed Roger. "Don't uncover the face! If you
do, I will go away."

"Go, then," replied Oliver. It appeared as if the bold boy and the
timid one had changed characters. The reason was that Roger had some
very disagreeable thoughts connected with Stephen and Nan Redfurn. He
never forgot, when their images were before him, that they had died in
the midst of angry and contemptuous feelings between them and him.
Oliver, on the other hand, was religious. Though, in easy times, more
afraid than he ought to have been of dishonest and violent persons, he
had yet enough trust in God to support his spirits and his hope in
trial, as we have seen: and about death and the grave, and the other
world, where he believed the dead went to meet their Maker and Father,
he had no fear at all. Nothing that Roger now said, therefore, made him
desist, till he had uncovered half the dried body.

"Look here!" said he--for Roger had not gone away as he had
threatened--"come closer and look, or you will see nothing in the dusk.
Did either Stephen or Nan wear their hair this way? And is this dress
anyth