In a little time he observed the Baron had entered the damp unwholesome square that was surrounded by the still more gloomy and unfriendly habituations contrived to render life a worse punishment than the most cruel death. He looked carefully into every on of them, and, coming to that in which stood the coffin before mentioned in this narrative, and seeing the black cloth, by which it had once been covered, now hanging in mouldering and tattered fragments around it, a silent memento of that destroying hand which spares neither the dead nor the living, urged, as we may suppose, by one of those sudden irresistible impulses which we are often actuated to obey against the dictates of sober reason, he stept in, and in an attitude of thoughtful meditation, struck with the horrid scenes which till now his eyes had never encountered, unknowing what he did, he placed one foot on the top of the sad receptacle, on which his looks were bent in serious reflection, when, awful and dreadful to relate, a deep groan issued from the coffin, and a voice exclaimed,--"Forbear, you hurt me!--you will crush my bones to powder!" The Baron started, and flew back so violently, that he struck his head against the opposite wall.--A moment's reflection, however, served to inspire him with more resolution, and to convince him that this could not be real;--it must be the wild effects of his own distempered imagination;--the dead were never heard to speak, and why a voice from the grave should be sent to him he could not comprehend. He determined therefore not to be alarmed, not driven from his purpose; when, in the next instant, the same voice, as if it knew the thoughts which floated in his mind, addressed him a second time in a rather louder and more authoritative tone from another part of the dungeon, and warned him not to interrupt the peaceful slumbers of the dead. Again called upon, it could not be delusion. Some one,--a lover perhaps, was concealed in that coffin, from which he was to be frightened like a school-boy. In an instant, with one violent blow, he crushed the mouldring abode of its insensible inhabitant to pieces, and a heap of bones were then presented to his sight, which had once belonged to a creature like himself, endowed perhaps with feelings more generous and humane than those which dwelt in the bosom of the man who had thus insulted its humble remains.