Of all the horrible and appalling calamities that can befall mortal man, we can imagine none more ghastly than that of being buried alive, and well authenticated records have placed beyond a doubt that it has occasionally happened. The case of the lady whose ring, cut from her finger by midnight violators of her tomb, was the means of saving her from a dreadful fate, has been often told. Her son, the eminent Dr L——, born many years after his mother had been buried, was the physician and friend of the family of the writer, one of whose earliest recollections is the hearing the story from the lips of an aged relative, while forming one of a group of small listeners gathered round and hanging with ’bated breath on the narration. Children love to have the same stories told over and over again in the same words. They like to know what is coming—to watch with thrills of expectation for each detail. And these details, graphically given by one who had them from the very actors in the scene, were weird and vivid. The vault at midnight—the cutting off of the finger—the ghastly terror of the ruffians, when the dead woman sat up in her coffin and blood began to flow—the familiar knock coming to the house-door in the dead of night, heard by terrified maids, who, thinking their mistress’s ghost was there, buried their faces, trembling, in their pillows. The bereaved husband lying sleepless in his grief, heard it too, and started at the sound. ‘If my dear wife were not gone,’ he thought, ‘I should say that was her knock;’ and when, more faintly, it again smote his ear, rising at last and going to the door, he was confronted by the resuscitated woman. All this was listened to with an interest intensified by the fact of its being true. A curious coincidence respecting this event is that an exactly similar story is recorded in the annals of the family of the Earls of Mount-Edgcumbe. In them we read that the mother of Richard Edgcumbe, created first Baron in 1742, being at the time young and childless, died, apparently, at their seat, Cothele, near Plymouth. She was buried with a valuable ring on her finger; and the cutting this off by violators of the tomb, as in the case of Mrs L——, restored her to consciousness. Five years afterwards, she gave birth to a son.