"Hé! you see," said the baron, pointing with his key, "my mummies are cased in hieroglyphics. Come! _Here_ is the number, the date, and the man." And lifting them carefully one off the other, he took out a deal box that had stood in the lowest stratum. The cover was loose, except for a string tied about it. He laid it upon the floor, and took out a plaster mask, and brushing and blowing off the saw-dust, held it up. David Arden saw a face with large eyes closed, a very high and thin nose, a good forehead, a delicately chiselled mouth; the upper lip, though well formed after the Greek model, projected a little, and gave to the chin the effect of receding in proportion. This slight defect showed itself in profile; but the face, looked at full front, was on the whole handsome, and in some degree even interesting. "You are quite sure of the identity of this?" asked Uncle David earnestly. There was a square bit of parchment, with two or three short lines, in a character which he did not know, glued to the concave reverse of the mask. The baron took it, and holding the light near, read, "Yelland Mace, suspect for his politics, May 2nd, 1844." "Yes," said Mr. Arden, having renewed his examination, "it very exactly tallies with the description; the nose aquiline, but very delicately formed. Is that writing in cypher?" "Yes, in cypher." "And in what language?" "German." David Arden looked at it. "You will make nothing of it. In these inscriptions, I have employed eight languages--five European, and three Asiatic--I am, you see, something of a linguist--and four distinct cyphers; so having that skill, I gave the benefit of it to my _friends_; this being secret." "Secret?--oh!" said Uncle David. "Yes, secret; and you will please to say nothing of it to any living creature until the twenty-first of October next, when I retire. You understand commerce, Mr. Arden. My practice is confidential, and I should lose perhaps eighty thousand francs in the short space that intervenes, if I were thought to have played a patient such a trick. It is but twenty days of reserve, and then I go and laugh at them, every one. Piff, puff, paff! ha! ha!" "Yes, I promise that also," said Uncle David dryly, and to himself he thought, "What a consummate old scoundrel!" "Very good, Sir; we shall want this of Yelland Mace again, just now; his face and coffin, ha! ha! can rest there for the present." He had replaced the mask in its box, and that lay on the floor. The door of the iron press he shut and locked. "Next, I will show you Mr. Longcluse: those are dead." He waved his short hand toward the row of iron doors which he had just visited. "Please, Sir, walk with me into this room. Ay, so. Here are the _resurrections_. Will you be good enough--L, Longcluse, M, one, two, three, four; _three_, yes, to hold this candlestick for a moment?" The baron unlocked this door, and, after some rummaging, he took forth a box similar to that he had taken out before.