The notion of suspended animation after death by no means expired with paganism. When Severus, Bishop of Ravenna, was about to die, he went in full pontificals to the tomb of his wife and daughter, had the stone removed, and bade the dead ones make room for him between them, and they obeyed. When S. Meven died, and his faithful friend Austell followed him shortly after, the dead body moved on one side in the sarcophagus to accommodate his companion. When an irreverent man struck the coffin of S. Cadoc with a staff, the incensed Saint "roared like a bull." In the Life of S. Germanus of Auxerre is a curious episode. A pagan named Mamertinus being overtaken by night and a storm, took refuge in a solitary building in which was a sarcophagus. He put his knapsack under his head on the upper slab of the tomb, and lying down there went to sleep. At midnight he was roused by a young man at the door of the cell, who called out, "Corcodemus, Corcodemus, levite of Christ, arise!" whereupon a voice answered from the tomb, "What do you want?" The youth replied, "Bishop Perigrinus and Bishop Amator want you at the church, where they are holding vigil." "I can't go," replied the dead man, "I have a visitor here and I must show him hospitality." After an interval the young man returned with two others and again summoned Corcodemus, who now got out of his grave and said to one of those who was at the door, "I will go with you, but you must abide here and protect my visitor, for there is a bitch with her young, to the number of seven, ready to tear him to pieces." So late as 1680 a book appeared, _De Miraculis Mortuorum_, by L. C. F. Garmann, published at Leipzig, opposing opinions not merely of the ignorant but of the learned as to a kind of prolongation of physical life in the dead--their issuing from the graves to suck the blood of the living, their continuing their wonted avocations underground, as a shoemaker being heard cobbling in his coffin, of infants shedding their milk teeth and growing second teeth, of gnawing their grave clothes, and many other horrible superstitions--showing how persistent the belief was that the dead did continue to live in their sepulchres. [Footnote: The confusion between the ghost and the corpse is exemplified in "Hamlet." "Tell Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre, Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd, Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jaws To cast thee up again." Act I. sc. 5.]