They went to bed and nothing more was thought about it until the next morning, when the wife, passing the house where the old woman lived, saw a crowd of neighbours assembled round the door, and found that the dead body of her husband’s cousin had just been discovered lying at the foot of the stairs. The accident in all probability had occurred at the very time she and her husband were speaking of the deceased, and when the old man declared he saw the mouse. She was fully convinced that the spirit of the old woman had come in that shape to take a last look and farewell of her kinsman.[141] [141] Related to me by Mrs. Andrew Thorn, wife of the old man. “In many Teutonic myths, we find that the soul leaves the body in the shape of a mouse.”--_Folk-Lore Journal_, Vol. II., Part VII., p. 208. THE ROBBER OF THE POOR BOX. It is not many years since, that in making some alterations in the parsonage of St. Michel du Valle, the workmen found under the flooring of one of the rooms a few small coins. They remembered that in the last century, a French priest, who had renounced his own religion, had been appointed curate of the parish by a non-resident Rector after having been duly licensed by the Bishop of Winchester; that, after leading a most irregular life to the great scandal of the parishioners, he had one day disappeared suddenly, and that after his departure the poor box in the church was found to have been broken open and robbed of its contents. It was not long before it was rumoured abroad that mysterious noises were heard in the dead of the night in the parsonage, as of someone walking through the rooms and dropping money as he went. No one doubted that the sacrilegious robber had left this mortal life, and that his ghost was doomed to revisit the scene of his iniquity, vainly endeavouring to make restitution to the widows and orphans, and to the aged and infirm pensioners of the church, of the money of which he had so unfeelingly deprived them. The workmen were fully convinced that the coins which they had found were part of those which had been so sacrilegiously abstracted. They dared not retain them for their own use, but brought them to the Rector with a request that they might be given to the poor.[142] [142] From Mrs. Thomas Bell, wife of the Rector of the Vale parish. BURIAL OF THE DROWNED. In all ages and among all nations the burial of the dead has been looked upon as a sacred duty; and the belief is not yet extinct that until the body is consigned to the earth the spirit is doomed to wander about, seeking rest and finding none. Great therefore is the guilt of him who, having found a corpse, neglects to provide for its sepulture. “_Les morts recllament la terre, et ch’est leû derouait._” (The dead claim the earth, and it is their right).