I leave the horrors of my situation to the reader's imagination. The smell of the charnel-house in my nostrils, and a yet warm corpse struggling for breath, as though the death-rattle were upon him; while I was benumbed by terror, and the hellish weight of the burden I bore. The scenes in Dante's Hell fall far short of anguish such as was then mine. I was too weak or terror-stricken to disengage myself from the corpse, which seemed as if expiring a second time; for I conjectured that, while senseless from loss of blood, the wretched man had been taken for dead, and thrust forthwith, Polish fashion, into a coffin, and now lay dying in good earnest. He seemed powerless alike for life and death, and I was doomed to be the couch whereon the fearful struggle would terminate. I strove to fancy that all my adventures in Brczwezmcisl were but a dream, and that I was laboring under an attack of nightmare, but circumstances and surrounding objects were too strong to admit of any such conclusion; still, I verily believe I should have finally succeeded in convincing myself that it was all a vision, and nothing but a vision, had not an incident more striking than any that hitherto preceded, established, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the fact of my being broad awake. THE LIGHT OF DAY. It was day-break; not that I could perceive the light of heaven, for the shoulders of my expiring friend impeded my view, but I inferred so from the bustle in the street below. I heard the footsteps and voices of men in the room; I could not make out the subject of their conversation, as they talked in Polish, but I remarked that they were busy about the coffin. Now, beyond a doubt, thought I, they are looking for the dead man, and my deliverance is at hand; and so it proved, although it happened after a fashion for which I was but little prepared. One of the exploring party smote so lustily with a stout bamboo upon the extended form of the dead or dying, that he started up, and stood erect. Some of the blows lighted upon my hapless person with such effect as to make me yell out most vigorously, and take up a position directly in the rear of the defunct. This old Polish and New East Prussian method of restoring the dead to life proved, certainly, so efficacious in the present instance, that I doubt whether the impassibility of death were not preferable to the acute perceptions of the living.