Of all the gloomy houses any one ever stayed in, Captain Sanker's was the worst. Nothing but coffins coming into it, and all of us stealing about on tip-toe. King lay in the room where he died. There was to be an inquest: at which the captain was angry. But he was so excited and sorrowful just then as to have no head at all. Which might well be excused in him. Picture what it was! Three carriages full of us had started on the Tuesday morning, expecting to have a day of charming pleasure on the Malvern Hills in the July sunshine; no more thinking of death or any other catastrophe, than if the world had never contained such! And poor King--poor lame King, whose weakness made him more helpless than were we strong ones, and who only on the previous Saturday had been plucked out of the fight in Diglis Meadow and been saved--King must fall asleep on a dangerous part of the hill and roll down it and come home to die! "Better King than any of the rest of you," cried Mrs. Sanker, more than once, in her dreamy way, and with her eyes dry, for she seemed tired of tears; "he could never have done battle with the world as you will have to do it; and he was quite ready for heaven." Instead of going home with our people the day after the death, as Tod did, I had to wait at Worcester for the inquest. When the beadle (or whoever the officer might be; he had gold cord on his hat and white ribbed stockings below his breeches: which stockings might have been fellows to old Jones's of Church Dykely) came to Captain Sanker's to make inquiries the night of the death, and heard that I had been first up with King after his fall, he said I should have to give evidence. So I stayed on with them--much to my uneasiness. If I had thought the Sankers queer people before, I thought them queerer now. Not one of the boys and girls, except Fred, cared to go alone by the door of the room where King lay. And, talking of King, it was not until I saw the name on the coffin-lid that I knew his name was not King, but Kingsley. He looked as nice and peaceful as any dead lad with a nice face could look; and yet they were afraid to pass by outside. Dan and Ruth were the worst. I did not wonder at her--she was a little girl; but I did at Dan. Fred told me that when they were children a servant used to tell them stories of ghosts and dreams and banshees; Hetta and he were too old to be frightened, but the rest had taken it all into their nature. I privately thought that Mrs. Sanker was no better than the fool of a servant, reciting to them her dreams and accounts of apparitions.