“Between midnight and one in the morning the little band proceeded to Schiller’s house. The coffin was carried down stairs and placed on the shoulders of the friends in waiting. No one else was to be seen before the house or in the streets. It was a moonlight night in May, but clouds were up. The procession moved through the sleeping city to the churchyard of St. James. Having arrived there they placed their burden on the ground at the door of the so-called _Kassengewölbe_, where the gravedigger and his assistants took it up. In this vault, which belonged to the province of Weimar, it was usual to inter persons of the higher classes, who possessed no burying-ground of their own, upon payment of a _louis d’or_. As Schiller had died without securing a resting-place for himself and his family, there could have been no more natural arrangement than to carry his remains to this vault. It was a grim old building, standing against the wall of the churchyard, with a steep narrow roof, and no opening of any kind but the doorway which was filled up with a grating. The interior was a gloomy space of about fourteen feet either way. In the centre was a trap-door which gave access to a hollow space beneath. “As the gravediggers raised the coffin, the clouds suddenly parted, and the moon shed her light on all that was earthly of Schiller. They carried him in: they opened the trap-door: and let him down by ropes into the darkness. Then they closed the vault. Nothing was spoken or sung. The mourners were dispersing, when their attention was attracted by a tall figure in a mantle, at some distance in the graveyard, sobbing loudly. No one knew who it was; and for many years the occurrence remained wrapped in mystery, giving rise to strange conjectures. But eventually it turned out to have been Schiller’s brother-in-law Wolzogen, who, having hurried home on hearing of the death, had arrived after the procession was already on its way to the churchyard.