I then referred to a circumstance that had happened during my late sickness, as affording the fullest confirmation of my story. The circumstance was this. While still lying tormented with fever, but at a moment when my mind was sound and lucid, Jim Jumble put a newspaper into my hand, in which, by a singular coincidence, appeared an account of my late transformation in Virginia, with an allusion to the fate of Zachariah Longstraw, by which I learned, for the first time, what had become of his body after I left it. From the article, which, strangely, and yet naturally enough, was headed "Outrageous Humbug, and Fatal Consequence thereof," it seemed to be universally believed that Dr. Feuerteufel's mummy was no mummy at all, but a living man, as I myself had heard it called in the village, with whom he had leagued in a conspiracy to hoax and swindle the good people of the south out of their money; and that the imposture had been detected by Mr. Arthur Megrim, who, proceeding to force the glass box, was knocked down by the pretended dead man, and so unfortunately killed, the mummy and his accomplice, the doctor, making their escape in the confusion. The editor of the paper, after noticing a second account, by which it was asserted that the unfortunate Megrim, though overturned by the pretended mummy in his flight, had received no injury from him, but, on the contrary, had died of sheer fright and horror, being of a nervous, hypochondriacal turn, and acknowledging that this account was more probable, inveighed warmly against the villany and audacity of the swindlers; who, he said, were more legitimate objects on whom to wreak the vengeance of Lynchdom than the people of that district had found in Zachariah Longstraw, the philanthropist. And here the editor reminded his readers of the fate of that excellent and distinguished individual, who had died in the Lynchers' hands the preceding autumn, against the ringleaders of whom his nephew, Mr. Jonathan Truelove, had so vainly attempted to establish legal proceedings. To this account, I say, I referred as containing an argument of my truth not to be resisted; but, unfortunately, the paper had by some means or other vanished, and Alderwood said my story went for nothing without it. That paper, I have always thought, he had himself got possession of and secreted. But had I even retained and shown it to him, I doubt whether it would have affected him in the least; for he was one of those skeptical men who believed a thing none the sooner for finding it in a newspaper.