Mary Horne, it will be noticed, wished to be kept as long as possible before her burial. She does not give a reason, but it was presumably to lessen the risk of premature burial, the possibility of which haunts many minds. Seven years before her death Dr. William Hawes had published his “Address on Premature Death, and Premature Interment,” and still to-day the subject is one of importance, as the Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial can testify. Recently a testator expressed a wish either to be cremated or that his heart should be pierced, as “I feel assured that many persons are buried alive.” Now and then sensational stories appear, as of rappings in a coffin or of the revival of one about to be interred. “All I recommend,” said James Clegg, “is not to be lain under ground alive,” and what he recommends is often anxiously striven against. Such efforts were made by Ann West (ob. 1803) who once was nearly buried alive, by directing that she should be buried in a coffin without a lid, and that a hole should be left in the brickwork of her vault. It was even said that she bequeathed her fortune to a servant on condition that he should place bread and water on her coffin for a year in case she should revive and need them. But perhaps all was not well at last, for her ghost was said to haunt the neighbourhood. A similar tale is told of a Manchester lady, a Miss Bexwick or Beswick, who died about the middle of the eighteenth century, and devised an estate to her doctor and others, on condition that the doctor paid her a morning visit for twelve months after her death. To fulfil the conditions it was necessary to embalm her body, and the doctor resided in the house to pay the mummy his daily call. Horatio Mucklow, of Highbury (ob. July 27, 1816), bequeathed a legacy to Powell the parish clerk, on condition that he would see his head severed from his body previous to burial, and Thomas Trigge, of St. George, Southwark (will dated February 24, 1755, and proved November 25, 1784), directed that before he was shut up in his coffin a surgeon should give him such a wound as would prove immediately fatal were he alive. Such drastic methods are not uncommon to-day. The late Lord Burton wrote: “I desire that before my body be placed in the coffin the spine and spinal marrow of the neck shall be completely severed by a competent surgeon and the heart removed and placed in a separate vessel, to be enclosed in the coffin,” and presumably the risk of premature burial was in his mind. “I have a great horror of being buried alive,” wrote a lady in her will, “therefore I wish my finger to be cut,” and she bequeathed £10 to the doctor performing such service. Another ordered a doctor to “thrust a dagger through my heart three times to make sure I am dead.” Better thus than to be buried alive: such a stuffy death, as Yum-Yum says in “The Mikado.”