“She tried every way to get them to consent, but the Board of Health had made the law so, and what do you think she did? She sent the men off on an errand, and took a spade that was lying near and pried the lid off so that she could see me, and when the men came running back, she said: 'That's him. I would know his head anywhere, it was so long.’ She was so glad that she had outwitted the authorities that she did not complain about the lid. But she was tired of moving me around, and so had me taken home where I had lived and died, and there she kept me all these years, 'just to have a man about the house' she said. As she was one of the cleanest women in the world, she could not bear to see the mold of the Long Island mud on me, and every Saturday I had a bath. She put clean clothes on me, and always did as long as she lived. We both lie now at Kenisco. I hope there will be no removal from there, but you must not blame me if I have lost confidence when it comes to be a question of routing out the dead to make place for the living, if there is money in it.” CHAPTER V. THE PRINCESS FROM EGYPT While the polished ghost was relating his varied experiences, the women were talking, and the young man found that his thoughts wandered as he noticed a couple of articulated skeletons. He wondered if their experience would not be worth an effort, and was trying to think up some plan by which he could get them to talk, but before he could do so a man, on the other side of the woman who hated cooking, said solemnly: “Now, maybe your folks had dyspepsia. That excuses much, and some folks that are not really nagging by nature get so by their sufferings. Now, I knew a fellow, and he was something awful. Nobody couldn't do nothing to pacify him after he had had his dinner, and at last it got so that smoking injured his vitals and his victuals done him no good.” “Did he pine away and die slow or go off all of a sudden at the end, as it were?” asked the old lady sympathetically. “Well, I disremember, for I was in California that year and when I came back he was gone.” The young reporter thought this was a good time to try to learn what death really meant, and so he chose out a ghost whose frontal development was such as to give the appearance of great intellectuality, and said modestly: “Sir, I hope you will not take it amiss if I ask you a few questions—” “Fire away!” replied the ghost. This unexpected answer quite took his breath away, but he managed to keep a sober face and asked: “I wish very much to know how a man feels when he knows that he is drawing his last breath, when in short, he knows he is dying. If it is not asking too much I should like to have as many of you as are willing to tell me, each his individual experience.” One thoughtful-looking man waited a moment and as nobody else took up the question he said: