Horrors such as these induce our hero to seek a new existence. Filling his pockets with money, he sets off in search of a corpse of which to take possession. At length, when nearly exhausted, a drunken fellow, apparently dead, is found lying under a shed. Transferring the money from his own person to that of the mendicant, he utters the usual wish, once, twice, thrice—and in vain. Horribly disconcerted, and dreading lest his charm should have actually deserted him, he begins to kick the dead man with all the energy he has left. At this treatment the corpse suddenly becomes animated, knocks our hero down with a whiskey jug, and makes off with the contents of his pockets, being a dozen silver spoons, and four hundred dollars in money. This accident introduces us to the acquaintance of a genuine philanthropist, Mr. Zachariah Longstraw, and this gentleman being at length murdered by a worthy ex-occupant of Sing-Sing, to whom he had been especially civil, our hero reanimates his body with excessive pleasure at his good fortune. The result is that he finds himself cheated on all sides, is arrested for debt, and is entrapped by a Yankee pedlar and carried off to the South as a tit-bit for the anti-abolitionists. On the route he ascertains (by accidently overhearing a conversation) that the missing body of Sheppard Lee, which {666} disappeared in so mysterious a manner from the side of the pit at the Owl-Roost, was carried off by one Dr. Feuerteufel, a German, who happened to be in search of subjects for dissection, and whose assistants were the dancing spectres in the church yard, which so terribly disconcerted our hero when on his way to the beech-tree. He is finally about to be hung, when a negro who was busied in preparing the gallows, fortunately breaks his neck in a fall, and our adventurer takes possession of his body forthwith. In his character of Nigger Tom, Mr. Lee gives us some very excellent chapters upon abolition and the exciting effects of incendiary pamphlets and pictures, among our slaves in the South. This part of the narrative closes with a spirited picture of a negro insurrection, and with the hanging of Nigger Tom. Our hero is revived, after execution, by the galvanic battery of some medical students, and having, by his sudden display of life, frightened one of them to death, he immediately possesses himself of his person. As Mr. Arthur Megrim, he passes through a variety of adventures, and fancies himself a coffee-pot, a puppy, a chicken, a loaded cannon, a clock, a hamper of crockery ware, a joint stock, a Greek Demi-God and the Emperor of France. Dr. Feurteufel now arrives in the village with a cargo of curiosities for exhibition—among which are some mummies. In one of them our hero recognizes the identical long missed body of Sheppard Lee.