He stood by me, shaking and perspiring, and suddenly seized me with a tremulous hand. “They shudn’t a’ sent me down there,” he whispered; “it give me the horrors, it did, to see that they’d burried him quick, and that for fower year he’d been struggling and wrenching to get out.” “I’m afraid that the devil’s got you indeed, my friend.” “It’s all along o’ thart. He come and he looked down upon me there in the pit.” “Who did? The devil?” “Him or thart Chis’ll doctor. It’s all one. I swat cold, I tell ye. I see his face make a ugly fiddle-pattern on the sky. My mate, he’d gone to dinner and the yard was nigh empty. ‘Look’ee here,’ I whispered up to him. ‘He were burried quick, as they burried that boy over in St. John’s, yonder, that you murdered.’” CHAPTER XLI. ACROSS THE WATER. For an instant the blood in my arteries seemed to stop, so that I gasped when I tried to speak. “What boy was that?” I said, in a forced voice, when I could command myself. “What boy?--eh?--what boy?” His eyes were wandering up and down the wall again. “Him, I say, as they burried quick--young Trender o’ the mill.” “How do you know he was buried alive? How could he have been if he was murdered?” “How do I know? He were murdered, I say. I’m George White, the sexton--and what I knows, I knows.” “And the doctor murdered him?” “Don’t I say so?” He had hardly spoken, when he put his hand to his head, moved a step back and stood staring at me with horror-stricken, injected eyes. “My God!” he muttered. “He whispered there into the pit that if I said to another what I said to him I were as good as a dead man.” The panic increased in him. I could see the tortured soul moving, as it were, behind the flesh of his face. When the nerve of endurance snapped he staggered and fell forward in a fit. Helpless to minister to a convulsion that must find its treatment in the delirium ward of a hospital, I ran to the police station, which was but a short distance away, and gave information of the seizure I had witnessed. A stretcher was sent for the poor, racked wretch; he was carried away spluttering and writhing, and so for the time being my chance of questioning him further was ended. Now, plainly and solemnly: Had I been face to face with an awful fragment of the truth, or had I been but the chance hearer of certain delirious ravings on the part of a drink-sodden wretch--ravings as baseless as the unsubstantial horror at which he had flung his cap?