Before she could reply a poor, melancholy-mad wretch came up to them with the startling complaint: “I have been dead a week, and they will not bury me! I went into the deadhouse and got into a coffin, but four men shook me out of it, and said it was a shocking misfit! Do you know where I can find a coffin for myself, doctor?” One of the most gruesome of all the manias of the melancholy-mad patient is the fixed conviction of one’s death and impending burial. Doctor Rupert had met with the hallucination before, but coming at this moment of his budding happiness, it struck him with a strange chill like an evil omen, as if the shadow of a grave stretched dark and forbidding between their hearts. They turned to the poor lunatic, a pale young man whose mind had given way at college from overstudy, in a sort of dismay, and Doctor Rupert exclaimed with unusual impoliteness: “Do go away, Alden, with your dismal croaking! You are not really dead, you know, but only in a trance, and presently you will come out of it, and thank your lucky stars that you were not buried alive.” But the maniac tossed back the long hair from his pale brow dejectedly and protested firmly: “You are mistaken. I am dead, and it is time to bury me! Martin is dead, also, and he was saying to me just now that it is not right for old Charles, that grinning darky over there in his red monkey suit, to be playing the fiddle and dancing when there are so many of us dead and unburied. It is not the kind of music for a funeral. He ought to play the dead march.” “Nonsense!” answered the young doctor; but Alden lingered, gabbling on vacantly: “I have a note up my sleeve to slip to the directors when they come again, complaining of the superintendent for not having us buried when we are dead. He spends too much time flirting with Miss Blue and the others, and neglects us. I’ll bet you a dime the directors will make him squirm when they read my note. Want to see it?” cordially. Doctor Rupert shook his head kindly. He had already seen several of these Round Robins gotten up by querulous patients and complaining of everybody and everything. The directors were always deluged with them when they met, and usually comforted the writers with tobacco. “Now, I will tell you, Alden, why you and Martin have not gotten your caskets yet,” the young doctor said, concluding to humor his whim. “It is because you have not given your order, and the superintendent does not know what style you want. Take my advice, and go and ask him for the style book on undertaking, and you and Martin can make your own selections. Fashions in caskets have changed, you know.” Alden listened attentively with his eyes cast down, and replied briskly: “I shall choose a metallic casket, hermetically sealed, so that the rascally doctors cannot steal me out and cut up my head to find what was the matter with my brain!”