September 2, 2025 • 17 mins
A respectable family is forced into a life of crime, with unexpected consequences.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
My name is John Brenwalter. My father, a drunkard, had
a patent for an invention for making coffee berries out
of clay. But he was an honest man, and he
would not engage himself in the manufacture. He was therefore
only moderately wealthy, his royalties from his really valuable invention
bringing him hardly enough to pay the expenses of litigation
(00:22):
with rogues guilty of infringement. So I lacked many of
the advantages enjoyed by the children of unscrupulous and dishonorable parents.
And had it not been for a noble and devoted mother,
who neglected all my brothers and sisters and personally supervised
my education, I should have grown up in ignorance and
been compelled to teach school. To be the favorite child
(00:46):
of a good woman is better than gold. I was
nineteen years of age when my father had the misfortune
to die. He'd always had perfect health, and his death,
which occurred at the dinner table without a moment's warning,
surprised no one more than himself. He had that very
morning been notified that a patent had been granted to
him for a device to burst open safes by hydraulic
(01:08):
pressure without noise. The Commissioner of Patents had pronounced it
the most ingenious, effective, and generally meritorious invention that had
ever been submitted to him, and my father had naturally
looked forward to an old age of prosperity and honor.
His sudden death was therefore a deep disappointment to him.
But my mother, whose piety and resignation to the will
(01:31):
of Heaven were conspicuous virtues of her character, was apparently
less affected. At the close of the meal, when my
poor father's body had been removed from the floor, she
called us into an adjoining room and addressed us as follows,
my children, The uncommon occurrence that you have just witnessed
is one of the most disagreeable incidents in a good
(01:53):
man's life, and one of which I take little pleasure.
I assure you, I beg you to believe that I
had no hand in bringing it about. Of course, she added,
after a pause during which her eyes were cast down
in deep thought. Of course it is better that he
is dead. She uttered this, with so evident a sense
(02:14):
of its obviousness as a self evident truth, that none
of us had the courage to grave her surprise by
asking an explanation. My mother's air of surprise when any
of us went wrong in any way was very terrible
to us. One day, in a fit of peevish temper,
I had taken the liberty to cut off the baby's ear.
(02:35):
Her simple words, John, you surprise me appeared to me
to be so sharp a proof that, after a sleepless night,
I went to her in tears and throwing myself at
her feet, exclaimed, Mother, forgive me for surprising you. So
now we all, including the one he had baby, felt
it would be good to keep matters smoother and to
(02:56):
accept without question the statement that was better, somehow for
our dear father to be dead. My mother continued, I
must tell you, my dear children, that in a case
of sudden and mysterious death, the law requires the coroner
to come out and cut the body into pieces and
submit them to a number of men, who, having inspected them,
pronounced the person dead. For this, the coroner gets a
(03:20):
large sum of money. I wish to avoid that pitiful
formality in this instance. It is one which had never
had the approval of the remains. John, Here, my mother
turned her angel face to me. You are an educated
lad and very discreet. You now have an opportunity to
show your gratitude for all the sacrifices that your education
(03:43):
has entailed upon the rest of us. John, go and
get rid of the coroner. Inexpressibly delighted by this proof
of my mother's confidence and the chance to distinguish myself
by an act that squared with my natural disposition, I
knelt before her and carried her hand to my lips
and bathed it with the tears of sensibility. Before five
(04:07):
o'clock that afternoon, I had indeed got rid of the coroner.
I was immediately arrested and thrown in jail. There I
passed a most uncomfortable night. I was unable to sleep
because of the profanity of my two fellow prisoners, clergymen
whose theological training had given her a fertility of impious
(04:30):
ideas and a command of blasphemous language altogether unparalleled. But
along towards morning, the de jailer, who had been sleeping
in an adjoining room had been equally disturbed, entered the
cell with a fearful oath, and warned the reverend gentleman
that if you heard any more swearing their sacred calling
would not prevent him from turning them out into the street.
(04:53):
After that, they moderated their objectionable conversation, substituting an accordion,
and I slept the peaceful and refreshing sleep of youth
and innocence. The next morning, I was taken before the
Superior Judge, sitting as a committing magistrate, and put upon
my preliminary examination. I pleaded not guilty, adding that the
(05:15):
man who I had murdered was a notorious Democrat. My
mother was a good Republican, and from early childhood I
had been carefully instructed by her in the principles of
honest government and the necessity of suppressing factional opposition. The judge,
elected by a Republican barret box with a sliding bottom,
was visibly impressed by the cogency of my plea and
(05:36):
offered me a cigarette. May it please your honor, began
the district attorney. I do not deem it necessary to
submit any evidence in this case. Under the law of
the land. You sit here as a committing magistrate. It
is therefore your duty to commit testimony. An argument alike
would imply doubt that your honor means to perform your
sworn duty. That is my case. My counsel, the brother
(06:01):
of the deceased coroner, rose and said, may it please
the court. My learned friend, on the other side, has
so well and eloquently stated the law governing this case,
that it only remains for me to inquire as to
what extent it has already been complied with. It is true,
your honor is a committing magistrate, and as such your
duty is to commit what though that is a matter
(06:25):
which the law has wisely and justifiably left to your
own discretion. And wisely you have discharged already every obligation
that the law imposes. Since I have known your Honor,
you have done nothing but commit. You have committed embrasary, theft, arson, perjury, adultery, murder,
(06:45):
every crime in the calendar, and every excess known to
the sensual and depraved, including my learned friend, the district Attorney.
You have done your whole duty as a committee magistrate.
And there is no evidence against this worthy young man,
my client, and as such I move he be discharged.
An impressive silence ensued. The judge arose, and, in a
(07:08):
voice trembling with emotion, sentenced me to a life of liberty. Then,
turning to my counsel, he said, coldly but significantly, I
shall see you later. The next morning, the lawyer who
had defended me against the charge of murdering his own
brother with whom he had a quarrel about some land,
had disappeared. His fate is to this day unknown. In
(07:34):
the meantime, my poor father's body had been secretly buried
at midnight in the back yard of his late residence,
with his late boots on, and the contents of his
late stammach cananalyzed. He was opposed to display, said my
dear mother, as she finished tamping down the earth above him,
and assisted the children to litter the place with straw.
His instincts were all domestic, and he loved a quiet life.
(07:59):
My mother's application for letters of administration stated that she
had good reason to believe that the deceased was dead,
that he could not come home for his meals for
several days. But the judge of the crobate court, as
he ever afterwards contemptuously called it, decided that the proof
of death was insufficient and put the estate into the
hands of the public administrator, who was his son in law.
(08:21):
It was found that the liabilities were exactly balanced by
the assets, and there was only left the patent for
the device for bursting open safes without noise by hydraulic pressure,
and this had passed into the ownership of the probate
Judge and the Public Administrator, as my mother chose to
spell it. Thus, within a few brief months, a worthy
(08:42):
and respectable family was reduced from prosperity to crime. Necessity
compelled us to go to work. In the selection of
occupations we were governed by a variety of considerations, such
as personal fitness, inclination, and so forth. My mother opened
a select private school for instruction in the art of
(09:03):
changing the spots upon leopard skin rugs. My eldest brother,
George Henry, who had a turn for music, became a
bugler in a neighboring asylum for deaf mutes. My sister
Mary Maria took orders for Professor Pumpernichol's essence of Latchkey's
for flavoring mineral springs, and I set up as an
adjustering gilder for the crossbeams for gibbets. The other children
(09:26):
too young for labour, continued to steal small articles in
front of shops, as they had been taught in our
intervals of leisure. We decoyed travelers into our house and
buried the bodies in the cellar. In one part of
this cellar we kept wines, liqueurs and provisions. From the
rapidity of their disappearance, we acquired the superstitious belief that
(09:47):
the spirits of the persons buried there came at dead
of night and held a festival. It was at least
certain that frequently of a morning we would discover fragments
of pickled meats, canned goods, and such debris littery the police.
Although it had been securely locked and barred against human intrusion.
It was proposed to remove the provisions and store them elsewhere,
(10:08):
But our dear mother, always generous and hospitable, said it
was better to endure the loss rather than risk exposure.
If the ghosts would deny this trifling gratification, they might
set on foot an investigation which would overthrow our scheme
of the division of labor, by diverting the energies of
the whole family into the single industry pursued by me.
(10:30):
We might all decorate the cross beams of gibbets we
accepted her decision with a filial submission, due to our
reverence for her worldly wisdom and the purity of her character.
One night, when we were all in the cellar and
dared to enter it alone, engaged in bestowing upon the
mare of an adjoining town the solemn offices of a
(10:51):
Christian burial, my mother and younger children holding a candle each,
while George Henry and I labored with a spade and pick.
My sister Maria uttered a shriek and covered her eyes
with her hands. We were all dreadfully startled, and the
mayor's funeral rites were instantly suspended, while with pale faces
and trembling tones, we begged her to say what had
(11:13):
alarmed her. The younger children were so agitated that they
held their candles unsteadily, and the wavering shadows of our
figures danced with uncouth and grotesque movements on the walls
and flung themselves into the most uncanny attitudes. The face
of the dead man, now gleaming ghastly in the light,
and now extinguished by some fluting shadow, appeared at each
(11:36):
emergence to have taken on a new and more forbidding expression.
A malign a menace. Frightened even more than ourselves by
the girl's scream, rats raced in multitude about the place,
squeaking shrilly, or stared into the black opacity of some
distant corner with steadfast eyes, mere points of green light
(11:57):
matching the faint phosphorescence of decay that filled the half
dug grave, and seemed the visible manifestation of that faint
odor of mortality which tainted the unwholesome air. The children
now sobbed and clung about the limbs of their elders,
dropping their candles, and we were near being left in
total darkness, apart from that sinister light which slowly welled
(12:19):
up towards the disturbed earth and overflowed the edges of
the grave like a fountain. Meanwhile, my sister, crouching in
the earth that had been thrown out of the excavation,
had removed her hands from her face and was staring
with expanded eyes into an obscure space between the two
wine casks. There it is, there it is, she shrieked,
(12:39):
pointing God in heaven, can't you see it? And there,
indeed it was a human figure, dimly discernible in the gloom,
a figure that wavered from side to side as if
about to fall. Clutching the wine casts for support, it
had stepped unsteadily forward, and for one moment stood revealed
in the light of our remaining candles. Then it surged
(13:01):
heavily and fell prone upon the earth. In that moment
we had all recognized that figure the face and the
bearing of our father, dead these ten months, and buried
by our own hands, our father indubitably risen and ghastly drunk,
on the instance of our precipitate flight from that horrible place,
and on the extinction of all human sentiment in that tumultuous,
(13:23):
mad scramble up the damp and moldy stairs, slipping, falling,
pulling one another down, and clambering over one another's back.
The lights extinguished. Babes trampled beneath the feet of their
strong brothers, and hurled backwards to a death by a
mother's arm. On all these I do not dare dwell.
My mother, my eldest brother, and my sister had escaped it.
(13:45):
The others remained below to perish of their wounds or
their terror, some perhaps by flame. For within an hour
we fall hastily gathering together what money and jewels we
had and what clothing we could carry, fired the dwelling
and fled by its life to the hills. We did
not even pause to collect the insurance. My dear mother
said on her deathbed years afterwards, in her distant land,
(14:08):
that this was the only sin of a mission that
lay upon her conscience. Her confessor, a holy man, assured
her that under the circumstances, Heaven would pardon the neglect.
About ten years after our removal from the scenes of
my childhood, I returned in disguise to the spot with
a view to obtaining some treasure belonging to us, which
(14:29):
had long been buried in the cellar. I may say
that I was unsuccessful. The discovery of many human bones
in the ruins had set the authorities digging for more.
They had found the treasure and kept it for their honesty.
The house had not been rebuilt, and the whole suburb
was in fact her desolation. So many unearthly sights and
(14:52):
sounds had been reported there about that nobody would live there,
And as there was no one to question nor molest
I resolved to grat my filial piety by gazing once
more into the face of my beloved father. If indeed
our eyes had deceived us, and if he was still
in the grave, I remembered that he had always worn
(15:13):
an enormous diamond ring, and never having seen nor heard
of it since his death, I had reason to think
he might have been buried in it. But curing a spade,
I soon located the grave in what would have been
the backyard and began digging. When I got down about
four feet, that whole bottom fell out of the grave,
and I was precipitated into a large drain, falling through
(15:34):
a long hole in its crumbling arch. There was no
body nor any vestige of one. Unable to get out
of the excavation, I crept through the drain, and, having
with some difficulty removed a massive charred, rubbish and blackened
masonry that choked it, emerged into what may have been
that faithful cellar. All was clear my father, whatever had
(16:00):
caused him to have been taken bad at his meal,
and I think it's possible that my sainted mother could
have thrown some light upon that batter had indubitably been
buried alive. The grave having been accidentally dug above the
forgotten drain and down almost to the crown of its arch,
and no coffin having been used. His struggles on reviving
(16:21):
had broken the long rotted masonry, and he had fallen through,
eventually escaping into the cellar, feeling that he was no
longer welcome in his own house, yet having no other,
he had lived in subterranean seclusion, a witness to our thrift,
and a pensioner on our providence. It was he who
had eaten our food, and it was he who had
(16:43):
drunk our wine. He was no better than a common
thief in a moment of intoxication, and feeling no doubt
that need of companionship, which is one sympathetic link between
a drunken man and his race, he had left his
place of concealment at a strangely inopportune time, entailing the
most deplorable consequences upon those nearest and dearest to him,
(17:05):
a blunder that hath almost a dignity of crime.
My name is John Brenwalter. My father, a drunkard, had
a patent for an invention for making coffee berries out
of clay. But he was an honest man, and he
would not engage himself in the manufacture. He was therefore
only moderately wealthy, his royalties from his really valuable invention
bringing him hardly enough to pay the expenses of litigation
(00:22):
with rogues guilty of infringement. So I lacked many of
the advantages enjoyed by the children of unscrupulous and dishonorable parents.
And had it not been for a noble and devoted mother,
who neglected all my brothers and sisters and personally supervised
my education, I should have grown up in ignorance and
been compelled to teach school. To be the favorite child
(00:46):
of a good woman is better than gold. I was
nineteen years of age when my father had the misfortune
to die. He'd always had perfect health, and his death,
which occurred at the dinner table without a moment's warning,
surprised no one more than himself. He had that very
morning been notified that a patent had been granted to
him for a device to burst open safes by hydraulic
(01:08):
pressure without noise. The Commissioner of Patents had pronounced it
the most ingenious, effective, and generally meritorious invention that had
ever been submitted to him, and my father had naturally
looked forward to an old age of prosperity and honor.
His sudden death was therefore a deep disappointment to him.
But my mother, whose piety and resignation to the will
(01:31):
of Heaven were conspicuous virtues of her character, was apparently
less affected. At the close of the meal, when my
poor father's body had been removed from the floor, she
called us into an adjoining room and addressed us as follows,
my children, The uncommon occurrence that you have just witnessed
is one of the most disagreeable incidents in a good
(01:53):
man's life, and one of which I take little pleasure.
I assure you, I beg you to believe that I
had no hand in bringing it about. Of course, she added,
after a pause during which her eyes were cast down
in deep thought. Of course it is better that he
is dead. She uttered this, with so evident a sense
(02:14):
of its obviousness as a self evident truth, that none
of us had the courage to grave her surprise by
asking an explanation. My mother's air of surprise when any
of us went wrong in any way was very terrible
to us. One day, in a fit of peevish temper,
I had taken the liberty to cut off the baby's ear.
(02:35):
Her simple words, John, you surprise me appeared to me
to be so sharp a proof that, after a sleepless night,
I went to her in tears and throwing myself at
her feet, exclaimed, Mother, forgive me for surprising you. So
now we all, including the one he had baby, felt
it would be good to keep matters smoother and to
(02:56):
accept without question the statement that was better, somehow for
our dear father to be dead. My mother continued, I
must tell you, my dear children, that in a case
of sudden and mysterious death, the law requires the coroner
to come out and cut the body into pieces and
submit them to a number of men, who, having inspected them,
pronounced the person dead. For this, the coroner gets a
(03:20):
large sum of money. I wish to avoid that pitiful
formality in this instance. It is one which had never
had the approval of the remains. John, Here, my mother
turned her angel face to me. You are an educated
lad and very discreet. You now have an opportunity to
show your gratitude for all the sacrifices that your education
(03:43):
has entailed upon the rest of us. John, go and
get rid of the coroner. Inexpressibly delighted by this proof
of my mother's confidence and the chance to distinguish myself
by an act that squared with my natural disposition, I
knelt before her and carried her hand to my lips
and bathed it with the tears of sensibility. Before five
(04:07):
o'clock that afternoon, I had indeed got rid of the coroner.
I was immediately arrested and thrown in jail. There I
passed a most uncomfortable night. I was unable to sleep
because of the profanity of my two fellow prisoners, clergymen
whose theological training had given her a fertility of impious
(04:30):
ideas and a command of blasphemous language altogether unparalleled. But
along towards morning, the de jailer, who had been sleeping
in an adjoining room had been equally disturbed, entered the
cell with a fearful oath, and warned the reverend gentleman
that if you heard any more swearing their sacred calling
would not prevent him from turning them out into the street.
(04:53):
After that, they moderated their objectionable conversation, substituting an accordion,
and I slept the peaceful and refreshing sleep of youth
and innocence. The next morning, I was taken before the
Superior Judge, sitting as a committing magistrate, and put upon
my preliminary examination. I pleaded not guilty, adding that the
(05:15):
man who I had murdered was a notorious Democrat. My
mother was a good Republican, and from early childhood I
had been carefully instructed by her in the principles of
honest government and the necessity of suppressing factional opposition. The judge,
elected by a Republican barret box with a sliding bottom,
was visibly impressed by the cogency of my plea and
(05:36):
offered me a cigarette. May it please your honor, began
the district attorney. I do not deem it necessary to
submit any evidence in this case. Under the law of
the land. You sit here as a committing magistrate. It
is therefore your duty to commit testimony. An argument alike
would imply doubt that your honor means to perform your
sworn duty. That is my case. My counsel, the brother
(06:01):
of the deceased coroner, rose and said, may it please
the court. My learned friend, on the other side, has
so well and eloquently stated the law governing this case,
that it only remains for me to inquire as to
what extent it has already been complied with. It is true,
your honor is a committing magistrate, and as such your
duty is to commit what though that is a matter
(06:25):
which the law has wisely and justifiably left to your
own discretion. And wisely you have discharged already every obligation
that the law imposes. Since I have known your Honor,
you have done nothing but commit. You have committed embrasary, theft, arson, perjury, adultery, murder,
(06:45):
every crime in the calendar, and every excess known to
the sensual and depraved, including my learned friend, the district Attorney.
You have done your whole duty as a committee magistrate.
And there is no evidence against this worthy young man,
my client, and as such I move he be discharged.
An impressive silence ensued. The judge arose, and, in a
(07:08):
voice trembling with emotion, sentenced me to a life of liberty. Then,
turning to my counsel, he said, coldly but significantly, I
shall see you later. The next morning, the lawyer who
had defended me against the charge of murdering his own
brother with whom he had a quarrel about some land,
had disappeared. His fate is to this day unknown. In
(07:34):
the meantime, my poor father's body had been secretly buried
at midnight in the back yard of his late residence,
with his late boots on, and the contents of his
late stammach cananalyzed. He was opposed to display, said my
dear mother, as she finished tamping down the earth above him,
and assisted the children to litter the place with straw.
His instincts were all domestic, and he loved a quiet life.
(07:59):
My mother's application for letters of administration stated that she
had good reason to believe that the deceased was dead,
that he could not come home for his meals for
several days. But the judge of the crobate court, as
he ever afterwards contemptuously called it, decided that the proof
of death was insufficient and put the estate into the
hands of the public administrator, who was his son in law.
(08:21):
It was found that the liabilities were exactly balanced by
the assets, and there was only left the patent for
the device for bursting open safes without noise by hydraulic pressure,
and this had passed into the ownership of the probate
Judge and the Public Administrator, as my mother chose to
spell it. Thus, within a few brief months, a worthy
(08:42):
and respectable family was reduced from prosperity to crime. Necessity
compelled us to go to work. In the selection of
occupations we were governed by a variety of considerations, such
as personal fitness, inclination, and so forth. My mother opened
a select private school for instruction in the art of
(09:03):
changing the spots upon leopard skin rugs. My eldest brother,
George Henry, who had a turn for music, became a
bugler in a neighboring asylum for deaf mutes. My sister
Mary Maria took orders for Professor Pumpernichol's essence of Latchkey's
for flavoring mineral springs, and I set up as an
adjustering gilder for the crossbeams for gibbets. The other children
(09:26):
too young for labour, continued to steal small articles in
front of shops, as they had been taught in our
intervals of leisure. We decoyed travelers into our house and
buried the bodies in the cellar. In one part of
this cellar we kept wines, liqueurs and provisions. From the
rapidity of their disappearance, we acquired the superstitious belief that
(09:47):
the spirits of the persons buried there came at dead
of night and held a festival. It was at least
certain that frequently of a morning we would discover fragments
of pickled meats, canned goods, and such debris littery the police.
Although it had been securely locked and barred against human intrusion.
It was proposed to remove the provisions and store them elsewhere,
(10:08):
But our dear mother, always generous and hospitable, said it
was better to endure the loss rather than risk exposure.
If the ghosts would deny this trifling gratification, they might
set on foot an investigation which would overthrow our scheme
of the division of labor, by diverting the energies of
the whole family into the single industry pursued by me.
(10:30):
We might all decorate the cross beams of gibbets we
accepted her decision with a filial submission, due to our
reverence for her worldly wisdom and the purity of her character.
One night, when we were all in the cellar and
dared to enter it alone, engaged in bestowing upon the
mare of an adjoining town the solemn offices of a
(10:51):
Christian burial, my mother and younger children holding a candle each,
while George Henry and I labored with a spade and pick.
My sister Maria uttered a shriek and covered her eyes
with her hands. We were all dreadfully startled, and the
mayor's funeral rites were instantly suspended, while with pale faces
and trembling tones, we begged her to say what had
(11:13):
alarmed her. The younger children were so agitated that they
held their candles unsteadily, and the wavering shadows of our
figures danced with uncouth and grotesque movements on the walls
and flung themselves into the most uncanny attitudes. The face
of the dead man, now gleaming ghastly in the light,
and now extinguished by some fluting shadow, appeared at each
(11:36):
emergence to have taken on a new and more forbidding expression.
A malign a menace. Frightened even more than ourselves by
the girl's scream, rats raced in multitude about the place,
squeaking shrilly, or stared into the black opacity of some
distant corner with steadfast eyes, mere points of green light
(11:57):
matching the faint phosphorescence of decay that filled the half
dug grave, and seemed the visible manifestation of that faint
odor of mortality which tainted the unwholesome air. The children
now sobbed and clung about the limbs of their elders,
dropping their candles, and we were near being left in
total darkness, apart from that sinister light which slowly welled
(12:19):
up towards the disturbed earth and overflowed the edges of
the grave like a fountain. Meanwhile, my sister, crouching in
the earth that had been thrown out of the excavation,
had removed her hands from her face and was staring
with expanded eyes into an obscure space between the two
wine casks. There it is, there it is, she shrieked,
(12:39):
pointing God in heaven, can't you see it? And there,
indeed it was a human figure, dimly discernible in the gloom,
a figure that wavered from side to side as if
about to fall. Clutching the wine casts for support, it
had stepped unsteadily forward, and for one moment stood revealed
in the light of our remaining candles. Then it surged
(13:01):
heavily and fell prone upon the earth. In that moment
we had all recognized that figure the face and the
bearing of our father, dead these ten months, and buried
by our own hands, our father indubitably risen and ghastly drunk,
on the instance of our precipitate flight from that horrible place,
and on the extinction of all human sentiment in that tumultuous,
(13:23):
mad scramble up the damp and moldy stairs, slipping, falling,
pulling one another down, and clambering over one another's back.
The lights extinguished. Babes trampled beneath the feet of their
strong brothers, and hurled backwards to a death by a
mother's arm. On all these I do not dare dwell.
My mother, my eldest brother, and my sister had escaped it.
(13:45):
The others remained below to perish of their wounds or
their terror, some perhaps by flame. For within an hour
we fall hastily gathering together what money and jewels we
had and what clothing we could carry, fired the dwelling
and fled by its life to the hills. We did
not even pause to collect the insurance. My dear mother
said on her deathbed years afterwards, in her distant land,
(14:08):
that this was the only sin of a mission that
lay upon her conscience. Her confessor, a holy man, assured
her that under the circumstances, Heaven would pardon the neglect.
About ten years after our removal from the scenes of
my childhood, I returned in disguise to the spot with
a view to obtaining some treasure belonging to us, which
(14:29):
had long been buried in the cellar. I may say
that I was unsuccessful. The discovery of many human bones
in the ruins had set the authorities digging for more.
They had found the treasure and kept it for their honesty.
The house had not been rebuilt, and the whole suburb
was in fact her desolation. So many unearthly sights and
(14:52):
sounds had been reported there about that nobody would live there,
And as there was no one to question nor molest
I resolved to grat my filial piety by gazing once
more into the face of my beloved father. If indeed
our eyes had deceived us, and if he was still
in the grave, I remembered that he had always worn
(15:13):
an enormous diamond ring, and never having seen nor heard
of it since his death, I had reason to think
he might have been buried in it. But curing a spade,
I soon located the grave in what would have been
the backyard and began digging. When I got down about
four feet, that whole bottom fell out of the grave,
and I was precipitated into a large drain, falling through
(15:34):
a long hole in its crumbling arch. There was no
body nor any vestige of one. Unable to get out
of the excavation, I crept through the drain, and, having
with some difficulty removed a massive charred, rubbish and blackened
masonry that choked it, emerged into what may have been
that faithful cellar. All was clear my father, whatever had
(16:00):
caused him to have been taken bad at his meal,
and I think it's possible that my sainted mother could
have thrown some light upon that batter had indubitably been
buried alive. The grave having been accidentally dug above the
forgotten drain and down almost to the crown of its arch,
and no coffin having been used. His struggles on reviving
(16:21):
had broken the long rotted masonry, and he had fallen through,
eventually escaping into the cellar, feeling that he was no
longer welcome in his own house, yet having no other,
he had lived in subterranean seclusion, a witness to our thrift,
and a pensioner on our providence. It was he who
had eaten our food, and it was he who had
(16:43):
drunk our wine. He was no better than a common
thief in a moment of intoxication, and feeling no doubt
that need of companionship, which is one sympathetic link between
a drunken man and his race, he had left his
place of concealment at a strangely inopportune time, entailing the
most deplorable consequences upon those nearest and dearest to him,
(17:05):
a blunder that hath almost a dignity of crime.
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