to be called by. Was that noise inside my head, or in the depths of that thick-veiled night, or was

the noise beneath the mysterious earth sown with human corpses? I looked around me, but I cannot recall how long I stayed where I was. Terror had paralyzed me; I was cold with fear, ready to burst out screaming — ready to die!

And suddenly it seemed to me that the marble slab I was sitting on was moving. Certainly it was moving, as if something were lifting it. With a single bound I moved to the neigh-boring tomb, and I saw — yes, I saw distinctly! — the slab I had just left rise upright; and the dead man came forth, came forth a bare skeleton, pushing the slab back to its former place with his bent back. I swear that I saw it with perfect clearness, though the night was pitch dark.

And on the cross I read:

"Here lies Jacques Olivant, who died at the age of fifty-one. He loved his family, and was kind and honorable. He gave up his soul in the grace of God."

The dead man likewise read what was carved upon the slab of the tomb. Then he picked up from the path a small, jagged stone and began, with effort and care, to scrape away the letters, and after a time he brought his work to completion. Then he gazed with his two hollow eye-sockets at the place where the letters had been carved; then, pointing with the bone that had been his forefinger, he began to trace with it gleaming letters, like those lines that children draw upon walls with the tips of matchsticks. And he wrote:

"Here rests Jacques Olivant, who died at the age of fifty-one. This man hastened his father's death by his harshness and his coldness, because he coveted possession of his fortune. He embittered his wife's life, made his children miserable, deceived his neighbors, robbed whomever he was able to rob, and died a wretch." When the dead man had finished this work, he stood dumbfounded, contemplating what he had done. And casting my gaze about me, I saw that all the graves were open, and that all the

corpses had come out of them and had effaced what their kinsmen and relations had written upon the slabs of the tombs, and had set down the truth in its place. And I learned that all of them had been the tormentors of their neighbors — that they had been malicious, wanting in hon-esty, hypocrites, liars, arrogant, blasphemers, envious. I learned that those men whom no blemish stains and those women whom no stain sullies — I learned that these upright fathers and faithful wives and loyal sons and chaste daughters had all of them, before, stolen and cheated and committed every shameful, hateful deed. I saw them all, at the same moment, on the threshold of the eternal dwelling, writing the truth — the

tremendous, sacred truth of which everyone was ignorant, or feigned ignorance, during life.

And I thought that the beloved, too, must have written something on the slab of her tomb.

And at that instant, running now without fear among the half-open graves, among the corpses and the skeletons, I made my way toward her, certain that I should find her at once. And I knew her straightway, without seeing her face, which was hidden in a winding-cloth.

And on the marble cross where I had first read:

"She loved, was loved, and died" —

"She went out one day in the rain to betray her lover; she caught cold, and died."