“‘Very well, sir,’ said I; and so I followed his directions. I procured the lime; and as I was to come privately in the evening to deposit it in the coffin, in company with the doctor alone, I was putting off the time in my workshop, polishing some trifle, and thinking to myself that I could not find in my heart to choke up my old friend with quicklime, even after he was dead, when, to my unspeakable horror, who should enter my workshop but the identical laird himself, dressed in his dead-clothes in the very same manner in which I had seen him laid in the coffin, but apparently all streaming in blood to the feet. I fell back over against a cart-wheel, and was going to call out, but could not; and as he stood straight in the door, there was no means of escape. At length the apparition spoke to me in a hoarse trembling voice, and it said to me, ‘Jamie Sanderson! O, Jamie Sanderson! I have been forced to appear to you in a d—d frightful guise!’ These were the very first words it spoke, and they were far from being a lie; but I halfflins thought to mysel that a being in such circumstances might have spoken with a little more caution and decency. I could make no answer, for my tongue refused all attempts at articulation, and my lips would not come together; and all that I could do was to lie back against my new cart-wheel, and hold up my hands as a kind of defence. The ghastly and blood-stained apparition, advancing a step or two, held up both its hands, flying with dead ruffles, and cried to me in a still more frightful voice, ‘Oh, my faithful old friend, I have been murdered! I am a murdered man, Jamie Sanderson! And if you do not assist me in bringing upon the wretch due retribution, dire will be your punishment in the other world.’
“This is sheer raving, James,” said the sheriff, interrupting him. “These words can be nothing but the ravings of a disturbed and heated imagination. I entreat you to recollect that you have appealed to the Great Judge of heaven and earth for the truth of what you assert here, and to answer accordingly.”
“I know what I am saying, my Lord Sheriff,” said Sanderson; “and I am telling naething but the plain truth, as nearly as my state of mind at the time permits me to recollect. The appalling figure approached still nearer and nearer to me, breathing threatenings if I would not rise and fly to his assistance, and swearing like a sergeant of dragoons at both the doctor and myself. At length it came so close to me that I had no other shift but to hold up both feet and hands to shield me, as I had seen herons do when knocked down by a goshawk, and I cried out; but even my voice failed, so that I only cried like one through his sleep.”
“‘What the d—l are you lying gaping and braying at there?’ said he, seizing me by the wrist and dragging me after him. ‘Do you not see the plight I am in, and why won’t you fly to succour me?’
“I now felt, to my great relief, that this terrific apparition was a being of flesh, blood, and bones like myself;—that, in short, it was indeed my kind old friend the laird popped out of his open coffin, and come over to pay me an evening visit, but certainly in such a guise as earthly visit was never paid. I soon gathered up my scattered senses, took my old friend into my room, bathed him all over, and washed him well with lukewarm water; then put him into a warm bed, gave him a glass or two of hot punch, and he came round amazingly. He caused me to survey his neck a hundred times, I am sure; and I had no doubt he had been strangled, for there was a purple ring round it, which in some places was black, and a little swollen; his voice creaked like a door-hinge, and his features were still distorted. He swore terribly at both the doctor and myself; but nothing put him half so mad as the idea of the quicklime being poured over him, and particularly over his face. I am mistaken if that experiment does not serve him for a theme of execration as long as he lives.”
“So he is alive, then, you say?” asked the fiscal.
“O yes, sir, alive, and tolerably well, considering. We two have had several bottles together in my quiet room; for I have still kept him concealed, to see what the doctor would do next. He is in terror for him, somehow, until sixty days be over from some date that he talks of, and seems assured that the dog will have his life by hook or crook, unless he can bring him to the gallows betimes, and he is absent on that business to-day. One night lately, when fully half seas over, he set off to the schoolhouse, and frightened the dominie; and last night he went up to the stable, and gave old Broadcast a hearing for not keeping his mare well enough.
“It appears that some shaking motion in the coffining of the laird had brought him back to himself, after bleeding abundantly both at mouth and nose; that he was on his feet ere he knew how he had been disposed of, and was quite shocked at seeing the open coffin on the bed, and himself dressed in his grave-clothes, and all in one bath of blood. He flew to the door, but it was locked outside; he rapped furiously for something to drink, but the room was far removed from any inhabited part of the house, and none regarded; so he had nothing for it but to open the window, and come through the garden and the back lane leading to my workshop. And as I had got orders to bring a bucketful of quicklime, I went over in the forenight with a bucketful of heavy gravel, as much as I could carry, and a little white lime sprinkled on the top of it; and being let in by the doctor, I deposited it in the coffin, screwed down the lid, and left it. The funeral followed in due course, the whole of which the laird viewed from my window, and gave the doctor a hearty day’s cursing for daring to support his head and lay it in the grave. And this, gentlemen, is the substance of what I know concerning this enormous deed, which is, I think, quite sufficient. The laird bound me to secrecy until such time as he could bring matters to a proper bearing for securing the doctor; but as you have forced it from me, you must stand my surety, and answer the charges against me.”
The laird arrived that night with proper authority, and a number of officers, to have the doctor, his son-in-law, taken into custody; but the bird had flown; and from that day forth he was never seen, so as to be recognised, in Scotland. The laird lived many years after that; and though the thoughts of the quicklime made him drink a great deal, yet from that time he never suffered himself to get quite drunk, lest some one might take it into his head to hang him, and he not know anything about it. The dominie acknowledged that it was as impracticable to calculate what might happen in human affairs as to square the circle, which could only be effected by knowing the ratio of the circumference to the radius. For shoeing horses, vending news, and awarding proper punishments, the smith to this day just beats the world. And old John Broadcast is as thankfu’ to heaven as ever that things are as they are.