when I spoke about the shape I was in, he told me that one of the cemetery keepers at Saint-Guitton had just left and that they were looking for somebody to take his place.
I saw no reason why I should be afraid of the corpses. It was the living that had made my life a burden for me. So I was perfectly happy when the two keepers in charge, who seemed to have entire control of the cemetery, accepted me.
They fitted me out with a suit of warm clothes, and they gave me a feed. Ah, what a feed that was! Great slices of red roast, a meat-pie dripping juice, a stack of golden pancakes. . . .
The cemetery of Saint-Guitton is an immense necropolis where no one has been buried for twenty years. The headstones are dilapidated and the inscriptions on them are eaten by lichens and rain. There are monuments that have fallen in ruins. There are others that have sunk into the ground and are half out of sight. There is a sort of faded brush growing all over the paths, and the burial lots themselves are a jungle.
The city is poor, and when they opened the new Western Cemetery they conceived a plan for cutting the old one up into building-sites for factories and that sort of thing.
But the manufacturers were not interested. They had no doubt heard some of the stories that the people who live out that way tell each other when they sit in front of their coke fires and listen to the wind as it whines in the yew-trees over in Saint-Guitton—stories that would make your hair stand on end.
Eight years ago, something happened.
The wealthy Duchess Opoltchenska—Russian or Bulgarian, she was—made an offer to the city to buy the abandoned cemetery for a fantastic price, on condition that she could build a mausoleum for herself there and that she should be the last person who should ever be buried there. She explained her plan for having the cemetery guarded night and day by three keepers. Two of them were to be two of her old servants; the third would be employed and supervised by these two.
The city was poor, as I said, and the officials jumped at the chance. A little army of workmen were put on the job at once, and built in the farthest corner from the road a great tomb that looked like a palace. The cemetery wall was built up to three times its former height, and was topped with iron spikes.
The mausoleum was scarcely more than finished in time to receive the body of the Duchess. Nobody thought of the arrangement as anything but the harmless fancy of an old woman with money. It was reported that she had jewelry of enormous value buried with her, and it all looked like a careful plan to keep the grave-robbers away.
Now for my part in it all:
The two keepers were very good to me. They were two big fellows, built like two bulldogs. But they must have had good hearts, for I could see how delighted they were at my robust appetite, and surely a couple of men who grin when a poor hobo takes his food well must be a good-natured sort.
When I went to work, I had to take an oath to keep certain rules strictly. I was never to leave the cemetery during the year of service I had signed up for; I was to have no dealings writh the outside; and I was never to go near the Duchess's mausoleum.
Velitcho, whose special business was to guard that corner of the cemetery, informed me that his instructions were to shoot at anybody who came in the neighborhood of the tomb. When he told me
