obey the last injunction of his friend, who shortly afterwards closed his eyes in death.
The report of Master Wilibald’s death brought out old and young to ascertain whether it were true. Among others came the mayor, who was in secret very well pleased with the turn which affairs had taken, for he had always some lurking suspicion about him that the old fellow would yet laugh at them all. He now ordered the body of the old piper to be buried as quickly and quietly as possible in a piece of unconsecrated ground; and when his directions were asked as to the disposal of the bagpipe, with a shrewdness which did the first magistrate of Neisse infinite honour, and saved poor heart-broken Wido some trouble, he directed it to be buried with its wicked master. So they placed the pipes in the coffin beside poor old Wilibald’s body, and buried the whole, late in the evening, in a neglected corner of the churchyard.
But in the course of the following night very strange things happened. There was a tower in the neighbourhood of the church, upon the top of which a party of watchmen were always stationed at night, for the purpose of raising the alarm in case of a fire taking place in the neighbourhood. No fire happened that night, but something which gave the watchmen infinitely more alarm; for about midnight they beheld, by the light of the moon, Master Wilibald rising out of his grave, which was near the churchyard wall. He held his bagpipe in his arm, and as soon as he had got himself fairly up out of the earth, they saw him plant himself with the utmost steadiness against a tall tomb-stone which shone in the moon’s rays, and begin to finger his pipes just as he used to do when alive in the town of Neisse. While the watchmen were gaping alternately at so strange a sight and at one another, a great many other graves in the churchyard opened, and the anatomies within them peeped out with their white fleshless skulls and eyeless sockets turned toward the spot where the piper stood—who was now blow-
