You will please keep it to yourself, if you don't mind? Thank you. Now it
is just this. I had an old uncle, a Dr Rant. Perhaps you may have heard
of him. Not that he was a distinguished man, but from the odd way he
chose to be buried.'
'I rather think I have seen the name in some guidebook.'
'That would be it,' said Miss Simpson. 'He left directions--horrid old
man!--that he was to be put, sitting at a table in his ordinary clothes,
in a brick room that he'd had made underground in a field near his house.
Of course the country people say he's been seen about there in his old
black cloak.'
'Well, dear, I don't know much about such things,' Mrs Simpson went on,
'but anyhow he is dead, these twenty years and more. He was a clergyman,
though I'm sure I can't imagine how he got to be one: but he did no duty
for the last part of his life, which I think was a good thing; and he
lived on his own property: a very nice estate not a great way from here.
He had no wife or family; only one niece, who was myself, and one nephew,
and he had no particular liking for either of us--nor for anyone else, as
far as that goes.
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