CHAPTER VIII.
HOW NICHOLAS MEISER, NEPHEW OF JOHN MEISER, EXECUTED HIS UNCLE'S WILL.
Doctor Hirtz of Berlin, who had copied this will himself, apologized very politely for not having sent it sooner.

Business had obliged him to travel away from the Capital.

In passing through Dantzic, he had given himself the pleasure of visiting Herr Nicholas Meiser, the former brewer, now a very wealthy land-owner and heavy holder of stocks, sixty-six years of age.

This old man very well remembered the death and will of his uncle, the _savant_; but he did not speak of them without a certain reluctance.

Moreover, he said that immediately after the decease of John Meiser, he had called together ten physicians of Dantzic around the mummy of the Colonel; he showed also a unanimous statement of these gentlemen, affirming that a man desiccated in a furnace cannot in any way or by any means return to life.