Welcome back to Nighty Night, bedtime stories to keep you awake. I'm your host, Ravi Achadri. And this week's tale proves

perhaps more than any other that there really is no rest for the dead.

The Body snatcher by Robert Stevenson. Every night in the year four of us sat in the small parlor of the George at Debenham, the undertaker and the landlord, and

Fets and myself.

Sometimes there would be more, but blow high, blow low, come rain or snow or frost,

who we four would each be planted in his own particular armchair.

Fets was an old drunken Scotchman, a man of education obviously and a man of some property

since he lived in idleness. He had come to Devonym years ago, while still young, and by a mere continuance of living had grown to be an adopted townsman. His blue camlet cloak was a local antiquity like the church spire. His place in the parlor at the George, his absence from church, his old crappulous disreputable vices, were all things of course in debonim.

He had some vague radical opinions and some fleeting infidelities, which he would now and again

set forth and emphasize with tottering slaps upon the table. He drank rum, five glasses regularly every evening,

and for the greater portion of his nightly visit to the George sat with his glass in his right hand

in a state of melancholy alcoholic saturation.

We called him the doctor for he was supposed to have some special knowledge of

medicine and had been known upon a pinch to set a fracture or reduce a

dislocation but beyond these slight particulars we had no knowledge of his

character and antecedents. One dark winter night, it had struck nine sometime before the landlord joined us.

There was a sick man in the George.

A great neighboring proprietor suddenly struck down with

Apoplexy on his way to Parliament, and the great man's still greater London doctor

had been telegraphed at his bedside. It was the first time such a thing had happened in Debenham, for the railway was but newly open, and we were all proportionately moved by the occurrence.

He's come, said the landlord after he had filled and lighted his pipe.

He, I said, who? Not the doctor.

...