Elsie just died. I'm not quite sure how we get from here to the next 20 books, but she was so upset about being sent to the convent school that she feel into a fever, and has been hallucinating for the past 20 pages or so, while her father prays that Jesus might take mercy on a sinner like him and bring his daughter back, but the doctor just declared her dead.

She'd had her aunt write up her will. In addition to things like which of her cousins got which of her dolls and books, she also said that she wanted her father to send a missionary to the heathens each year.

Hmm. Retcon in the next book?

Oh. In what has to be at least 20 minutes or so after the doctor said she was dead, she started blinking, and then opened her eyes and asked for water.

I know that nineteenth-century medicine wasn't all that advanced compared to what we have now, but surely they could tell the difference between alive and dead?

You have got to be kidding me. Elsie has amnesia. She's forgotten everything since just before her father first arrived home a year and a half ago.

Her father, by the way, has now pledged his life to serve God, because Elsie's illness has made him see the wickedness of his ways.

I don't know - I think that there are actual stories of people in comas being buried alive. Don't know that they were from as late as the 19th century but the stories would have been out there.

I heard that's where the term "saved by the bell" came from. People were buried with a string in the coffin that was attached to a bell above ground. that way, if they woke up in the coffin, they could ring the bell and someone would dig them up.

Elsie got her memory back, and asked her father if he's still planning to send her to the convent school. He says no, he's learned to love Jesus, and he'll never again ask her to do something contrary to God's word.

Oh. This entire scene had much weeping, too.

I TOLD you her dad was going to learn to do what Elsie wanted. AND that she was goignt ohave to suffer. Although I did not see that this was going to happen by having her die and come back, JUST LIKE JESUS.

Oh. This entire scene had much weeping, too.

Err, the characters, not you, right?

Victorians had a near-hysterical fear of being buried alive. Between that horror and the fact there was a lot of graverobbing going on for the medical colleges, people really didn't like the idea of either sufficating underground or waking up on some slab being sliced-and-diced by some med student.