The hours passed slowly until the clock struck midnight.  At that moment, the white sheet began to move.  Slowly, the corpse sat up and inquired, “Are you here, my friend?”

“Of course I am,” the schoolteacher answered, not a little taken aback.  The miller quietly lay down again.  “Well, well,” the schoolteacher said to himself.  “He’s not dead after all, he’s just testing my word.”

He took one of the candles and, raising it high, felt the corpse’s face.  It was as hard and cold as midwinter ice.  “He’s dead, all right,” the schoolteacher noted.  “Perhaps his stingy soul couldn’t find peace until he’d made sure he hadn’t given away the grain for nothing.”  Putting down the candle, he went on with his reading, and for the rest of the night, the miller was silent as dead men should be.  The schoolteacher breakfasted well and returned home, where his wife was anxiously waiting.

The next night was the same.  As soon as midnight sounded, the miller sat up, raised his head, and asked, “Are you here, my friend?”

“I am,” the other replied.

The third day, they buried him, and that night the schoolteacher was to stand guard in the graveyard.  “In the mill, it’s one thing: a warm room, good beer, a comfortable couch.  But to have to wait around all night in the cold in the cemetery, that’s not for me,” he thought to himself.  Trying to figure out what he should do, he went to speak with the village priest.

“If you gave your word, you have to go,” the priest began.  “But if you want my advice, I wouldn’t go unprepared.  Take some holy water and a sprinkler.  When you get to the cemetery, stand near the grave.  Cross yourself with the holy water and sprinkle a circle of it all around you.  You have to be careful when it comes to ghosts.”

The schoolteacher followed the priest’s advice to a word.  When he arrived at the miller’s grave, he made a cross over himself and a circle all around; he wrapped himself in his coat and sat on the ground.  The moon shone like a fish’s eye.  Everything was silent until the stroke of eleven.  Then the doors of the graveyard burst open, and two monstrous dogs, blacker than night, roared over the graves toward the schoolteacher.