vince, and by the latter were laid before the Emperor Hadrian; and as it was not the custom to mystify Roman emperors, we are constrained to believe that what the prefect and proconsul communicated to him they had good reason for believing themselves.

"It appears that a gentleman called Demostratos, and Charito, his wife, had a daughter called Philinnion, who died; and that about six months afterwards, a youth named Machates, who had come to visit them, was surprised, on retiring to the apartments destined to strangers, by receiving the visits of a young maiden, who cats and drinks and exchanges gifts with him. Some accident having taken the nurse that way, she, amazed at the sight, summons her master and mistress to behold their daughter, who is there sitting with the guest. Of course they do not believe her; but at length, wearied by her importunities, the mother follows her to the 'guest's chamber: but the young people are now asleep, and the door closed; but looking through the keyhole, she perceives what she believes to be her daughter. Still unable to credit her senses, she resolves to wait till morning before disturbing them: but when she comes again the young lady has departed; whilst Machates, on being interrogated, confesses that Philinnion had been with him, but that she had admitted to him that it was unknown to her parents. Upon this the amazement and agitation of the mother were naturally very great; especially when Machates showed her a ring which the girl had given him, and a bodice which she had left behind her; and his amazement was no less when he heard the story they had to tell. He, however, promised that if she returned the next night, he would let them see her; for he found it impossible to believe that his bride was their dead daughter. He suspected, on the contrary, that some thieves had stripped her body of the clothes and ornaments in which she had been buried, and that the girl who came to his room had bought them. When, therefore, she arrived, his servant having had orders to summon the father and mother, they came; and perceiving that it was really their daughter, they fell to embracing her with tears. But she reproached them for the intrusion, declaring that she had been permitted to spend three days with this stranger, in the house of her birth; but that now she must go to the appointed place; and immediately fell down dead, and the dead body lay there visible to all.

"The news of this strange event soon spread abroad, the house was surrounded by crowds of people, and the prefect was obliged to take measures to prevent a tumult. On the following morning, at an early hour, the inhabitants assembled in the theater; and from thence they proceeded to the vault, in order to ascertain if the body of Philinnion was where it had been deposited six months before. It was not; but on the bier there lay the ring and cap which Machates had presented to her the first night she visited him; showing that she had returned there in the interim. They then proceeded to

the house of Demostratos, where they saw the body, which it was decreed must now be buried without the bounds of the city. Numerous religious ceremonies and sacrifices followed, and the unfortunate Machates, seized with horror, put an end to his own life."

The next story shows how eager is her preference for a recondite hypothesis:

"The following very singular circumstance occurred in this country towards the latter end of the last century, and excited at the time considerable attention; the more so, as it was asserted by every body acquainted with the people and the locality that the removal of the body was impossible by any recognized means, besides that no one would have had the hardihood to attempt such a feat.

"Mr. William Craighead, author of a popular system of arithmetic, was parish school-master of Monifieth, situate upon the estuary of the Tay, about six miles east from Dundee. It would appear that Mr. Craighead was then a young man, fond of a frolic, without being very scrupulous about the means, or calculating the consequences. There being a lykewake in the neighborhood, attended by a number of his acquaintance, according to the custom of the times, Craighead procured a confederate, with whom he concerted a plan to draw the watchers from the house, or at least from the room where the corpse lay. Having succeeded in this, he dextrously removed the dead body to an outer house, while his companion occupied the place of the corpse in the bed where it had lain. It was agreed upon between the confederates, that when the company was reassembled, Craighead was to join them, and at a concerted signal the impostor was to rise, shrouded like the dead man, while the two were to enjoy the terror and alarm of their companions. Mr. C. came in, and after being some time seated, the signal was made, but met no attention: he was rather surprised; it was repeated, and still neglected. Mr. C., in his turn, now became alarmed; for he conceived it impossible that his companion could have fallen asleep in that situation; his uneasiness became insupportable; he went to the bed, and found his friend lifeless! Mr. C.'s feelings, as may well be imagined, now entirely overpowered him, and the dreadful fact was disclosed; their agitation was extreme, and it was far from being alleviated when every attempt to restore animation to the thoughtless young man proved abortive. As soon as their confusion would permit, an inquiry was made after the original corpse, and Mr. Č. and another went to fetch it in, but it was not to be found. The alarm and consternation of the company was now redoubled; for some time a few suspected that some hardy fellow among them had been attempting a Roland for an Oliver; but when every knowledge of it was most solemnly denied by all present, their situation can be more easily imagined than described that of Mr. C. was little short of distraction. Daylight came

personal trust. Many of us are very imperfectly acquainted with the chain of reasoning and calculation which convinces that an eclipse will occur at a given moment; but we know the kind of knowledge on which it depends-we exercise ourselves, in a more or less degree, the same faculties are those by which others have attained to this result, and we know too that among all competent persons who do examine the question there is an absolute coincidence of opinion. It is a matter which has received great corroboration; but more than this, it is in its nature capable of unlimited corroboration, for every man may if he chooses test its truth for himself. Our confidence in such a case is not so much trust in men, as faith in the capacity for right working of the human mind. It is one thing to rely upon another person for the truth of a certain fact, it is another to be dependent upon him for its truth. We trust him just because we are not dependent on the sole evidence of his assertion, because there is other evidence if we choose to seek it. In the inverse proportion, as facts are permanent or repeated under circumstances open to varied observation, and as they are capable of experimental test, does our belief in them depend on individual human trustworthiness. Though I may have never seen the sea, I believe in the ebb and flow of the tides on different grounds to those on which I believe in a remarkable meteor which my neighbor tells me he saw at ten o'clock last night. My belief in the latter depends almost entirely on my personal confidence in my neighbor; not quite entirely so, because others may have seen it; his statement is open at least to corroboration or refutation; and I know from other sources that such things are not uncommon. When, however, he tells me he saw a ghost, that in the dead of the night his grandmother stood by his bedside in a shattered cottage-bonnet or otherwise, I am absolutely dependent on his veracity and powers of accurate observation; and by veracity we mean to specify, not unwillingness to tell a lie, but all the moral and mental characteristics which enable a man to transmit correctly to another mind his own experience-characteristics which those who have had any experience in collecting evidence will admit to be rare. But this position of absolute reliance on the individual who professes to have seen it, is

the highest certainty we can attain to of the existence of a ghost. For ourselves, we rarely think it worth while to ask any one if he has seen a ghost; we content ourselves with inquiring, Have you ever seen a person who has seen a ghost? It is rarely indeed that you can get one of these stories at first hand. They are almost always exposed to the chances of error which accumulate in all secondary evidence, from imperfect recital, imperfect comprehension, imperfect memory, and imperfect truthfulness; all swayed one way by love of the marvelous, and the still more deeply-rooted human passion, love of a good story. A man who has seen a ghost has good evidence to go on. A man who hears the account of a trustworthy man who says he has seen a ghost, has evidence more or less reliable; but a man who reads in a book that an unknown person, X, appeared to an unknown person, Y, what evidence has he?

Take as an instance of the sort of testimony we are generally dependent on in ghost-stories, and of the way in which they are retailed, the following brief anecdote from Mrs. Crowe's book:

"The American case-I have omitted to write

down the name of the place, and forget it—was that of a mother and son. She was also a highly respectable person, and was described to her. She was a widow, and had one son, to me as perfectly trustworthy by one who knew whom she was extremely attached. He, however, disappeared one day, and she never could learn what had become of him; she always said that if she did but know his fate she should be happier. At length when he had been dead a considerable time, her attention was one day, induced her to look round, and she saw her son, whilst reading, attracted by a slight noise, which dripping with water, and with a sad expression of countenance. The features, however, presently relaxed, and they assumed a more pleas ing aspect before he disappeared. From that time she ceased to grieve, and it was subsequently ascertained that the young man had run away to sea; but no more was known of him. Certain it was, however, that she attributed her recovered tranquillity to having seen her son as above narrated."

Now in this case we are dependent on the accuracy, 1, of the author; 2, of her informant; 3, of the respectable widow. We have no grounds for impugning it in any of these cases; but, on the other hand, it is practically not easy to place implicit confidence in the perfect accuracy of three unknown persons, and inac

father, and on the other my eldest sister, Amelia; then myself, and the rest of the family according to their ages. At the foot of the hall stood my youngest sister, Alexes, and above her my sister Catherine-a creature, by the way, in person and mind more like an angel of heaven than an inhabitant of earth. We all stood silent and motionless. At last It entered the unimagined something that, casting its grim shadow before, had enveloped all the trivialities of the preceding dream in the stifling atmosphere of terror. It entered, stealthily descending the three steps that led from the entrance down into the chamber of horror; and my mother felt It was Death. He was dwarfish, bent, and shriveled. He carried on his shoulder a heavy axe; and had come, she thought, to destroy'all her little ones at one fell swoop.' On the entrance of the shape, my sister Alexes leapt out of the rank, interposing herself between him and my mother. He raised his axe, and aimed a blow at Catherine ; a blow which, to her horror, my mother could not intercept, though she had snatched up a three-legged stool, the sole furniture of the apartment, for that purpose. She could not, she felt, fling the stool at the figure without destroying Alexes, who kept shooting out and in between her and the ghastly thing. She tried in vain to scream; she besought my father in agony to avert the impending stroke but he did not hear, or did not heed her, and stood motionless as in a trance. Down came the axe, and poor Catherine fell in her blood, cloven to the white halse bane.' Again the axe was lifted by the inexorable shadow over the head of my brother, who stood next in the line. Alexes had somewhere disappeared behind the ghastly visitant; and, with a scream, my mother flung the footstool at his head. He vanished, and she awoke. This dream left on my mother's mind a fearful apprehension of impending misfortune, which would not pass away. It was murder she feared; and her suspicions were not allayed by the discovery that a man-some time before discarded by my father for bad conduct, and with whom she had somehow associated the Death of her dream had been lurking about the place, and sleeping in an adjoining outhouse on the night it occurred, and for some nights previous and subsequent to it. Her terror increased; sleep forsook her; and every night, when the house was still, she arose and stole, sometimes with a candle, sometimes in the dark, from room to

room, listening, in a sort of waking nightmare, for the breathing of the assassin, who she im agined was lurking in some one of them. This could not last. She reasoned with herself; but her terror became intolerable, and she related her dream to my father, who of course called her a fool for her pains-whatever might be his real opinion of the matter. Three months had elapsed, when we children were all of us seized with scarlet fever. My sister Catherine died almost immediately-sacrificed, as my mother in her misery thought, to her (my mother's)

over-anxiety for Alexes, whose danger seemed more imminent. The dream-prophecy was in part fulfilled. I also was at death's door-given up by the doctors, but not by my mother: she was confident of my recovery; but for my brother, who was scarcely considered in danger at all, but on whose head she had seen the visionary axe impending, her fears were great; for she could not recollect whether the blow had or had not descended when the spectre vanished. My brother recovered, but relapsed, and barely escaped with life; but Alexes did not. For a year and ten months the poor child lingered; and almost every night I had to sing her asleep; often, I remember, through bitter tears-for I knew she was dying, and I loved her the more as she wasted away. I held her little hand as she died; I followed her to the grave-the last thing that I have loved on earth. And the dream was fulfilled. Truly and sincerely yours, J. NOEL PATON."

We quote this piece of vulgar and affected writing only as a specimen of the way in which prophecies may be and are got up. People have a sort of vanity in being supposed to be more close to what is supernatural than their fellows. To have a relation to a ghost, or to have dreamed an anticipatory dream, is in its way a distinction, and makes one a subject of interest. People who in the bottom of their hearts don't believe in their ghosts, are not unwilling that others should do so; and by affirming occurrences within your experience of which a ghost is the common explanation, and denying your belief in it, you are distinguished at once for your adventure and your strength of mind. Nothing makes even an unbeliever so sore as to throw doubts on his own ghost-story; the surest way to bring it out in strong relief is to suggest explanations, which are always met by appropriate facts; so that the crevices by which doubt may creep in are gradually filled up, and the narrator very soon conscientiously believes his narrative in its amended form. Of "that dream" we have only to observe that, according to it, Catherine ought to have met with a violent death; that whether "my brother" survived or not, the prophecy was equally fulfilled and unfulfilled, and that Alexes ought to have escaped. The dream suggested murder to the mother, and by a particular man. He, however, does not murder any of the children; but three months after, Catherine dies of scarlet fever, the brother recovers from it, and Alexes dies in a year and ten months. A similar liberality of interpretation would supply any num