which is the greater reason for believing his honesty in the narration. He always gives his grounds for attaching more or less credit to his narration, and mostly tells whether they came to him on the immediate authority of his informant or otherwise. Another story told by him agrees with the hypothesis that it is the communication between spirit and spirit that creates the sense of having seen a phantom. Two brothers residing in London, sons of an old baronet, whom Mr. Moreton indicates as Sir G. H., had long been courting the same lady, and at last quarrelled so desperately about her, as actually to challenge one another to fight a duel. The affair was to come off at five o'clock in the morning, without seconds, as of course none would have undertaken the office for so unnatural a rencontre. The younger brother was at the place almost as soon as it was light, and was amazed at finding his rival there already. He drew his sword, and was surprised to see his antagonist coming to meet him with his sword likewise in his hand, but as he came nearer, to his astonishment he found that it was not his brother, but his old father, whom he had believed to be safe at home, sixty miles off, and that the weapon was only the little cane Sir G. was wont to carry.

'Why, how now, Jack?' he said, 'What, challenge and draw on your father?' The youth answered by declaring that it had been a cowardly shift in his brother Tom to challenge him, and send his father. You would not have done so, Sir, when you were a young man.' The old gentleman answered that it was no time to talk but to fight, adding, "There are no relations in love'-words which Jack had the day before used in his altercation with his brother-and therewith drawing his sword, he advanced on his son, who, in horror, threw down his sword and scabbard on the ground, crying, There, Sir, kill me with it! What do you mean ?" And as his father ran upon him, he sprang aside, and seemed about to run away. His father stooped, picked up the sword, and stood still, and Jack, in his bewilderment, walked a good way back towards the town, but finding his father did not follow him, he decided, though weaponless, to keep his appointment, went back, but saw no one, and sitting down on the grass, waited for nearly two hours, and when at last he decided on going home, he found his sword lying at the very place where he had dropped it. This amused him more,' and he returned to his lodgings, where he was soon sought out by an old family servant, who brought him word that the esquire, as his brother was called in the household, was desirous of hearing whether he had not seen something extraordinary that morning, adding that he would have come himself, had he not been very

6

unwell. Jack further found that his father was ill in bed inhis own home, or at least had been so when he had sent the servant to town a few days before. He despatched the man to his brother with the reply, that he had either seen his father or the devil, whereupon the esquire came in haste; they had a complete reconciliation, and, comparing notes, found that as the elder son approached the place intended for the duel, he, too, had been met by his father, who asked him where he was going? He made some trifling excuse about joining a party who were going to Hampton Court, but his father reddened with anger, stamped with his foot, and declared that he knew the real end to be the murder of his younger son; nor would he listen to any arguments, telling the esquire that he knew Jack to be more earnest and honourably minded to the lady than himself, and had given his consent to his marriage with her, and ended by commanding him to be reconciled to his brother.

The two young men, being thoroughly friends, inquired at their father's usual lodgings and at the Black Swan Yard,' where his coach always stood,' and found that he was not known to be in town nor expected there. Becoming very uneasy about him, they agreed to ride home together, and inquire after him. They found him alive, recovering from his illness, and much relieved to see them on such good terms, for not only had he long known of their rivalry and ill-feeling about the young lady, but twice he had dreamt in one night that they had actually quarrelled, and were on the point of fighting, but that he had got up at four o'clock in the morning to prevent it. The impression was so strong that he had actually written a letter of warning to the esquire, which arrived at his lodgings a few hours after the two had set out for the country.

Of course there is now no opportunity of testing the veracity of this adventure, but it has every appearance of authenticity, and it appears to us that the coincidence proves that there was some communication between the anxious mind of the sick and anxious father at home and his sons-perhaps facilitated by bodily ailment. An almost similar story is told in the 'Shepherd's Calendar," by James Hogg, of two brothers of the name of Beattie. He there says that the circumstances were made public in the lifetime of the younger brother, and never contradicted by him, but he gives the tale in a less credible manner, making the father be brought to the spot in a dream by the witchcraft of the young lady's aunt. To these appearances at the moment of death-or by force of correspondence of mindbelongs that famous story which furnished Crabbe with his poem of Lady Barbara. It is curious to trace the story's development in the two versions given in the 'Diaries of a Lady of Quality,'

that collection of contemporary gossip by an intelligent cultivated woman, which cannot be read without a certain degree of interest. In her first version, purporting to be a copy made in 1794, by the Honorable Mrs, Maitland, from the dictation of the Lady Betty Cobb, to whom Lady Beresford had confessed the whole on her death-bed, the story is almost exactly what Crabbe versified. Lord Tyrone and his sister, having been bewildered and distressed by infidel teaching, agree that the first to die should come and inform the other whether there were indeed immortality for the soul.

'And when a spirit, much as spirits might

I would to thee communicate my light.'

Lord Tyrone dies, and at the same moment appears to his sister, then married to Sir Martin Beresford, and not only satisfies her religious doubts, but predicts the number of her children, her foolish second marriage, and that she would die at forty-seven, after the birth of a son. Moreover, as tokens of the reality of his appearance, he causes the curtains of the bed to be drawn through a hook from the tester, writes in her pocket-book, and grasping her wrist with a hand cold as ice, leaves a burnt mark there that causes her always to wear a velvet ribbon. Of course all turned out as predicted. After her first husband's death, she lived a very retired life, only associating with the family of the clergyman of the parish, and Crabbe has most delicately and ingeniously marked out the train of persuasions which led her into marrying this clergyman's son, who behaved very ill to her. She was favourably recovering from the birth of the son who was to be fatal to her, when her father-in-law jestingly told her that he had settled an old dispute as to her real age, by consulting her baptismal register and that he found she was forty-seven instead of forty-eight. You have signed my death-warrant," she said, and the next day, sending for him and Lady Betty Cobb, she told them the real story of her life, and on removing the ribbon, the sinews of her wrist were found shrunken. She died shortly after, and the ribbon and writing remained with her friend; her eldest son, as had been predicted by the ghost, married Lord Tyrone's daughter.

The second version of the story, which was related to Miss Wynne by the Llangollen ladies, made Lord Tyrone not the brother, but the first love, and omitted the whole original compact, only making him come for the ring he had once given her, and predicting her husband's death and her own second marriage and death after the birth of her son. The impress on the wrist was made in taking off the ring, which was never seen again. All the predictions were accomplished, and though she had tried

to disbelieve the vision at first, it so preyed on her mind that when her son was born, her husband and the nurse made her believe it was a daughter, and she was only undeceived, when nearly recovered, by a housemaid, who spoke of the child as 'he.' She burst into tears, but was persuaded out of her alarm, and was going down stairs when she cried There is Lord Tyrone, I see him on the landing-place,' fainted, and died in a few days' time.

The stubborn facts of the peerage shew that Lady Beresford was no sister of Lord Tyrone, and that she had lost her first husband before the death of that nobleman. This, however, is not much to the purpose, for her husband plays no part in the story. The Editor of the Diaries, on the authority of a letter to Mr. F. Pollock, from one of the Beresford family, says that it was true that

Evermore the lady wore
A bracelet on her wrist,'

but that it was to cover a scar left by disease early in life, and that she had really had a dream before her second marriage, warning her of her unhappiness in it.

We have given this whole process of ghost development because it is worth observing that there is a certain core of truth beneath the romantic additions. We believe that those who are determined on explaining away whatever seems supernatural, sometimes are quite as inventive as those who work up a brilliant phantom story. It was a fact that the high spirited Lady Edgeworth, who firmly took the tallow candle out of the barrel of gunpowder, where her Irish maid had stuck it, nevertheless suffered much terror from the supposed antics of elves on the mound called Fairy mount before her windows. Her descendants at Edgworthstown accounted for it by supposing the village people to have, like the Merry Wives of Windsor, sent their children to play tricks there in order to torment her. That Irish peasants should send their children by night to a haunted mound is assuredly as improbable as that some appearance unaccounted for should take place there. There is moreover-or more properly was-in the last half century, every temptation to deny or explain away a ghost story, since in that strongminded age, any confession of belief that there was some unexplained mystery, was supposed to be mere credulity and contemptible weakness. Even Mrs. Radcliffe, with all her poetical sense of the weird and terrible, was obliged to conform to the taste of her age by resolving her ghost into a waxen image. And when the Beresford family owned that their ancestress had really had a warning dream, it was, considering the

incredulous age, going a good way towards acknowledging the apparition.

Of Dreams, we say nothing here, for their remarkable accomplishment has been so often proved that not the most resolute scepticism has been able to get beyond the theory that the mind had been occupied with the subject dreamt of. They belong to the world of mystery rather than of Folk Lore, and we have only mentioned the cases in which the appearance of a wraith or double ganger coincided curiously with a dream of the person it represented, as if he had been there in spirit.

The apparitions that are most decidedly matters of local tradition are those that haunt spots where a crime has been committed or an untimely death has taken place. Littlecote Hall (see Rokeby) is a well-known instance, and we could quote on good private authority several more. The instance Mr. Henderson gives was from Mr. Wilkie's MS. book of Border traditions:

About half a mile to the east of Maxton, a small rivulet runs across the turnpike road, at a spot called Bow-brig Syke. Near this bridge lics a triangular field, in which, for nearly a century, it was averred that the forms of two ladies, dressed in white, might be seen pacing up and down. Night after night the people of the neighbourhood used to come and watch them, and curiosity brought many from a great distance. The figures were always to be seen at dusk; they walked arm in arm, precisely over the same spot of ground till morning light. Mr. Wilkie adds, that about twelve years before the time of his noting down the story, while some people were repairing the road, they took up the large flat stones upon which foot-passengers crossed the burn, and found beneath them the skeletons of two women, lying side by side. After this discovery, the Bow-brig ladies were never again seen to walk in the Three-corner field. Mr. Wilkie says further, that he received this account from a gentleman who saw and examined the skeletons, and who added that they were believed to be those of two ladies, sisters to a former Laird of Ltitledean. Their brother is said to have killed them in a fit of passion, because they interfered to protect from ill-usage a young lady whom he had met at Bow-bridge Syke. He placed the bodies upon the bridge, and lowered the flat stones on them to prevent discovery.'-Henderson, p 273.

Many of such stories resolve themselves into the fancies of persons, who, thinking a place ought to be haunted, immediately people it with sights and sounds of their own imagination, but still -as in the other case--there are numerous instances where the noises and appearances are observed by unprepared witnesses, and fail of being accounted for. We cannot refrain from quoting one, which-though Judge Haliburton has placed it among the dialogues of his Clockmaker, and has thus given it an air of invention, we know that he privately declared to be the full belief in the locality where the events took place-namely Sable Island, on the coast of Nova Scotia, a desolate, wild, and lonely sandy place, full of hollows scooped out by the