le neighbors whispered strange
things about Priscilla. The big, red, Irish matrons, whose innumerable
progeny swarmed out of the adjacent doors, used to mock at the pale
Western child. They fancied--or, at least, affirmed it, between jest
and earnest--that she was not so solid flesh and blood as other
children, but mixed largely with a thinner element. They called her
ghost-child, and said that she could indeed vanish when she pleased,
but could never, in her densest moments, make herself quite visible.
The sun at midday would shine through her; in the first gray of the
twilight, she lost all the distinctness of her outline; and, if you
followed the dim thing into a dark corner, behold! she was not there.
And it was true that Priscilla had strange ways; strange ways, and
stranger words, when she uttered any words at all. Never stirring out
of the old governor's dusky house, she sometimes talked of distant
places and splendid rooms, as if she had just left them. Hidden things
were visible to her (at least so the people inferred from obscure hints
escaping unawares out of her mouth), and silence was audible. And in
all the world there was nothing so difficult to be endured, by those
who had any dark secret to conceal, as the glance of Priscilla's timid
and melancholy eyes.

Her peculiarities were the theme of continual gossip among the other
inhabitants of the gubernatorial mansion. The rumor spread thence into
a wider circle. Those who knew old Moodie, as he was now called, used
often to jeer him, at the very street-corners, about his daughter's
gift of second-sight and prophecy. It was a period when science
(though mostly through its empirical professors) was bringing forward,
anew, a hoard of facts and imperfect theories, that had partially won
credence in elder times, but which modern scepticism had swept away as
rubbish. These things were now tossed up again, out of the surging
ocean of human thought and experience. The story of Priscilla's
preternatural manifestations, therefore, attracted a kind of notice of
which it would have been deemed wholly unworthy a few years earlier.
One day a gentleman ascended the creaking staircase, and inquired which
was old Moodie's chamber door. And, several times, he came again. He
was a marvellously handsome man,--still youthful, too, and fashionably
dressed. Except that Priscilla, in those days, had no beauty, and, in
the languor of her existence, had not yet blossom