g
of the murmuring ocean.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VIII.

MYRTLE HAZARD'S STATEMENT.

"A Vision seen by me, Myrtle Hazard, aged fifteen, on the night of June
15, 1859. Written out at the request of a friend from my recollections.

"The place where I saw these sights is called, as I have been told since,
Witches' Hollow. I had never been there before, and did not know that it
was called so, or anything about it.

"The first strange thing that I noticed was on coming near a kind of hill
or mound that rose out of the low meadows. I saw a burning cross lying
on the slope of that mound. It burned with a pale greenish light, and
did not waste, though I watched it for a long time, as the boat I was in
moved slowly with the current and I had stopped rowing.

"I know that my eyes were open, and I was awake while I was looking at
this cross. I think my eyes were open when I saw these other
appearances, but I felt just as if I were dreaming while awake.

"I heard a faint rustling sound, and on looking up I saw many figures
moving around me, and I seemed to see myself among them as if I were
outside of myself.

"The figures did not walk, but slid or glided with an even movement, as
if without any effort. They made many gestures, and seemed to speak, but
I cannot tell whether I heard what they said, or knew its meaning in some
other way.

"I knew the faces of some of these figures. They were the same I have
seen in portraits, as long as I can remember, at the old house where I
was brought up, called The Poplars. I saw my father and my mother as
they look in the two small pictures; also my grandmother, and her father
and mother and grandfather, and one other person, who lived a great while
ago. All of these have been long dead, and the longer they had been dead
the less like substance they looked and the more like shadows, so that
the oldest was like one's breath of a frosty morning, but shaped like the
living figure.

"There was no motion of their breasts, and their lips seemed to be moving
as if they were saying, Breath! Breath! Breath! I thought they wanted
to breathe the air of this world again in my shape, which I seemed to see
as it were empty of myself and of these other selves, like a sponge that
has water pressed out of it.

"Presently it seemed to me that I returned to myself, and then those
others became part of me by being taken up, one by one, and so lost in my
own life.

"My father and moth