e, frightened, and in their fright to have
huddled together and climbed up on each other's backs,--as the people
did in that awful crush where so many were killed, at the execution of
Holloway and Haggerty. Then the Lady's portrait, up-stairs, with the
sword-thrusts through it,--marks of the British officers' rapiers,--and
the tall mirror in which they used to look at their red coats,--confound
them for smashing its mate?--and the deep, cunningly wrought arm-chair
in which Lord Percy used to sit while his hair was dressing;--he was a
gentleman, and always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save
the silk covering my grandmother embroidered. Then the little room
downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on the
hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,--"the study"
in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of armed
men,--sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will show you
the "dents" left by the butts of their muskets all over the floor. With
all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the wild stories
those awful country-boys that came to live in our service brought with
them;--of contracts written in blood and left out over night, not to be
found the next morning, (removed by the Evil One, who takes his nightly
round among our dwellings, and filed away for future use,)--of dreams
coming true,--of death-signs,--of apparitions, no wonder that my
imagination got excited, and I was liable to superstitious fancies.

Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly see
a ghost is all very well-in the day-time. All the reason in the world
will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just such
circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head. That is the
only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of curiosity with which
I watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy with which I lie awake
whenever I hear anything going on in his chamber after midnight.

But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred for
the present. You will see in what way it happened that my thoughts were
turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how I got my fancy
full of material images,--faces, heads, figures, muscles, and so
forth,--in such a way that I should have no chance in this number to
gratify any curiosity you may feel, if I had the means of so doing.

Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my