or from their accompaniments,
that they powerfully impress the memories of children but little removed
from infancy, and are retained by them in a sort of troubled
recollection ever after, however extended their term of life. Samuel
Johnson was only two and a half years old when, in accordance with the
belief of the time, he was touched by Queen Anne for the "Evil;" but
more than seventy years after, he could call up in memory a dream-like
recollection of the lady dressed in a black hood, and glittering with
diamonds, into whose awful presence he had been ushered on that
occasion, and who had done for the cure of his complaint all that
legitimate royalty could do. And an ancient lady of the north country,
who had been carried, when a child, in her nurse's arms, to witness the
last witch execution that took place in Scotland, could distinctly tell,
after the lapse of nearly a century, that the fire was surrounded by an
awe-struck crowd, and that the smoke of the burning, when blown about
her by a cross breeze, had a foul and suffocating odor. In this respect
the memory of infant tribes and nations seems to resemble that of
individuals. There are characters and events which impress it so
strongly, that they seem never to be forgotten, but live as traditions,
sometimes mayhap very vague, and much modified by the inventions of an
after time, but which, in floating downwards to late ages, always bear
about them a certain strong impress of their pristine reality. They are
shadows that have become ill defined from the vast distance of the
objects that cast them,--like the shadows of great birds flung, in a
summer's day, from the blue depths of the sky to the landscape far
below,--but whose very presence, however diffused they may have become,
testifies to the existence of the remote realities from which they are
thrown, and without which they could have had no being at all. The old
mythologies are filled with shadowy traditions of this kind,--shadows of
the world's "gray fathers,"--which, like those shadows seen reflected on
clouds by travellers who ascend lofty mountains, are exaggerated into
the most gigantic proportions, and bear radiant glories around their
heads.

There is, however, one special tradition which seems to be more deeply
impressed and more widely spread than any of the others. The destruction
of well nigh the whole human race, in an early age of the world's
history, by a great deluge, appears to have so impr