hat they were wholly independent of each other. Curious
to know whether the will exerted any power over them, I set myself to
try whether I could not conjure up a death's-head as one of the series;
but what rose instead was a cheerful parlour fire, bearing a-top a
tea-kettle, and as the picture faded and then vanished, it was succeeded
by a gorgeous cataract, in which the white foam, at first strongly
relieved against the dark rock over which it fell, soon exhibited a deep
tinge of sulphurous blue, and then came dashing down in one frightful
sheet of blood. The great singularity of the vision served to freshen
recollection, and I detected in the strange cataract every line and tint
of the water-fall in the incantation scene in "Der Freischuetz" which I
had witnessed in the Theatre Royal of Edinburgh, with certainly no very
particular interest, so long before. There are, I suspect, provinces in
the philosophy of mind into which the metaphysicians have not yet
entered. Of that accessible storehouse in which the memories of past
events lie arranged and taped up, they appear to know a good deal; but
of a mysterious cabinet of daguerrotype pictures, of which, though fast
locked up on ordinary occasions, disease sometimes flings the door ajar,
they seem to know nothing.

FOOTNOTE:

[9] The kind of club into which the compositors of a printing-house
always form themselves has from time immemorial been termed a _chapel_;
and the petty tricks by which Franklin was annoyed were said to be
played him by the chapel ghost. "My employer desiring," he says, "after
some weeks, to have me in the composing room, I left the pressmen. A new
_bien-venu_ for drink, being five shillings, was demanded of me by the
compositors. I thought it an imposition, as I had paid one to the
pressmen. The master thought so too, and forbade my paying it. I stood
out two or three weeks, was accordingly considered as an
_excommunicate_, and had so many little pieces of private malice
practised on me by mixing my sorts, transposing and breaking my matter,
&c. &c., if ever I stepped out of the room, and all ascribed to the
_chapel ghost_, which, they said, ever haunted those not regularly
admitted, that, notwithstanding my master's protection, I found myself
obliged to comply and pay the money."

CHAPTER XVI.

"Let not this weak, unknowing hand,
Presume thy bolts to throw."--POPE.

The great fires of the Parliament Close and the High Stre