s permitted to accompany a relation
to drink tea with a very clever old lady, of one hundred and twenty--or,
so I thought then; I now think she, perhaps, was only about seventy.
She was lively, and intelligent, and had seen and known much that was
worth narrating. She was a cousin of the Sneyds, the family whence Mr.
Edgeworth took two of his wives; had known Major Andre; had mixed in the
Old Whig Society that the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire and "Buff and
Blue Mrs. Crewe" gathered round them; her father had been one of the
early patrons of the lovely Miss Linley. I name these facts to show that
she was too intelligent and cultivated by association, as well as by
natural powers, to lend an over-easy credence to the marvellous; and
yet I have heard her relate stories of disappearances which haunted
my imagination longer than any tale of wonder. One of her stories was
this:--Her father's estate lay in Shropshire, and his park-gates opened
right on to a scattered village of which he was landlord. The houses
formed a straggling irregular street--here a garden, next a gable-end of
a farm, there a row of cottages, and so on. Now, at the end house or
cottage lived a very respectable man and his wife. They were well known
in the village, and were esteemed for the patient attention which they
paid to the husband's father, a paralytic old man. In winter, his chair
was near the fire; in summer, they carried him out into the open space
in front of the house to bask in the sunshine, and to receive what
placid amusement he could from watching the little passings to and fro
of the villagers. He could not move from his bed to his chair without
help. One hot and sultry June day, all the village turned out to the
hay-fields. Only the very old and the very young remained.

The old father of whom I have spoken was carried out to bask in the
sunshine that afternoon as usual, and his son and daughter-in-law went
to the hay-making. But when they came home in the early evening, their
paralysed father had disappeared--was gone! and from that day forwards,
nothing more was ever heard of him. The old lady, who told this story,
said with the quietness that always marked the simplicity of her
narration, that every inquiry which her father could make was made, and
that it could never be accounted for. No one had observed any stranger
in the village; no small household robbery, to which the old man might
have been supposed an obstacle, had been com