ner, and his son, the
future possessor, each at separate times and for weeks, reside in the
castle, and occupy themselves in repeated attempts to discover whether
they have been imposed on. The selfsame trick, if trick it was, is
repeated night after night, without variation. The roll of the
approaching carriage-wheels, first along the gravelled avenue, then over
the paved court-yard, while no carriage was visible,--how were such
sounds to be imitated? The fall of footsteps, unaccompanied by aught in
bodily form, up the lighted stairway, and past the very side of the bold
youth who stepped down to meet them,--what human device could
successfully simulate these? The sound of the opening gallery-door and
the noises of the midnight orgies, with full opportunity to examine
every nook and corner of the scene whence, to every ear, the same
identical indications came,--how, in producing and reproducing these,
could trickery, time after time, escape detection? Both father and son,
it is evident, had their suspicions aroused; and both, as evidently,
were men of courage, not to be blinded by superstitious panic. Is it a
probable thing that they would destroy an old and valued family mansion,
without having exhausted every conceivable expedient to detect
imposture?

Nor was this imposture, if as such we are to regard it, conducted in
approved form, after the orthodox fashion. It assumed a shape contrary
to all usually received ideas. No spectre clanking its chains; no lights
burning blue; no groans of the tormented; no ordinary getting-up of a
ghostly disturbance. But a mere succession of sounds, indicating, if we
are to receive and interpret them literally, the periodical return from
the world of spirits of some of its tenants, restless and unblest. Was
this the machinery a mystifier was likely to select?

Such are the difficulties which attend the hypothesis of a concerted
plan of deception. They will be overlooked by those who have made up
their minds that communications between this world and the next are
impossible, and who will content themselves with pronouncing, that,
though they cannot detect the mode of the imposture, yet imposture of
some kind or other it plainly must have been.

And such skeptics will very properly remind us of other difficulties in
the way of accepting as a reality the alleged phenomena. What have the
spirits of the departed to do with conveyances resembling those of
earthly structure? Are there in