saving the theory to suggest itself. Now it
has always appeared to me that the apostles of spectres (if the phrase
will be allowed me) have, like other men with a mission, been, perhaps,
a little precipitate in assuming their facts, and sometimes find "true
ghosts" upon evidence much too slender to satisfy the hard-hearted and
unbelieving generation we live in. They have thus brought scandal not
only upon the useful class to which they belong, but upon the world of
spirits itself--causing ghosts to be so generally discredited, that
fifty visits made in their usual private and confidential way, will now
hardly make a single convert beyond the individual favored with the
interview; and, in order to reinstate themselves in their former
position, they will be obliged henceforward to appear at noon-day, and
in places of public resort.

The reader will perceive, then, that I am convinced of the equal
impolicy and impropriety of resting the claims of my clients (ghosts in
general) upon facts which will not stand the test of an impartial, and
even a skeptical scrutiny. And, perhaps, I can not give a happier
illustration of the temper of my philosophy, at once candid and
cautious, than is afforded by the following relation, for every tittle
of which I solemnly pledge my character at once as a gentleman and as a
metaphysician.

There is a very agreeable book by Mrs. Crowe, entitled "The Night Side
of Nature," and which among a _dubia caena_ of authentic tales of terror,
contains several which go to show the very trivial causes which have
from time to time caused the reappearance of departed spirits in this
grosser world. A certain German professor, who, for instance, actually
_persecuted_ an old college friend with preternatural visitations for no
other purpose, as it turned out, than to procure a settlement of some
small six-and-eightpenny accounts, which he owed among his trades-people
at the time of his death. I could multiply, from my own notes, cases
still odder, in which sensible and rather indolent men, too, have been
at the trouble to re-cross the awful interval between us and the
invisible, for purposes apparently still less important--so trivial,
indeed, that for the present I had rather not mention them, lest I
should expose their memories to the ridicule of the unreflecting. I
shall now proceed to my narrative, with the repeated assurance, that the
reader will no where find in it a single syllable that is not most