o often happened that their own
fathers, brothers, husbands, or sons were gamblers!--but because he kept
a hotel and took in money!

Notwithstanding this exclusion from companionship with certain families,
Mr. Horace Blondelle led a very gay, happy, and prosperous life.

We see and grieve over this sort of thing very frequently in the course
of our lives. We fret that the wicked man should "flourish like a green
bay tree," and we forget that the time must come when he will be cut
down and cast into the fire.

That time was surely coming for Mr. Horace Blondelle.

Meanwhile he "flourished."

The third season of the "Dubarry White Sulphur Springs," was even more
successful than its forerunners had been.

People were possessed with a furor for the nasty waters and flocked by
thousands to the neighborhood.

But the autumn of that year was marked by other events of more
importance to this story.

First, in the opening of the fall term of the Blackville Academy for
young gentlemen, lawyer Closeby came to Black Hall, armed with the
authority of Mr. Lyon Berners, and straightway took little Cromartie,
now a lad of seven years of age, out of the hands of Miss Tabby, and
placed him in those of Dr. and Mrs. Smith, dominie and matron of the
academy, for education.

Miss Tabby mourned over the partial loss of her favorite, but was
consoled on the very next Hallow Eve, when a beautiful babe was left at
her door.

And now that years have passed, we approach the time when the great
Hallow Eve Mystery was destined to be a mystery no longer.

CHAPTER XXX.

THE GUARDIANS OF THE OLD HOUSE.

On every lip a speechless horror hung,
On every brow the burden of affliction;
The old ancestral spirits knew and felt
The house's malediction.--THOMAS HOOD.

Time does but deepen the gloom that hangs over an old mansion where a
heinous crime has been committed, an awful tragedy enacted.

As the years darkened over the old Black Hall, the house fell to be
regarded as a place haunted and accursed.

But as there is a certain weird attraction in the horrible, the old
Black Hall came to be the greatest object of morbid interest in the
neighborhood, greater even than the magnificent caverns, or the
miraculous springs.

The crowds of visitors who came down to the "Dubarry White Sulphur"
every summer, after tasting the waters of the spring and exploring the
beauties of the caverns, invariably drove down the b