plaster Cupids,
baskets of flowers, etc., modeled in high relief, and with a
centre-piece of unusual size and magnificence. A small table, the only
article of furniture the room contained, was placed directly under
this centre-piece. The young wife, rather weary of her researches, was
standing beside this table, and was leaning on it while she went on
talking with her husband, when suddenly a loud, imploring voice called
from down stairs, "Caroline! Caroline! come down to me--come!"

"Who can that be?" asked the husband in amazement. "I fastened all the
doors and windows before we left the lower rooms."

Again came the loud call, this time with an accent of agonized
entreaty: "Caroline! oh, Caroline! come down--_do_ come!"

The young couple hesitated no longer, but hastened down stairs. There
was no one there. Doors and windows were securely fastened, and the
old house looked as solitary as when they had first entered it.

"Very strange!" said the gentleman. "But now that we _are_ down here,
Caroline, suppose we take a look at the garden?" So they sallied forth
to examine that portion of their new domain, but scarcely had they
entered it when they were startled by a loud crash within the house.
Looking up, they saw volumes of what appeared to be smoke issuing from
the window of the room they had just quitted, and fearing that the
room was on fire, they quickly returned to it. There was no fire: what
had appeared to be smoke was only a cloud of dust, for the massive and
elaborately ornamented ceiling had fallen, and the heavy centre-piece
had crushed to fragments the table against which the young wife had so
lately been leaning. But for the warning voice her destruction would
have been inevitable. My informant went on to state that the pieces
of the shattered table were preserved as sacred relics by his parents,
and that his mother always declared that she had recognized in the
mysterious voice that of a dear relative long before deceased.

It was once my fortune to pass some weeks in a "haunted house." I was
quite young then, a mere school-girl in fact, and the friend whom I
came to visit was also very young; and both of us were too gay and
frolicsome to care much for whatever was strange or startling in our
surroundings. Not that we ever saw anything--my friend herself, the
daughter of the house, had never done so--but the sounds we heard were
sufficiently odd and inexplicable to fill us with astonishment, if not