ritions.

"I have seen them myself," he added, gravely.

"You do not mean it!" I sat bolt upright in my chair in my astonishment.
I had myself, largely through his influence, become a sceptic in matters
relating to the supernatural.

"Yes, I have seen ghosts. They not only have appeared to me, but were as
real to my ocular vision as any other external physical object which I
saw with my eyes.

"Of course, it was an hallucination. Tell me; I can explain it."

"I explained it myself," he said, dryly. "But it left me with a little
less conceit and a little more sympathy with the hallucinations of
others not so gifted."

It was a fair hit.

"In the year--," he went on, after a brief period of reflection, "I was
the State's Attorney for my native county, to which office I had been
elected a few years after I left college, and the year we emancipated
ourselves from carpet-bag rule, and I so remained until I was appointed
to the bench. I had a personal acquaintance, pleasant or otherwise,
with every man in the county. The district was a close one, and I could
almost have given the census of the population. I knew every man who was
for me and almost every one who was against me. There were few neutrals.
In those times much hung on the elections. There was no borderland. Men
were either warmly for you or hotly against you.

"We thought we were getting into smooth water, where the sailing was
clear, when the storm suddenly appeared about to rise again. In the
canvass of that year the election was closer than ever and the contest
hotter.

"Among those who went over when the lines were thus sharply drawn was an
old darky named Joel Turnell, who had been a slave of one of my nearest
neighbors, Mr. Eaton, and whom I had known all my life as an easygoing,
palavering old fellow with not much principle, but with kindly manners
and a likable way. He had always claimed to be a supporter of mine,
being one of the two or three negroes in the county who professed to
vote with the whites.

"He had a besetting vice of pilfering, and I had once or twice defended
him for stealing and gotten him off, and he appeared to be grateful to
me. I always doubted him a little; for I believed he did not have force
of character enough to stand up against his people, and he was a chronic
liar. Still, he was always friendly with me, and used to claim the
emoluments and privileges of such a relation. Now, however, on a sudden,
in this campaign he