_could_ have followed. It would have been a noble return
for having, temporarily, used the race as unmitigated slaves. It would
have been an act of enlightened philanthropy. It would have become
statesmen. What you did reads and works like the puerile suggestion of a
school-boy's theme. What you are further doing, to suppress, by force,
the trade in slaves, would have been worthy my distinguished countryman
whose biography has immortalised Cervantes. Humanity would smile at it,
but that she shudders and sickens."

But, to leave the region of dreams, which are no longer realisable, let
us shift the scene.

The churchyard has its nightly terrors. One heard of corpse-lights seen
dancing over graves--but over some alone. A few only had witnessed this;
but _they_ had no doubt on the matter. Things looked "uncanny;" but time
did not pause, and the story was forgotten. Even when the tale was
fresh, what was it but superstition? Who of those who hugged its
sympathetic terrors by the Christmas fireside, thought they could be
true on the bright frosty morning of the morrow? It was mere fancy.
There was nothing in it. Yet there _was_ something. And now and then a
striking and mysterious event would occur to bring back the old idea.
There was a cottage, (this I heard of a certainty,) in a hamlet I could
name, to which a bad report attached. A room in it was haunted. More
than one who had slept there had seen, at midnight, the luminous
apparition of a little child standing upon the hearth-stone. At length
suspicion became active. The hearth-stone was raised, and there were
found, buried beneath it, the remains of an infant. A story was now
divulged, how the former tenant and a female of the neighbourhood had, a
very few years before, abruptly left the village. The apparition here
was real and significant enough.

"It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.
Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak:
Augurs and understood relations have,
By magot-pyes, and choughs, and rooks, brought forth
The secret'st man of blood."

But tales like these, though true, gradually lose the sharpness of their
evidence for want of an accredited contemporary narrator, and so become
valueless. But time brings round every thing.

And at length a marvellous narrative, to the same effect with the above,
made its appearance in a trustworthy German work, _P. Kieffer's
Archives_, the complete authentication of which