perilous adventure may excite, ends, I am well aware, with
my escape to the farmhouse. I have only ventured on writing these few
additional sentences because my marriage is the moral of my story. It
has brought me the choicest blessings of happiness and prosperity, and I
owe them all to my night-adventure in _The Black Cottage_.

THE SECOND DAY.

A CLEAR, cloudless, bracing autumn morning. I rose gayly, with the
pleasant conviction on my mind that our experiment had thus far been
successful beyond our hopes.

Short and slight as the first story had been, the result of it on
Jessie's mind had proved conclusive. Before I could put the question
to her, she declared of her own accord, and with her customary
exaggeration, that she had definitely abandoned all idea of writing to
her aunt until our collection of narratives was exhausted.

"I am in a fever of curiosity about what is to come," she said, when we
all parted for the night; "and, even if I wanted to leave you, I could
not possibly go away now, without hearing the stories to the end."

So far, so good. All my anxieties from this time were for George's
return. Again to-day I searched the newspapers, and again there were no
tidings of the ship.

Miss Jessie occupied the second day by a drive to our county town to
make some little purchases. Owen, and Morgan, and I were all hard at
work, during her absence, on the stories that still remained to be
completed. Owen desponded about ever getting done; Morgan grumbled at
what he called the absurd difficulty of writing nonsense. I worked on
smoothly and contentedly, stimulated by the success of the first night.

We assembled as before in our guest's sitting-room. As the clock struck
eight she drew out the second card. It was Number Two. The lot had
fallen on me to read next.

"Although my story is told in the first person," I said, addressing
Jessie, "you must not suppose that the events related in this particular
case happened to me. They happened to a friend of mine, who naturally
described them to me from his own personal point of view. In producing
my narrative from the recollection of what he told me some years since,
I have supposed myself to be listening to him again, and have therefore
written in his character, and, w henever my memory would help me, as
nearly as possible in his language also. By this means I hope I have
succeeded in giving an air of reality to a story which has truth, at any
rate, to recomme