The Queen's cadet, and other tales

by James Grant

PAQUETTE.

AN EPISODE OF THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR.

CHAPTER I.

In the spring of the year 1870, when my merry Paquette and I used to laugh at the cartoons of the Kladderadatch, representing King William lowering a mannikin in regimentals gently, by the spike of his helmet, into a huge chair, inscribed "Spanien," we little foresaw the horrors that were to come, or the days when we might tremble at the warlike news of the official Staatsanzieger.

We had been married a year, and were so happy in our pretty little house at Blankenese (a short distance from Hamburg), where all the sloping bank above the Elbe is covered with rich green copsewood, from amid which peep out the tiny red-tiled cottages of the fishermen; while over all tower the white-walled villas of those opulent merchants whose names stood so high in the Neuerwall or the Admiralitatstrasse, and higher still in the Bourse of the Free City—free now only in name, as it has become, since the Holstein war, an integral portion of the Prussian Empire.

Paquette Champfleurie was my first real love; yet, though still little more than a girl, she was a widow when we married, and it all came to pass in this fashion, for we had indeed much sorrow before our days of joy arrived. When I, Carl Steinmetz—for such is my name, though no relation to the great Prussian general—was but a lad in a merchant's office, in the quaint old gable-ended and timber-built street called the Stubbenhuk, I had learned to love Paquette, then a boarder in a fashionable school on the beautiful Alsterdam. Our interviews were stolen; our intercourse most difficult; for her kinswoman, the Gräfine von Spitzberger—a reduced lady of rank, with whom she was placed for educational purposes—watched her with the eyes of a lynx. But what will not love achieve?

Paquette, a lively, dark-eyed, and chestnut-haired girl from Lorraine, with a piquant little face that was not by any means French in contour or expression, and I, a sharp-witted burschen fresh from Berlin, soon found means for prosecuting our affair of the heart, from the time when our eyes first met on a Sunday evening in St. Michael's Kirche, to that eventful hour when, after many a note exchanged or concealed in a certain hollow tree near the Lombardsbrücke, we plighted our troth in the little grove near Schiller's bronze statue, with no witnesses but the quiet stars overhead, and the snow-white swans that floated on the blue current of the Alster.

But sorrow soon came to rouse us from our dreams; for three weeks after that happy evening her father took her home, without permitting us to say farewell, and ere long I learned that she had become the wife of Baptiste Graindorge, a wealthy merchant of Lorraine! With these tidings the half of my life seemed to leave me. They cost me many a secret tear, and much jealous bitterness, though I knew that French girls have no freedom of choice in matrimony; and I loathed the odious Graindorge in my heart, while bending resolutely over my desk, in the dingy and gloomy little office in the noisy Stubbenhuk—bending also every energy to amass money, though for what purpose now I scarcely know. But fortune favoured me.

I became ere long a junior partner in the firm under whom I had worked as a clerk, and the same year saw Paquette free; for our horrible Graindorge had died abroad of fever, at the French colony of Senegal, and she became mine—mine after all! A widow, no scheming father could interfere with her then.

In the whole of busy Hamburg there could be no happier couple than we were—and this was but a year ago. Wedded, we visited every place where we had been wont to meet by stealth, in terror of the old Gräfine—the leafy arcades of the Young Maiden's Walk, the Botanical Gardens, the groves that cover all the old mounds about the Holstein Wall, and the banks of the Alster, while Michael's Kirche was indeed a holy place to us, for there we had first met.

One morning in July of last year—ah, I shall never forget it—we were at breakfast together in the dining-room of our cottage at Blankenese, and prior to taking the Sporvei 'bus for the city, I was skimming over the Staatsanzieger, which was then beginning to be full of threatening news concerning the Spanish succession, and calling on Prussia to rouse herself, as all France, or Paris, at least, was shouting "A Berlin!" and "To the Rhine!" The atmosphere was deliciously warm; the slender iron casements were wide open; the fragrant roses and jessamine clambered thickly round them, and the drowsy hum of the bees mingled with the sounds that came, softened by distance, from the vast shining bosom of the Elbe, where ships, with the flags of all the world, were gliding, some towards Jonashafen and the city, others downward to the North Sea; and opposite lay the flat but green and lovely coast of Hanover, studded with pretty red villages, church-spires, and windmills whirling in the sunny air.

My heart felt happy and joyous, and Paquette was looking her loveliest in a light muslin morning dress; her bright brown hair, her pure complexion, and her dark, laughing eyes, making her seem a very Hebe, as she poured out my coffee, buttered the little brown German rolls, and chirruped about how we should spend the evening, after she had joined me in the city, and we had dined, as we frequently did, under the shady verandah of the pleasant Alster Pavilion, surrounded by swans and pleasure boats.

"Where shall we go, Carl, darling?" she continued—"to the Circus Renz?"

"No, Paquette; I am sick of the horsemanship and the sawdust, and the same everlasting girl, who, when she is not flying through a hoop, prances about in the dress of a Uhlan."

"The Botanical Gardens, then; the band of the 76th Hanoverians play there to-night, and some ten thousand gay people will be present."

"Well, darling, it shall be as you wish; and after looking in at the Stadt Theatre, to see Kathie Lanner's Swedish ballet, a droski will soon whirl us home from the Damthor-wall."

"But it was in that theatre, Carl, love, we saw each other last, and at a distance, on the night——"

"Before—before——" I began.

"I was torn from you to become the wife of another, Carl," she exclaimed, in a low voice, as she took my face between her pretty hands, and kissed me playfully.

"Ah, Graindorge!" thought I, with a little bitterness, as I kissed her in return, and rose to fill my meerschaum prior to setting forth for the city; but a strange cry from Paquette made me wheel sharply round on the varnished floor, and to my bewilderment and terror, I saw her sinking back in her chair, pallid as death, like one transfixed—her jaw relaxed, her poor little hands clasped, her eyes expressive only of horror and woe, and bent on something outside the window. My gaze involuntarily followed hers, as I sprung to her side.

At the railing before our little flower-garden stood a shabby-looking man, whose face will ever haunt me. His hat, well worn, tall and shiny, was pressed knowingly over the right eye. He was looking steadily at us, and appeared as if he had been doing so for some time. A diabolical grin, like that of Mephistopheles, was over all his features—in his carbuncle-like eyes, and in his wide mouth, where all his teeth seemed to glisten. He had a sallow and dissipated face, a hooked, sardonic nose, and on his left cheek a large black mole. A faded green dress-coat, with brass buttons, a yellow vest, and short inexpressibles of checked stuff, formed his attire.

My wife was almost fainting, and seemed on the verge of distraction.

"Paquette, my love," I began; but she held up her trembling hands as if deprecatingly between us, and said in a low, broken, and wailing voice—

"Do not speak to me—do not touch me. I am not your wife! Oh, my poor deluded Carl!—oh, my poor heart! Oh, death, come and end this horror—this mystery!"

Her words, her voice, her whole air and expression, made my blood run cold with a sudden terror, that her reason had become affected.

"Paquette—dearest Paquette," I said, in a soothing and an imploring manner, "what do these terrible words mean? That man——"

"Is Monsieur Baptiste Graindorge, my first husband, come back from the grave to torment me!"

"Impossible—girl, you rave!" said I, in deep distress, as I vaulted over the window and rushed out upon the road; but the scurvy eavesdropper was gone, and no trace of him remained. In great grief, and feeling sorely disturbed by the whole affair, I returned to Paquette, whom I found crouching on the sofa, crushed by agitation and despair. She gazed at me lovingly, sorrowfully, and yet as if fearful that I might approach and touch her.

"Is there not some terrible mistake or misconception in this?" said I, seeking to gather courage from my own words.

"None—none," she replied. "I recognized too surely his face—the mole—the odious smile."

"But the man died in Africa—it is impossible; and you are my wife, Paquette, whom none can take from me," I continued, with excited utterance, as she permitted me to kiss her: but the poor little pet was cold as marble, and her tremulous hands played almost fatuously, yet caressingly, with my hair, while she murmured—

"Oh, Carl—my poor Carl—what will become of us now?"

The whole affair seemed too improbable for realization. I besought her to take courage—to consider the likeness which had startled her as a mere fancy—an optical delusion; and, aware that my presence was imperatively necessary at business in the city, I was compelled to leave her, and did so not without a sorrowful foreboding.

So strong was the latter emotion, that the closing of the house-door rang like a knell in my heart. I paused irresolute at the garden gate, and again on the road; but the jingling bells of the approaching Sporvei 'bus ended my doubts. I sprang in, and in due time found myself at my office in the busy Admiralitatstrasse, opposite the Rath Haus.

Haunted by the strange episode of the morning, I strove vainly to become absorbed in bills of lading, and so forth, till one o'clock should toll from the spires—the time for plunging into the crowd of noisy speculators at the Bourse—and I was just about to set forth, when a stranger was announced; I looked up, and was face to face with the horrible Graindorge! He stood before me just as I had seen him at the garden-rail, with his tall shiny hat, his shabby coat, his bloated visage with its black mole and malignant smile.

"Your business?" I asked curtly.

"Will be briefly stated, Herr Steinmetz," said he. "So madame fully recognized me this morning?"

"Or thought she did," said I, after a short interval of silence.

"There was no doubt in the matter, but firm conviction. I did not die in Senegal, the report was false; and so, Herr Steinmetz, I am here to claim my wife and take her back with me to Lorraine."

"You are a foul impostor!" cried I furiously, yet with a sinking heart; "and I shall hand you over to the watch."

"Pardon me, but you will do nothing of the kind," replied the other, with the most exasperating composure; "it will not be pleasant to have your wife—your supposed wife, I mean—made a source of speculation to all Hamburg, by any public exposé."

"Oh, my God! my poor Paquette!" I exclaimed involuntarily; "and I love her so!"

"Milles diables!" grinned the Frenchman; "it is more than I do."

"Wretch! what proof have we that you are Baptiste Graindorge, and not a cheat—a trickster?"

"The effect produced by my presence—my appearance—on madame, who dare not deny my identity, which the Gräfine Spitzberger has already admitted—with great reluctance, I grant you. Well, I am supposed to be dead. I shall be content to let this supposition remain, and to quit Hamburg for a consideration."

"Name it," I asked, thankful for the prospect of being rid of his horrid presence even for a time, that I might consult some legal friend; and yet, even while I spoke and thought of purchasing his silence, I knew that Paquette, my adored wife, would be no wife of mine! It was a horrible dilemma. Graindorge the Lorrainer was rich; now he seemed to be poor and needy. I knew not what to think; grief was uppermost in my soul. After a pause he said slowly—

"For six thousand Prussian dollars I shall quit Hamburg."

With a trembling hand, yet without hesitation, I wrote him a cheque on my banker, Herr Berger in the Gras-keller, for the sum named, and the snaky eyes of the Frenchman flashed as he clutched the document. He inserted it in his tattered pocket-book, and carefully buttoned his shabby green coat over it; then he placed his hat jauntily on one side of his head, and tapping the crown with his hand, made me a low ironical bow, and with a pirouette and a malicious smile quitted the room, saying—

"Adieu, Monsieur Steinmetz—I go; but for a time only."

CHAPTER II.

I saw the whole scheme now. The bankrupt—for such I had no doubt he was—meant to make his power over Paquette and me a source of future revenue to himself; and I felt sure that when his last dollar was spent—by to-morrow, perhaps—he would present himself again with a fresh demand. Like one in a dream I went to the Bourse; but little or no business was done there that day, for war rumours were hourly growing more rife. There were riots in its neighbourhood, too. The tradesmen were "on strike," and the swords of the watch had been busy, for no less than seven unarmed men were cut down in the Adolphsplatz. Then, that evening I heard that a spy, supposed to be a Frenchman, had been hovering about the northern ramparts, near the Damthor, and had been seen to count the cannon on the Holstein-wall—a spy who had escaped alike the watch and the guard of the Seventy-sixth Regiment, and whom I heard described as a shabby man in a green coat, with a mole on his cheek!

My heart leaped within me; could this personage and M. Baptiste Graindorge be one and the same? If so, neither Hamburg nor I was likely to be troubled by his presence again.

Before my usual hour, I hastened home—home to my pretty little villa among the rose-trees at Blankenese; but, alas! to find it desolate, and our servant, Trüey, a faithful young Vierlander, in tears, and filled with wonder; for her mistress had packed up some clothes, and leaving all her jewels, even to her wedding-ring, had departed, after writing a letter for me.

I tore it open, and found it to contain but a few words, to confirm my terror and fill up the cup of my misery.

"The Gräfine von Spitzberger has been with me. The man we saw is indeed my husband, M. Graindorge, the story of whose death has been all a mistake; and he proved to her his identity, by his knowledge of all our family affairs. Oh, Carl! oh, my poor darling! the real husband of my heart and my only love! I must leave you—yes—and by the time you read this, shall be far on the railroad for France. Graindorge shall never see me more; my father's house or a convent must be my shelter now. My last hope is, that you will not attempt to follow me; my last prayer, that God may bless and comfort you."

The lines were written tremulously. I kissed my darling's wedding-ring, placed it by a ribbon at my neck, and wept bitterly. Then the room seemed to swim around me; I became senseless, and was ill in bed for days. Our home was broken now. It was desolate—oh, so desolate, without my Paquette! She was gone. She had left me for ever! And every object around seemed to recall her more vividly to me—her piano, her music, the little ornaments we had bought together at the Alster Arcade, and the pillow her cheek had rested on. "She will write to me," thought I; but no letter came. And something of jealousy began to mingle with the bitterness of my soul. Was she with Graindorge?

I think I should have gone mad but for the events that occurred so quickly now, for one week sufficed to change the whole face of affairs in Hamburg. France had declared war against Prussia. Trade stood still; silence reigned in our splendid Bourse, usually the most noisy and busy scene in the world; the Elbe was empty of shipping, for its buoys and lights were all destroyed. The Prussians, horse, foot, and artillery, were pouring towards Travemünde, where a landing of the French was expected. In one day nearly every horse in Hamburg was seized for military purposes, and the city was ordered to furnish eighteen thousand infantry for the Landwehr.

Of this force I was one. A strip of paper was left at my office one day, and the next noon saw me in the barracks near the Damthor-wall, and before the colonel, an officer of Scottish descent, the Graf von Hamilton. Then, like thousands of others, my plain clothes were taken from me, and I received in lieu a spiked helmet of glazed leather, a blue tunic faced with white, a goat-skin knapsack, great-coat, and camp-kettle, a needle-gun, bayonet, and sword. We were all accoutred without delay, and within two hours were at drill, under a burning sun, in the Heilinghaist-feld, between Hamburg and Altona. My desk, my office, my home, knew me no more; yet I often mounted guard near the chambers of our firm in the Admiralitatstrasse. Paquette and my previous existence seemed all a dream—a dream that had passed away for ever. And though the gay streets, the tall spires, the sights and sounds in our pleasure-loving city were all unchanged, I seemed to have lost my identity. My former life was completely blotted out.

From the Landwehr, with many others, I was speedily drafted into the Seventy-sixth Hanoverians, and in three weeks we were ordered to join the Army of the Rhine. Though I had studied in Berlin, I was not a Prussian, but a native of the free city of Hamburg. Like many of my comrades, who were fathers of families, or only sons, torn from their homes and peaceful occupations, I had no interest in the cruel and wanton war on which we were about to enter; and more than all, I loved France, for it was the native land of Paquette Champfleurie.

In the then horror of my mind, the war was certainly somewhat of a change or relief, and the excitement around drew me from my own terrible thoughts. I was going towards Lorraine, where even while fighting against her poor countrymen, I might see my lost one, my wife—for such I still deemed her, despite the odious Baptiste Graindorge; and so I fondly and wildly speculated. The idea of being killed and buried where Paquette might perhaps pass near my grave, was even soothing to my now morbid soul, for I knew that she had loved me long before that man came between us with his wealth of gold napoleons; so she must love me still—Carl, whose heart had never wandered from her.

But there is something great and inspiring in war and its adjuncts, after all. I remember that on the day we left our beautiful Hamburg, when I heard the crash of the brass bands and saw the North German colours waving in the wind, above the long, long column of glazed helmets and bright bayonets, as our regiment, with the Forty-seventh Silesians, the Fifty-third Westphalians, and the Eighty-eighth Nassauers, defiled through the Damthor, and past the Esplanade towards the Bahnhof, I became infected by the enthusiasm around me, and found myself joining in the mad shouts of "Hurrah, Germania!" and in the old Teutonic song which the advanced guard of Uhlans struck up, brandishing their lances the while—

"O Tannebaum, O Tannebaum, wie grün sind deine Blatter!"

as we marched for the Rhine, towards which we were forwarded fast by road and rail.

We were soon face to face with the gallant French, and how fast those terrible battles followed each other at Weissenburg, Forbach, Spicheren, and elsewhere, the public prints have already most fully related. Though I did not seek death any more than others my comrades, I cared little for life, yet (until one night in October) I escaped in all three of those bloody conflicts, and many a daily skirmish, without a wound, though the chassepot balls whistled thickly round me, and more than once the fire of a mitrailleuse, a veritable stream of bullets, swept away whole sections by my side. I have had my uniform riddled with holes, my helmet grazed many times, and part of my knapsack shot away; yet somehow fate always spared poor Carl Steinmetz; for he had no enmity in his heart towards the poor fellows who fell before his needle-gun. At last we rapidly pushed on, and reduced many fortified places as we advanced to blockade Metz. Then Lorraine lay around us, and I gazed on the scenery with emotions peculiarly my own, for I thought of Paquette, of her animated face and all her pretty ways, and of all she had told me of her native province, its dense forests where wolves lurked, its wild mountains, its salt springs and lakes—Lorraine now, as in centuries long past, a subject for dispute between France and Germany.

The Seventy-sixth, under the Graf von Hamilton, formed part of the army which, under Prince Frederick Carl, blockaded Metz with such cruel success; and we had severe work in the wet nights of October, while forming the feld-wacht in the advanced rifle-pits. Often when lying there alone, in the damp hole behind a sand-bag or sap-roller, waiting for a chance shot in the early dawn at some unfortunate Frenchman, I thought bitterly and sadly of our once happy home, of Paquette, my lost wife, and wondered where she was now, or if, when she saw the Prussian columns, with all their bright-polished barrels and spiked helmets shining in the sun, she could dream that I, Carl Steinmetz, was a unit in that mighty host. Then I would marvel in my heart whether I, with the spiked helmet and needle-gun, loaded with accoutrements and spattered with mud, was the same Carl Steinmetz who, but a few months before, sat daily at his desk in the Admiralitatstrasse, and had the sweet smiles of Paquette to welcome him home and listen to his news from the Bourse. Was this military transformation madness or witchcraft? It was neither, but stern reality, as an unexpected shot from a hedge about four hundred yards distant, tore the brass eagle from my helmet and fully informed me.

This was just about daybreak on the morning of the 26th October last, and when I could see all the village quarters, from Mars-la-Tour to Mazières, lit up, and all the bivouac fires burning redly on our left and in the rear.

With a few others I started from the rifle-pits, and we made a dash at the hedge, which we believed to conceal some of those Francs-tireurs, whom we had orders to shoot without mercy, though they were only fighting for home and country. We were on the extreme flank of the blockading force, and the hedge in question surrounded a villa which stood somewhat apart from the road to Château Salins. Led by the Graf's son, a young captain, we rushed forward, and found it manned by some fifty men of the French line, who had crept out of Metz intending to desert, for Bazaine permitted them to do so when provisions began to fail. "A bas les Pru-essiens!" cried their leader—a tall sub-officer in very tattered uniform—thus accentuating the word in the excess of his hatred.

"Vorwarts—für Vaterland—hurrah, Germania!" shouted the young Von Hamilton. A volley that killed ten of our number tore among us, but we broke through and fell upon them with the bayonet. Clubbing his chassepot the French sous-officier, with a yell on his lips, beat down poor Hamilton; then he rushed upon me, and what was my emotion—what my astonishment, to find myself face to face with Graindorge—he who had robbed me of Paquette—the same beer-bloated and scurvy-looking fellow, with the huge black mole, whom I had last seen in Hamburg! I charged him with my bayonet breast high, but agitation so bewildered me that he easily eluded my point, and felled me to the earth with his clubbed rifle. Now came a sense of confusion, of light flashing from my eyes, the clash of steel, the ping of passing balls; then darkness seemed to envelop me, and death to enter my heart as I became senseless.

I remained long thus, for the sun was in the west when full consciousness returned. The thick leather helmet had saved my head from fracture, but dried blood plastered all my face, and I found my right arm broken by a bullet. All the French in the rear of the hedge had been shot down or bayoneted, and they presented a terrible spectacle. All were dead save one—the sous-officier, who lay near me, dying of many bayonet wounds. Our wounded had been removed, but ten of the Seventy-sixth lay near me stiff and cold. What a scene it was in that pretty garden, amid the rose-trees, the last flowers of autumn, and the twittering sparrows, to see all those poor fellows, made in God's fair image, butchered thus—and for WHAT? My wounds were sore, my heart was sad and heavy; oh, when was it otherwise now? Staggering up I turned to the Frenchman, whose half-glazing eyes regarded me with a fiercely defiant expression, for he doubted not that in this guerre à la mort his last moment had come. I took off my battered helmet, and then with a thrill of terror he seemed to recognize me.

"Carl Steinmetz of Hamburg!" said he, with difficulty.

"You know me then?" I asked grimly.

"Oh, yes—in God's name give me water—I am dying!"

My canteen was empty; but I found some wine in that of a corpse which lay near. I poured it down his throat and it partially revived him.

"Yes, fellow," said I, "in me you see that Steinmetz who was so happy till you came and my wife fled; so we know each other, Monsieur Baptiste Graindorge."

"I am not Baptiste—he is lying quiet in his grave on the shore of the Senegal river."

"Who, in the name of Heaven, are you?"

"Achille Graindorge—his cousin. I took advantage of our casual but strong resemblance to impose upon you—and—and get money—when in Hamburg—acting——"

"As a spy—eh?"

"Yes."

"Has she—has Paquette seen you since?"

"No—for she would at once have detected the cheat."

"And you know not where she is?"

"As I have Heaven soon to answer—no," he gasped out, and sinking back, shortly after expired, his last breath seeming to issue from the wounds in his chest. I had no pity for him, but felt a glow of joy in my heart, as I turned away, and crept—for I was unable to stand—towards the door of the villa in search of succour, the agony of my thirst and wounds being so great that I cared little whether the inmates aided or killed me.

However, the coincidences of this day were not yet over.

The door, on which I struck feebly with my short Prussian sword, was opened ultimately by an old gentleman, beyond whom I saw a female, shrinking back in evident terror. I recognized M. de Champfleurie, my father-in-law; but being now unable to speak, I could only point to my parched lips and powerless arm, as I sank at his feet and fainted.

When I recovered, my uniform was open, my accoutrements were off; I was lying upon a sofa with my aching head pillowed softly—on what?—The tender bosom of Paquette, my darling little wife; for she had recognized me, though disguised alike by dress and blood, and now her tears were falling on my weather-beaten face.

It chanced that, flying from place to place in Lorraine, before our advancing troops, and having failed to reach Metz, they had taken shelter in that abandoned villa; and thus happily I could reveal the secret of our separation before the burial party bore away the body of Achille Graindorge, who had actually been quartered at Senegal when his cousin Baptiste died there.

My story is told. On the following day Metz capitulated, and poor M. Champfleurie danced with rage on learning that Bazaine had surrendered with two other Marshals of the Empire, 173,000 prisoners and 20,000 sick, wounded, and starving men. My fighting days were over now; Paquette was restored to me, and happiness was again before us.

For their kindness in succouring me, the Graf von Hamilton gave M. de Champfleurie and his daughter a pass to the rear, and we speedily availed ourselves of it, for I was discharged with a shattered arm; and now I write these lines, again in pleasant Blankenese, our dear home, with the broad Elbe shining blue beneath our windows, and the autumn leaves falling fast from the thick woods that cover all its green and beautiful shore.

APPARITIONS AND WONDERS.

CHAPTER I.
LEAVES FROM OLD LONDON LIFE: 1664-1705.

The Scottish newspaper recorded, not long ago, some instances of mirages in the Firth of Forth exactly like the freaks of the Fata Morgana in the Straits of Messina, and on three distinct occasions the Bass Rock has assumed, to the eyes of the crowds upon the sands of Dunbar, the form of a giant sugar-loaf crowned by battlements, while the island of May seemed broken into several portions, which appeared to be perforated by caverns where none in fact exist.

Such optical delusions have been common at all times in certain states of the atmosphere, and science finds a ready solution for them; but in the days of our forefathers, they were deemed the sure precursors of dire calamities, invasion, or pestilence.

The years shortly before and after the beginning of the last century seem to have been singularly fruitful in the marvellous; and the most superstitious Celtic peasant in the Scottish glens or the wilds of Connemara would not have believed in more startling events than those which are chronicled in the occasional broadsides, and were hawked about the streets of London by the flying stationers of those days.

To take a few of these at random: we find that all London was excited by strange news from Goeree, in Holland, where, on the evening of the 14th of August, 1664, there was seen by many spectators an apparition of two fleets upon the ocean; these, after seeming to engage in close battle for one hour and a half (the smoke of the noiseless cannon rolling from their sides), vanished, as if shown from a magic-lantern. Then appeared in the air two lions, or the figures thereof, which fought three times with great fury, till there came a third of greater size, which destroyed them both. Immediately after this, there came slowly athwart the sky, as represented in the woodcut which surmounted this veracious broadsheet, the giant figure of a crowned king. This form was seen so plainly, that the buttons on his dress could be distinguished by the awe-stricken crowd assembled on the sands. Next morning the same apparition was seen again; and all the ocean was as red as blood. "And this happening at this juncture of time," concludes the narrator, "begets some strange apprehensions; for that, about six months before Van Tromp was slain in war with England, there was seen near the same place an apparition of ships in the air fighting with each other."*

* London: printed by Thomas Leach, Shoe Lane, 1664.

Sixteen years later, another broadsheet announced to the metropolis, that the forms of ships and men also had been seen on the road near Abington, on the 26th of August, 1680, "of the truth whereof you may be fully satisfied at the Sarazen's Head Inn, Carter Lane." It would seem that John Nibb, "a very sober fellow," the carrier of Cirencester, with five passengers in his waggon, all proceeding to London about a quarter of an hour after sunrise, were horrified to perceive at the far horizon, the giant figure of a man in a black habit, and armed with a broadsword, towering into the sky. Like the spectre of the Brocken, this faded away; but to add to the bewilderment of Nibb and his companions, it was replaced by "about a hundred ships of several bigness and various shapes." Then rose a great hill covered with little villages, and before it spread a plain, on which rode thirty horsemen, armed with carbine and pistol.

The same document records that, on the 12th of the subsequent September, a naval engagement was seen in the air, near Porsnet, in Monmouthshire, between two fleets, one of which came from the northern quarter of the sky, the other from the south. A great ship fired first, "and after her, the rest discharged their vollies in order, so that great flashings of fire, and even smoak was visible, and noises in the ayr as of great guns." Then an army of phantoms engaged in "a square medow" near Porsnet, closing in with sword and pistol, and the cries of the wounded and dying were heard. On the 27th of December, Ottery, near Exeter, had a visitation of the same kind, when at five in the evening two armies fought in the air till six o'clock. "This was seen by a reverend minister and several others to their great amazement." On the 2nd of the same month, the people in Shropshire were, according to another sheet, sorely perplexed by the sudden appearance of two suns in the firmament, and it was duly remembered, that "such a sign was seen before the death of that tempestuous firebrand of Rome here in England, Thomas Beckett, Archbishop of Canterbury, and when Queen Mary began her bloody reign."

Then follow the death of the three lions in the Tower, and a vast enumeration of fiery darts, bullets, storms of hail, and floods, making up that which the writer hopes will prove "a word in season to a sinking kingdom."*

* London: Printed for J. B., Anno Domini 1680; and P. Brooksly, Golden Ball, near the Hospital Gate, 1681.

Nor were ghosts wanting at this time, of a political nature, too; for, in the same year, there was hawked in London an account of an apparition which appeared three several times to Elizabeth Freeman, thirty-one years of age, on each occasion delivering a message to his sacred majesty King Charles the Second. As certified before Sir Joseph Jorden, knight, and Richard Lee, D.D., rector of Hatfield, her story was as follows, and was, no doubt, a political trick:

On the night of the 24th of January, 1680, she was sitting at her mother's fire-side, with a child on her knee, when a solemn voice behind her said, "Sweetheart!" and, on turning, she was startled to perceive a veiled woman all in white, whose face was concealed, and whose hand—a pale and ghastly one—rested on the back of her chair.

"The 15th day of May is appointed for the royal blood to be poisoned," said the figure. "Be not afraid, for I am only sent to tell thee," it added, and straightway vanished.

On Tuesday, the 25th of January, the same figure met her at the house door, and asked Elizabeth if she "remembered the message," but the woman, instead of replying, exclaimed: "In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, what art thou?" Upon this the figure assumed "a very glorious shape," and saying, "Tell King Charles, from me, not to remove his parliament, but stand to his council," vanished as before. Next evening the veiled figure appeared again, when Elizabeth was with her mother, who, on beholding her daughter's manifest terror, said: "Dost thou see anything?" She was then warned to retire, after which the spectre said, sternly: "Do your message." "I shall, if God enable me," replied Elizabeth. After this the spectre appeared but once again, and remained silent. "This was taken from the maid's own mouth by me, Richard Wilkinson, schoolmaster in the said town of Hatfield."*

* London: Printed for J. B., Anno Domini 1680; and P. Brooksly, Golden Ball, near the Hospital Gate, 1681.

In 1683, as a variety, London was treated to an account of a dreadful earthquake in Oxfordshire, where the houses were rocked like ships or cradles, while tables, stools, and chests "rowled to and fro with the violence of the Shog."*

* Printed for R. Baldwin, at the Old Bailey.

The year 1687 brought "strange and wonderful news from Cornwall, being an account of a miraculous accident which happened near the town of Bodmyn, at a place called Park. Printed by J. Wallis, White Fryars Gate—next Fleet St.—near the Joyners Shop."

From this it would appear that on Sunday, the 8th of May, Jacob Mutton, whose relations were of good repute, and who was servant to William Hicks, rector of Cordingham (at a house he had near the old parish church of Eglashayle, called Park), heard, on going into his chamber about eight o'clock in the evening, a hollow voice cry, "So hoe! so hoe! so hoe!" This drew him to the window of the next room, from whence, to the terror of a lad who shared his bed, he disappeared, and could nowhere be found.

According to his own narrative, he had no sooner laid a hand upon an iron bar of the window, which was seventeen feet from the ground, than the whole grating fell into the yard below, all save the bar which he had grasped. This bar was discovered in his hand next morning, as he lay asleep in a narrow lane beyond the little town of Stratton, among the hills, thirty miles distant from Park. There he was wakened by the earliest goers to Stratton fair, who sent him home, sorely bewildered, by the way of Camelford. "On Tuesday he returned to his master's estate, without any hurt, but very melancholy, saying 'that a tall man bore him company all the journey, over hedges and brakes, yet without weariness.'" What became of this mysterious man he knew not, neither had he any memory of how the iron bar came to be in his hand. "To conclude, the young man who is the occasion of this wonderful relation, was never before this accident accounted any ways inclinable to sadness, but, on the contrary, was esteemed an airy, brisk, and honest young fellow."

But Mutton's adventure was a joke when compared with that of Mr. Jacob Seeley, of Exeter, as he related it to the judges on the western circuit, when, on the 22nd of September, 1690, he was beset by a veritable crowd of dreadful spectres. He took horse for Taunton, in Somersetshire, by the Hinton Cliff road, on which he had to pass a solitary place, known as the Black Down. Prior to this, he halted at a town called Cleston, where the coach and waggons usually tarried, and there he had some roast beef, with a tankard of beer and a noggin of brandy, in company with a stranger, who looked like a farmer, and who rode by his side for three miles, till they reached the Black Down, when he suddenly vanished into the earth or air, to the great perplexity of Mr. Jacob Seeley. This emotion was rather increased when he found himself surrounded by from one to two hundred spectres, attired as judges, magistrates, and peasantry, the latter armed with pikes; but, gathering courage, he hewed at them with his sword, though they threw over his head something like a fishing-net, in which they retained him from nine at night till four next morning. He thrust at the shadows with his rapier, but he felt nothing, till he saw one "was cut and had four of his fingers hanging by the skin," and then he found blood upon his sword. After this, ten spectre funerals passed; then two dead bodies were dragged near him by the hair of the head; and other horrors succeeded, till the spell broke at cock-crow.

It was now remembered that the house wherein Mr. Seeley had his beef, beer, and brandy had been kept by one of Monmouth's men (the spectre farmer, probably), who had been hung on his own sign-post, and the piece of ground where the net confined the traveller, was a place where maay of the hapless duke's adherents had been executed and interred. Hence it was named the Black Down, according to the sheet before us, which was "Printed for T. M., London, 2nd Oct., 1690."

A sheet circulated at the close of the preceding year warns "all hypocrites and atheists to beware in time," as there had been a dreadful tempest of thunder and lightning in Hants, at Alton, where the atmosphere became so obscure that the electric flashes alone lighted the church during the service, in which two balls of fire passed through its eastern wall, another tore the steeple to pieces, broke the clock to shreds, and bore away the weathercock. The narrator adds, that all Friesland was under water, and that a flood in the Tiber had swept away a portion of the Castle of St. Angelo.

As another warning, London was visited, in 1689, by a tempest, which uprooted sixty-five trees in St. James's Park and Moorfields, blew down the vane of St. Michael's Church in Cornhill, and innumerable chimneys, and injured many well-built houses, and part of the Armourers' Hall in Coleman Street. Several persons were killed in Gravel Lane and Shoreditch; sixty empty boats were dashed to pieces against the bridge; three Gravesend barges full of people were cast away, and the Crown man-of-war was stranded at Woolwich.*

* Printed for W. F., Bishopgate Without.

But the warning seems to have been in vain, for London, in 1692, was treated to an earthquake, which—as another sheet records—spread terror and astonishment about the Royal Exchange, all along Cornhill, in Lothbury, and elsewhere, on the 8th of September. All things on shelves were cast down, and furniture was tossed from wall to wall; the Spitalfields weavers had to seek shelter in flight, and all their looms were destroyed; these and other calamities were, it was alleged, "occasioned by the sins of the nation," and to avert such prodigies, the prayers of all good men were invoked.*

* J. Gerard, Cornhill, 1692.

Two years later saw another marvel, when "the dumb maid of Wapping," Sarah Bowers, recovered her power of speech through the prayers of Messrs. Russell and Veil, "two pious divines," who exorcised and expelled the evil spirit which possessed her; and in 1696 the metropolis was treated to the "detection of a popish cheat" concerning two boys who conversed with the devil, though none seemed to doubt the Protestant miracle.

The close of the century 1700 saw "the dark and hellish powers of witchcraft exercised upon the Reverend Mr. Wood, minister of Bodmyn," on whom a spell was cast by a mysterious paper, or written document, which was given to him by a man and woman on horseback (the latter probably seated on a pillion), after which he became strangely disordered, and wandered about in fields, meadows, woods, and lonely places, drenched the while with copious perspirations; however, "the spell was ultimately found in his doublet, and on the burning thereof, Mr. Wood was perfectly restored," and wrote to his uncle an account of the affair, which appeared in a broadsheet published at Exeter, by Darker and Farley, 1700.

Rosemary Lane was the scene of another wonder, when a notorious witch was found in a garret there, and carried before Justice Bateman, in Well Close, on the 23rd July, 1704, and committed to Clerkenwell Prison. Her neighbour's children, through her alleged diabolical power, vomited pins, and were terrified by apparitions of enormous cats; by uttering one word she turned the entire contents of a large shop topsy-turvy. She was judicially tossed into the river from a ducking-stool, "but, like a bladder when put under water, she popped up again, for this witch swam like a cork." This was an indisputable sign of guilt; and in her rage or terror she smote a young man on the arm, where the mark of her hand remained "as black as coal;" he died soon after in agony, and was buried in St. Sepulchre's churchyard.* Of the woman's ultimate fate we know nothing.

* H. Hills, in the Blackfriars, near the waterside.

In 1705, London was excited by a new affair: "The female ghost and wonderful discovery of an iron chest of money;" a rare example of the gullibility of people in the days of the good Queen Anne.

A certain Madam Maybel, who had several houses in Rosemary Lane, lost them by unlucky suits and unjust decrees of the law: for a time they were tenantless and fell to decay and ruin. For several weeks, nay months past (continues the broadsheet), a strange apparition appeared nightly to a Mrs. Harvey and her sister, near relations of the late Madam Maybel, announcing that an iron chest filled with treasure lay in a certain part of one of the old houses in the lane. On their neglecting to heed the vision, the ghost became more importunate, and proceeded to threaten Mrs. Harvey, "that if she did not cause it to be digged up in a certain time (naming it) she should be torn to pieces." On this the terrified gentlewoman sought the counsel of a minister, who advised her to "demand in the name of the Holy Trinity how the said treasure should be disposed of."

Next night she questioned the spectre, and it replied:

"Fear nothing; but take the whole four thousand pounds into your own possession, and when you have paid twenty pounds of it to one Sarah Goodwin, of Tower Hill, the rest is your own; and be sure you dig it up on the night of Thursday, the 7th December!"

Accordingly men were set to work, and certainly a great iron chest "was found under an old wall in the very place which the spirit had described."

One of the diggers, John Fishpool, a private of the Guards, "has been under examination about it, and 'tis thought that the gentleman who owns the ground will claim the treasure as his right, and 'tis thought there will be a suit of law commenced on it." Many persons crowded to see the hole from whence the chest had been exhumed in Rosemary Lane, and, by a date upon the lid, it would seem to have been made or concealed in the ninth year of the reign of Henry the Eighth.*

* London: printed for John Green, near the Exchange, 1705.

The dreadful effects of going to conjurers next occupied the mind of the public.

Mr. Rowland Rushway, a gentleman of good reputation, having lost money and plate to a considerable amount, Hester, his wife, took God to witness, "that if all the cunning men in London could tell, she should discover the thief, though it cost her ten pounds!"

With this view she repaired to the house of a judicial astrologer in Moorfields, about noon, when the day was one of great serenity and beauty. After some preliminary mummery or trickery, the wizard placed before her a large mirror, wherein she saw gradually appear certain indistinct things, which ultimately assumed "the full proportion of one man and two women."

"These are the persons who stole your property," said the astrologer; "do you know them?"

"No," she replied.

"Then," quoth he, "you will never have your goods again."

She paid him and retired, but had not gone three roods from the house when the air became darkened, the serene sky was suddenly overcast, and there swept through the streets a dreadful tempest of wind and rain, done, as she alleged, "by this cunning man, Satan's agent, with diabolical black art," forcing her to take shelter in an ale-house to escape its fury. Many chairmen and market folks were all cognizant of this storm, which was confined to the vicinity of the ale-house, and a portion of the adjacent river, where many boats were cast away; and the skirt of it would seem to have visited Gray's Inn Walk, where three stately trees were uprooted.

CHAPTER II.
THE WILD BEAST OF GEVAUDAN.

In the year 1765, the French, Dutch, and Brussels papers teemed with marvellous accounts of a monstrous creature, called "The Wild Beast of Gévaudan," whose ravages for a time spread terror and even despair among the peasantry of Provence and Languedoc, especially in those districts of the ancient Narbonne Gaul which were mountainous, woody, and cold, and where communication was rendered difficult by the want of good roads and navigable rivers.

In the April of that year a drawing of this animal was sent to the Intendant of Alençon, entitled "Figure de la beste (sic) feroce l'ou nomme l'hyene qui a devoré plus que 80 personnes dans le Gévaudan." An engraving of this is now before us, and certainly its circulation must have added to the confusion of the nature of the original. This print represents the beast with a huge head, large eyes, a long tongue, a double row of sharp fangs, small and erect ears like those of a cat, the paws and body of a lion, with the tail of a cow, which trails on the ground with a bushy tuft at the end.*

* The History of France records that there appeared a wild beast in the Forest of Fontainebleau in 1653, which devoured one hundred and forty persons, before it was killed by twelve mousquetaires of the Royal Guards!

In December, 1764, it first made its appearance at St. Flour, in Provence, and on the 20th it devoured a little girl who was herding cattle near Mende. A detachment of light dragoons, sent in search of it, hunted in vain for six weeks the wild and mountainous parts of Languedoc. Though a thousand crowns were offered by the province of Mende to any person who would slay it, and public prayers were put up in all the churches for deliverance from this singular scourge, which soon became so great a terror to those districts, as ever the dragon was of which we read in the "Seven Champions of Christendom."

No two accounts tallied as to the appearance of this animal, and some of these, doubtless the offspring of the terror and superstition of the peasantry, added greatly to the dread it inspired. French hyperbole was not wanting, and the gazettes were filled with the most singular exaggerations and gasconades.

The groves of olive and mulberry trees, and the vineyards, were neglected, the wood-cutters abandoned the forests, and hence fuel became provokingly dear, even in Paris.

In the month of January we are told that it devoured a great many persons, chiefly children and young girls. It was said by those who escaped to be larger than a wolf, but that previous to springing on its victim, by crouching on the ground, it seemed no longer than a fox. "At the distance of one or two fathoms it rises on its hind legs, and leaps upon its prey, which it seizes by the neck or throat, but is afraid of horned cattle, from which it runs away."

It was alleged by some to be the cub of a tiger and lioness; by others, of a panther and hyena, which had escaped from a private menagerie belonging to Victor Amadeus, duke of Savoy. A peasant of Marvejols, who wounded it by a musket shot, found a handful of its hair, "which stank very much;" he averred it to "be the bigness of a year-old calf, the head a foot in length, the chest large as that of a horse, his howling in the night resembled the braying of an ass." According to collated statements, the beast was seen within the same hour at different places, in one instance twenty-four miles apart; hence many persons naturally maintained that there were two.

On the 27th December, 1764, a young woman, in her nineteenth year, was torn to pieces by it at Bounesal, near Mende. Next day it appeared in the wood of St. Martin de Born, and was about to spring upon a girl of twelve years, when her father rushed to her protection. The woodman, a bold and hardy fellow, rendered desperate by the danger of his child, kept it at bay for a quarter of an hour, "the beast all the while endeavouring to fly at the girl, and they would both inevitably have become its prey if some horned cattle which the father kept in the wood had not fortunately come up, on which the beast was terrified and ran away."

This account was attested on oath by the woodman, before the mayor and other civil authorities of Mende, an episcopal city in Languedoc.

On the 9th of January an entire troop of the 10th Light Horse (the Volontaires Etrangers de Clermont-Prince), then stationed at St. Chely, was despatched under Captain Duhamel in quest of the animal, which had just torn and disembowelled a man midway between their quarters and La Garge. On this occasion the Bishop of Mende said a solemn mass, and the consecrated Host was elevated in the cathedral, which was thronged by the devout for the entire day; but the beast still defied all efforts for his capture or destruction, and soon after, "in the wood of St. Colme, four leagues from Rhodez, it devoured a shepherdess of eighteen years of age, celebrated for her beauty."

The English papers began to treat the affair of "the wild beast" as a jest or allegory invented by the Jesuits to render the Protestants odious and absurd, as it was said to have escaped from the Duke of Savoy's collection; and "this circumstance is designed," says one journal, "to point out the Protestants who are supposed to derive their principles from the ancient Waldensee, who inhabited the valleys of Piedmont, and were the earliest promoters of the Reformation."

A writer in a Scottish newspaper of the period goes still farther, and announces his firm belief that this tormentor of the Gévaudanois was nothing more or less than the wild beast prophesied in the Apocalypse of St. John, whereon the scarlet lady was mounted. Another asserts that it was typical of the whole Romish clergy, and that its voracious appetite answered to another part of Scripture, "conceived in the words eating up my people as they eat bread,"—his favourite food being generally little boys and girls of Protestant parentage.*

* Edinburgh Advertiser, 1764.

After a long and fruitless chase, Captain Duhamel, before returning to quarters at St. Chely, resolved to make a vigorous attempt to destroy this mysterious scourge of Languedoc; but his extreme ardour caused his plans to miscarry.

Posting his volontaires, some on horseback, and some on foot, at all the avenues of a wood to which it had been traced, it was soon roused from its lair by the explosion of pistols and sound of trumpets. There was a cry raised of "Voilà ! Gardez la-Bête!" and Duhamel, an officer of great courage, who had dismounted, rushed forward to assail it sword in hand, but had the mortification to see it, with a terrible roar, spring past the very place he had just quitted.

Two of his dragoons fired their pistols, but both missed. They then pursued it on the spur for nearly a league, and though seldom more than four or five paces from it, they were unable to cut it down, and ultimately it escaped, by leaping a high stone wall which their horses were unable to surmount; and after crossing a marsh which lay on the other side, it leisurely retired to a wild forest beyond.

The baffled dragoons reported that it "was as big as the largest park dog, very shaggy, of a brown colour, a yellow belly, a very large head, and had two very long tusks, ears short and erect, and a branched tail, which it sets up very much when running." Fear had no share in this strange description, for the officers of Clermont's regiment asserted that the two dragoons were as brave men as any in the corps; but some declared that it was a bear, and others a wild boar!

On the 12th of January it attacked seven children (five boys and two girls) who were at play near the Mountain of Marguerite. It tore the entire cheek off one boy, and gobbled it up before him; but the other four, led by a boy named Portefaix, having stakes shod with iron, drove the beast into a marsh, where it sunk up to the belly, and then disappeared. That night a boy's body was found half devoured in the neighbourhood of St. Marcel; on the 21st it severely lacerated a girl, and (according to the Paris Gazette) "next day attacked a woman, and bit off her head!"

The four brave boys who put it to flight received a handsome gratuity from the Bishop of Mende, and by the king's order were educated for the army; the Gazette adds that the king gave the young Portefaix a gift of four hundred livres, and three hundred to each of his companions.

As females and little ones seemed the favourite food of the beast, Captain Duhamel now ordered several of his dragoons to dress themselves as women, and with their pistols and fusils concealed, to accompany the children who watched the cattle; and the King of France now offered from his privy purse two thousand crowns, in addition to the one thousand offered by the province of Mende, for the head of this terrible animal.

Inspired by a hope of winning the proffered reward, a stout and hardy peasant of Languedoc, armed with a good musket, set out in search of it; but on beholding the beast suddenly near him, surrounded by all the real and imaginary terrors it inspired, he forgot alike his musket and his resolution; he shrieked with terror and fled, and soon after "the creature devoured a woman of the village of Jullange, at the foot of the Mountain of Marguerite."

As the terror was increasing in Gévaudan and the Vivarez, the offered rewards were again increased to no less than ten thousand livres; by the diocese of Mende, two thousand; by the province of Languedoc, two thousand; by the king, six thousand; and the following placard was posted up in all the towns and cities of the adjacent provinces:—

"By order of the King, and the Intendant of the Province of Languedoc:

"Notice is given to all persons, that his Majesty, being deeply affected by the situation of his subjects, now exposed to the ravages of the wild beast which for four months past has infested Vivarez and Gévaudan, and being desirous to stop the progress of such a calamity, has determined to promise a reward of six thousand livres to any person or persons who shall kill the animal. Such as are willing to undertake the pursuit of him, may previously apply to the Sieur de la Font, sub-deputy to the Intendant of Mende, who will give them the necessary instructions, agreeable to what has been prescribed by the ministry on the part of his Majesty."

Still the ubiquitous beast remained untaken; and a letter from Paris of the 13th February relates the terror it occasioned to a party consisting of M. le Tivre, a councillor, and two young ladies, who were on their way to visit M. de Sante, the curé of Vaisour.

They were travelling in a berlingo, drawn by four post-horses, with two postilions, and accompanied by a footman, who rode a saddle-horse, and was armed with a sabre. The first night, on approaching the dreaded district, they halted at Guimpe, and next morning at nine o'clock set forth, intending to lunch at Roteaux, a village situated in a bleak and mountainous place. The bailiff of Guimpe deemed it his duty to warn them, as strangers, "that the wild beast had been often seen lurking about the Chaussée that week, and that it would be proper to take an escort of armed men for their protection."

M. le Tivre and the councillor, being foolhardy, declined, and took the young ladies under their own protection; but they had scarcely proceeded two leagues when they perceived a post-chaise, attended by an outrider, coming down the rugged road that traversed the hill of Credi, at a frightful pace, and pursued by the wild beast!

The leading horse fell, on which the terrible pursuer made a spring towards it; but M. le Tivre's footman interposed with his drawn sabre, on which the beast pricked up its ears, stood erect, and showed its fangs and mouth full of froth, whisked round, and gave the terrified valet a blow with its tail, covering all his face with blood. The rest of the narrative is ridiculously incredible, for it states, that, on perceiving a gentleman levelling a blunderbuss (which flashed in the pan), the beast darted right through the chaise of M. le Tivre, smashing the side glasses and escaped to the wood. "The stench left in the shattered chaise was past description, and no burning of frankincense, or other method, removed it, so that it was sold for two louis, and though burned to ashes, the cinders were obliged, by order of the commissary, to be buried without the town walls!" (Advertiser, 1765).

Eluding the many armed hunters who were now in pursuit of it, in the early part of February the wild beast was seen hovering in well-frequented places, on the skirts of the forests adjoining the fields and vineyards, in the hamlets, and on the highways. In Janols, the capital of Gévaudanois, it sprang upon a child, whose cries brought his father to his aid, but ere a rescue could be effected, the poor little creature was rent asunder.

Three days afterwards, on the Feast of the Purification, five peasants, going to mass at Reintort de Randon, suddenly perceived it on the highway before them. It was crouching, and about to spring, when their shouts, and the pointed staves with which they were armed, put it to flight. On Sunday, the 3rd February, it was heard howling in the little village of St. Aman's during the celebration of high mass. All the inhabitants were in church, "but as they had taken the precaution to shut up the children in their houses, it retired without doing any mischief." On the 8th it was perceived within a hundred yards of the town of Aumont. A general chase through the snow was made by the armed huntsmen; but night came on before they came within range of the dreaded fugitive.

In February and March we find it still continuing its ravages through all the pleasant valleys of the Aisne. At Soissons it worried a woman to death and partly devoured her. Two girls were brought to the Hospital of St. Flour in a dying state from wounds it had inflicted:

"Catherine Boyer, aged twenty years, who was attacked on the 15th of January at Bastide-de-Montfort; all that part of the head on which the hair grew is torn away, with a part of the os coronæ, and the whole pericranium with the upper part of the ear is lost. The occipital bone is likewise laid bare. The other girl belongs to St. Just; the left side of her head and neck is carried away, with part of her nose and upper lip."

On the 1st of March, a man boldly charged it on horseback, but was thrown, and leaving his nag to its mercy, scrambled away and found refuge in a mill, where it besieged him for some time, till a lad of seventeen appeared, whom it lacerated with teeth and claws and left expiring outside the door. On the road near Bazoches, it tore to pieces a woman who attempted to save a girl on which it was about to spring; and four men of that place, armed with loaded guns, watched all night, near the mangled body, in the hope that it might return; but the animal was several miles distant, and after biting several sheep and cows in a farm-yard, was at last severely wounded by Antoine Savanelle, an old soldier, who assailed it with a pitchfork, which he thrust into its throat, and he was vain enough to declare that the wound was mortal and that he must have killed it.

This boast, however, was premature, for it soon reappeared, biting, tearing, and devouring, and though a man of Malzieu wounded it by a musket shot, making it roll over with a hideous cry, it was able on the 9th to drag a child for two hundred yards from a cottage door. It dropped its prey unhurt; but on the same evening, we are told that it partly devoured a young woman near the village of Miolonettes, and committed other ravages, the mere enumeration of which would weary rather than astonish, though it was stated that not less "than twenty thousand men" (a sad exaggeration surely), noblesse, hunters, woodmen, and soldiers, were in pursuit of it, under the Count de Morangies, an old maréchal de camp, who passed a whole night near the body of the half-devoured girl, in the vain hope that the monster would return within range of his musket.

Great astonishment and ridicule were excited in England by these continued details, and under date of 13th March, a pretended letter from Paris, headed "Wonderful Intelligence!" went the round of the press.

"The wild beast that makes such a noise all over Europe, and after whom there are at least thirty thousand regular forces and seventy thousand militia and armed peasants, proves to be a descendant on the mother's side from the famous Dragon of Wantley, and on the father's side from a Scotch Highland Laird. He eats a house as an alderman eats a custard, and with the wag of his tail he throws down a church. He was attacked on the night of the 8th instant, in his den, by a detachment of fourteen thousand men, under the command of Duc de Valliant; but the platoon firing, and even the artillery, had only the effect of making him sneeze; at last he gave a slash with his tail by which we lost seven thousand men; then making a jump over the left wing, made his escape."

Elsewhere we find:—"Yesterday, about ten in the morning, a courier arrived (in London) from France, with the melancholy news that the wild beast had, on the 25th instant, been attacked by the whole French army, consisting of one hundred and twenty thousand men, whom he totally defeated in the twinkling of an eye, swallowing the whole train of artillery and devouring twenty-five thousand men."

But still in Languedoc, lovers who had lost their brides, brothers their sisters, and parents their children, armed with guns and spears, beat the mountain sides and wild thickets for this animal, the existence of which was considered nearly or quite fabulous in London.

It would seem to have been deemed so in Holland, too, for the Utrecht Gazette, after detailing how bravely a poor woman of La Bessiere, name Jane Chaston, defended her little children against the beast, which appeared in her garden and tore one with its teeth, states that whatever scoffers might say, its existence was no longer doubtful, adding, "that unless we believe in the accounts of it which come from France, we must reject the greatest part of the events to which we give credit, as being of much less authority."

Louis XV gave a handsome gratuity to Jane Chaston for her courage and tenderness in defending her children, but we are not informed how or with what she was armed.

The Duc de Praslin received a report from the Comte de Montargis, who commanded the troops in the neighbourhood of La Bessiere, to the effect that, three days after the adventure of Jane Chaston, a party of eighty dragoons, en route to join their regiment, fell in with the beast, and rode at full speed towards it. When first discovered it was one hundred and fifty yards distant, and fled into a hollow place, which was environed by marshes and water, and then they endeavoured to hunt it forth by dogs. They opened a fire upon it with their carbines; but as the rain was falling in torrents, all these flashed in the pan, save one, which went off without effect. "The rain," continues the report, which is not very flattering to M. le Comte's cavalry, "not only hindered aid from coming to the troopers (the explosion of the carbine and their incessant cries of 'the beast! the beast!' having alarmed the whole neighbourhood), but by filling up the hollows with water, made them unable any longer."

Three-quarters of an hour after this the beast appeared in a field where tiles were made, at the base of Mount Mimat, where there is a hermitage dedicated to St. Privat, partly hewn out of the rock. This was then inhabited by an aged recluse and an officer of artillery, a reformed roué, who had dwelt with him for eighteen months, by way of penance. From the window they could plainly see the beast gambolling playfully on the grass, and climbing up the trees like a squirrel; but being without arms, they shut and made fast the door of the grotto, near which it remained watching for half an hour. This time the officer employed in making a sketch of it, which next day he sent to the Bishop of Mende; and here, perhaps, we have the startling engraving which was produced by the Intendant of Alençon.

The Comte de Montargis forwarded this sketch to the Duc de Praslin, to whose office the people flocked in multitudes to behold it; but public opinion was divided as to whether the animal was a lynx or a bear; "but I am certain," adds the writer of the news, "that if it was brought to the fair of St. Germain, it would draw more spectators than the famous Indian bird."

This celebrated fair was then held in a large meadow contiguous to the ancient Abbey of St. Germain-des-Prés, and was the grand rendezvous of all the dissipated society of Paris, to whom its gaming-tables, booths, theatres, cafes, cabarets, formed a never-ending source of attraction.

In April the beast devoured a young woman of twenty, who was watching some cattle. After that event the country became quite deserted; though its preference for the fair sex seemed very decided, no men would work in the fields, herd the flocks, or go abroad, save in armed bands.

The Brussels Gazette of May records a new phase in the history of the beast. Of eighteen persons whom it had bitten, thirteen are stated to have died raving mad. One patient began to howl like a dog, on which he was bled copiously, and chained hand and foot. Endued with terrible strength, he burst his bonds, and raved about in wild frenzy, destroying everything that came in his way, until he was shot down by an officer with a double-barrelled gun, when attempting, with a crowbar, to break into a country-house near Broine, where thirty persons had taken refuge from him.

About six in the evening of the 1st of May, the Sieur Martel de la Chaumette, whose château was at St. Alban's, in the bishopric of Mende, perceived, from a window, an animal which he was certain could be no other than the wild beast of Gévaudan. It was in a grass meadow, seated on its hind legs, and was gazing steadfastly at a lad, about fifteen years of age, who was herding some horned cattle, and was all unaware of its vicinity and ulterior views. The Sieur de la Chaumette summoned his two brothers, and armed with guns they issued forth in pursuit of the animal, which fled at their approach.

The youngest overtook it in the forest, and put a ball into it at sixty-seven paces; it rolled over three times, which enabled the elder Chaumette to put in another ball at fifty-two paces, on which it fled, and escaped, losing blood in great quantities. Night came on, and the pursuit was abandoned; but next day the Chaumettes were joined by the Sieurs d'Ennival, father and son, and a band of hunters. Its trail and traces of blood were found, and followed for a great distance, but they tracked it in vain.

The Sieur de la Chaumette, who had slain a great many wolves, declared that the animal he had seen in the meadow was not one; but his description of its appearance coincided exactly with that given by the Sieur Duhamel of the 10th Light Horse, and with the sketch made by the military hermit of St. Privat. The Chaumettes were in great hopes that the two bullets had slain the monster; but on the day following, at five in the evening, at a spot five leagues distant from the château, it devoured a girl fourteen years of age, and the terror of the people increased, as the beast seemed to have a charmed life, and to be almost bullet-proof.

The picked marksmen of fifty parishes now joined in the chase. Two remarkably fine dogs of the Sieur d'Ennival were so eager in the pursuit, that they left the hunt far behind, and, as they were never seen again, were supposed to have been killed and eaten. The society of the knights of St. Hubert, in the city of Puy, composed of forty men, joined in the crusade against this denizen of the wilds of Languedoc; but it was not until the end of September, 1765, that it was ultimately vanquished and slain by a game-keeper and the Sieur Antoine de Bauterne, a gentleman of Paris, who set out for Gévaudan on purpose to encounter it.

After a long, arduous, and exciting chase, through forest and over fell, on bringing it to bay at fifty yards, he shot it in the eye. Mad with pain and fury, it was crouching prior to springing upon him, when his companion, M. Rheinchard, gamekeeper to Louis, Duke of Orleans (son of Philip, so long regent of France), by a single bullet, in a vital spot, shot it dead.

It was then measured, and found to be five feet seven inches long, thirty-two inches high, and only one hundred and thirty pounds in weight. On the 4th of October, the Sieur de Bauterne, who was extolled as if he had been the victor of another Steenkirk or Fontenoy, arrived triumphantly in Paris, and had the honour to present it to the king; and then great was the astonishment and the disappointment of all who saw this animal—the terrible wild beast of Gévaudan, whose sanguinary career had for so many months excited such dismay there and wonder elsewhere—and found that it was only a wolf after all, and not a very large one! Horace Walpole, fourth Earl of Orford—the brilliant and witty Walpole of Strawberry Hill—saw the carcass as it lay in the queen's antechamber at Versailles, and asserts that it was simply a common wolf. Its nature accounted for some of the peculiarities it exhibited during its ravages, as the wolf, according to Weissenborn, destroys every other creature it can master, and, on a moderate calculation, consumes during the year about thirty times its own weight of animal substance; and to increase the list of its crimes, it has, he adds, in many instances, communicated hydrophobia to man.

CHAPTER III.
"THERE WERE GIANTS IN THOSE DAYS."

Among many other strange things, our unlettered ancestors believed in the past existence of those tall fellows, giants (individually, or even collectively as nations), quite as implicitly as they, worthy folks, did in the pranks and appearances of contemporary witches and ghosts; but even among the learned a more than tacit belief in a defunct class of beings, whose bulk and stature far exceeded those of common humanity, found full sway until the beginning of the present century.

A love of the marvellous is strong; and even Buffon, the eminent naturalist, fell into the old and vague delusion that "there were giants in those days," and he made the bones of an elephant to figure as the remains of a man of vast stature.

With Scripture for a basis to their assertions, it was difficult, no doubt, for the over-learned, and still more for the unlearned, of past times to subdue their belief in the existence of such foes as were encountered by our old friend Jack of gallant memory—veritable giants, tall as steeples, to whom such men as Big Sam of the Black Watch, O'Brien the Irish giant (whose skeleton is in the museum of the College of Surgeons), even the King of Prussia's famous grenadiers, and the girl fifteen years old and more than seven feet high, "who was presented to their majesties at Dresden,"* were all as pigmies and Liliputians by comparison.

* Gentleman's Magazine, 1753.

The Bible gives us four distinct races of giants, the chief of whom were the Anakims, or sons of Anak, the people of the chosen land, to which Moses was to lead the children of Israel, who were unto them but as grasshoppers in size. Og, the king of this tall race and of Bashan, however, if judged by the measurement of the present day, was not taller than eight feet six inches, as his brazen bedstead measured just nine Jewish cubits; but the Rabbis maintain that the bed described was only his cradle when an infant. The Anakims are referred to in the fifth chapter of the Koran, which speaks of Jericho as a city inhabited by giants. The father of Og is also asserted to have been of stature so great, that he escaped the Flood by—wading!

When told (as we are) in 1 Samuel that Goliath was in height six cubits and a span, that his coat of mail weighed five thousand shekels of brass, that the staff of his spear was as a weaver's beam, and that its head weighed six hundred shekels of iron, it was difficult for the simple people of past days, when, in some remote cavern or river's bed, or fallen chalk cliff, the monster bones of the elephant, the mastodon, or the rhinoceros came unexpectedly to light, not to believe that there might have been many Goliaths in the world once.

Josephus records that in his time there were to be seen in Gaza, Gath, and Azoth the tombs of those mighty men of old, the sons of Anak, who had been slain when Joshua marched into the land of Canaan, and slew the people of Hebron and Dabir.

According to the Moslems, even Joshua was a man of prodigious stature; and the highest mountain on the shores of the Bosphorus is at this hour called by the Turks the Grave of Joshua,—Juscha Taghi,—or the Giant's Mountain.*

* The grave is fifty feet long, and has been called the tomb of Amycus and of Hercules.

Tradition ascribes the origin of the name of Antwerp to a giant whose abode was in the woody swamps through which the Scheldt then wandered to the German Sea, and who used to cut off the hands and feet of those who displeased him; "and to prove this" (vide Atlas Geographus, 1711) "they show there a tooth, which they pretend to be his. It is a hand's-breadth long, and weighs six ounces. Moreover, the city has hands cut off as part of its arms."

Giants figure largely among the earlier fables of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, the two latter contending still for the nationality of the famous

"Finn MacCoul,
Wha dung the deil, and gart him yowl,"

and who, by the famous causeway of his own construction, could cross the Irish Channel to Britain whenever he chose.

Fiannam is probably the same personage. He is said to have lived in the time of Ewen II. of Scotland, a potentate who, according to Buchanan, "reigned in the year before Christ 77, and was a good and civil king;" and local story connects with his name the Giant's Chair, a rock above the river Dullan, in the parish of Mortlach.

England, too, is not without traces of some interest in the sons of Anak. We have the Giant's Grave, a long and grassy ridge in the beautiful Fairy Glen at Hawkstone, in Salop; another place so named on the coast of Bristol, and a third at Penrith, where two stone pillars in the churchyard, standing fifteen feet asunder at the opposite ends of a grave, and covered with runes or unintelligible carving, mark the size and tomb of Owen Cæsarius. Near these pillars is a third stone, called the Giant's Thumb.

Two miles below Brougham Castle, on the steep banks of the Eamont, are two excavations in the rock, having traces of a door and window, and of a strong column indented with iron; and these caves are assigned by tradition to a giant, who bore the classic name of Isis.

The vast stature of the Patagonians was long the subject of implicit belief, until it passed into a proverb. Antonio Pagifeta, who accompanied the adventurous Ferdinand Magellan on his famous voyage in 1519, records that on the coast of Brazil they found wild and gigantic cannibals so nimble of foot, that no man could overtake them. Bearing on thence to south latitude 49°, the land seemed all desolate and uninhabited, for they could see no living creature. At last a giant came singing and dancing towards them, and threw dust on his head. He was so tall, that the head of a Spaniard reached only to his waist. His apparel was the skin of a monstrous beast. All the inhabitants were men of the same kind, wherefore "the admiral called them Patagons."

This absurd story was corroborated a hundred years later by Jacob le Maire, in a voyage to the same region, and by the Dutch navigator Schouten, when they relate that at Port Desire they found graves containing human skeletons from eleven to twelve feet long. However, the Spanish officers of Cordova's squadron, by accurate measurements, reduced the utmost stature of the real Patagonian to seven feet one and a half inches, and their common height to six feet.

Premising that, of course, the great bones about to be referred to were those of the mammoth, the mastodon and other antediluvian animals, perhaps the most amusing instance of the credulity and gullibility even of the learned in such matters was a mémoire, read seriously to the Royal Academy of Sciences at Rouen, in the middle of the last century, by a savan named M. le Cat.

Therein he asserted and affected to give proof that Ferragas, who was slain by Orlando, the nephew of Charlemagne, was eighteen feet in height; that Isoret, whose tomb lay near the chapel of St. Pierre, in the suburbs of Paris, had been twenty feet high; and that in the city of Rouen, when digging near the convent of the Jacobins in 1509, during the reign of Louis XII., there was found in a tomb of stone a skeleton, the skull of which would hold a bushel (thirty-eight pounds weight) of corn. The shin-bones were entire, and measured four feet long. On this astounding tomb was a plate of copper, bearing the epitaph, "In this grave lies the noble and puissant Lord Riccon de Valmont and his bones." He then proceeds to tell us that Valence in Dauphiné possesses the bones of the giant Buccart, tyrant of the Vivarais, whom his vassal, the Count de Cabillon, slew by a barbed arrow, the iron head of which was found in his tomb when it—with all his bones intact—was discovered in 1705, at the base of the mountain of Crussol, whereon the giant dwelt, and whence he used to come daily to drink of the river Merderet. The skeleton when measured was twenty-two feet six inches long.*

* "In the Dominican Church there's the picture of a giant called Buard, who they pretend, by his bones dug up in their monastery, was fifteen cubits high and seven broad."—Atlas Geographus, 1711, 4to.

"Father Crozart assured me," continued the veracious M. le Cat, "that the physicians who were in the train of the princes who passed through Valence all acknowledged the bones to be human, and offered twenty-two pistoles for them." He farther appends a copy of the epitaph of this personage, forwarded to him by the same Father Crozat in 1746, and beginning, "Hæc est effigiis gigantis Baardi Vivariensis tiranni in Montis Cressoli Stantis," &c.

This tall personage, a second whose bones were exposed by the waters of the Rhone in 1456, and a third whose skeleton, nineteen feet long, was found near Lucerne in 1577, were all jokes and swindle when compared with others that were found in later years, particularly the remains of Teutobochus, king of the Teutones, which were discovered near the ruined castle of Chaumont in Dauphine, in the year 1613, by some masons who were digging a well. At the depth of eighteen feet, in light sandy soil, they came upon a tomb built of brick; above it was a stone inscribed, "Teutobochus Rex." Five years afterwards Mazurier, a surgeon, published his Histoire Véritable du Géant Teutobochus, which excited keen controversy, and brought all Paris—the Paris of Louis the Just and of Richelieu—rushing in crowds to see the bones of the mastodon, or whatever it was, whose tomb bore a royal inscription.

This king of the Teutones, who is said to have been vanquished and slain in battle a few miles from Valence, and to have been buried with all honour by Marius, his conqueror, was carefully measured, and found to be twenty-five feet six inches long, ten feet across the shoulders, and five from breast to back-bone. His teeth were each the size of an ox's foot. All France heard of this with wonder, and a belief which the anatomist Riolan sought in vain to ridicule and expose.

Sicily was peculiarly the favourite abode of giants.

At Mazarino, a town near Girgenti, there were found in 1516 the bones of a giant whose skull was like a sugar-hogshead, with teeth each five ounces in weight; and in the Val di Mazzara, thirty years after, the alleged remains of another were found, whose stature was the same!

Patrick Brydone, in his Tour to Sicily and Malta, in 1773, mentions some of these marvellous discoveries.

"In the mountain above it (il Mar Dolce) they show you a cavern where a gigantic skeleton is said to have been found; however, it fell to dust when they attempted to remove it. Fazzello says its teeth were the only part that resisted the impression of the air; that he procured two of them, and that they weighed near two ounces. There are many such stories to be met with in the Sicilian legends, as it seems to be a universal belief that this island (Sicily) was once inhabited by giants; but, although we have made diligent inquiry, we have never yet been able to procure a sight of any of those gigantic bones which are said to be still preserved in many parts of the island. Had there been any foundation for this, I think it is probable they must have found their way into some of the museums. But this is not the case; nor indeed have we met with any person of sense and credibility that could say they have seen them. We had been assured at Naples that an entire skeleton, upwards of ten feet high, was preserved in the museum at Palermo; but there is no such thing there, nor I believe anywhere else in the island."

This Palermitan giant is gravely referred to in the mémoire of M. le Cat, as well as "another thirty-three feet high, found in 1550."

According to Plutarch, Serbonius had the grave of Antæus (the Libyan giant and antagonist of Hercules) opened in the city of Tungis, and, finding his body to be "sixty cubits long, was infinitely astonished," as well he might be, and gave orders for the tomb to be closed, but added new honours to his memory. The bones of a giant, forty-six cubits in length, were laid bare by an earthquake in Crete, as Pliny states with implicit faith; and it was disputed whether they were those of Otus, son of Neptune, who built a city in his ninth year, or of the equally fabulous Orion. But all that we have noted are overtopped by the giant found at Thessalonica in 1691, who was ninety-six feet high (as certified by M. Quoinet, consul for France), and by another found at Trepani, in Sicily—the ancient Drepanum. The latter, Boccaccio states the learned of his time to have taken for the skeleton of Polyphemus, the son of Neptune and Thoosa—the one-eyed Cyclop of the Odyssey.

"A form enormous! far unlike the race
Of human birth, in stature and in face;"

and on being measured, the bones proved to be exactly three hundred feet long!

CHAPTER IV.
BURIED HEARTS.

It is natural enough that the human heart—deemed by poets and philosophers to be the seat of our affections and passions, of our understanding and will, courage and conscience, by some men looked upon as the root of life itself—should have been considered by many of the dying in past times as a votive gift peculiarly sacred. And this feeling has been the cause in many instances of the burial of the heart apart from the place where the ashes of the body might repose.

Among the earliest instances of the separate mode of heart-burial is that of Henry the Second of England. After this luckless monarch expired in a passion of grief, before the altar of the church of Chinon, in 1189, his heart was interred at Fontevrault, but his body, from the nostrils of which tradition alleges blood to have dropped on the approach of his rebellious son Richard, was laid in a separate vault. From Fontevrault his heart, according to a statement in a public print, was brought a few years ago to Edinburgh, by Bishop Gillis, of that city. If so, where is it now?

When Richard Cœur de Lion fell beneath Gourdon's arrow at the siege of Chaluz, the gallant heart, which, in its greatness and mercy, inspired him to forgive, and even to reward the luckless archer, was, after his death, preserved in a casket in the treasury of that splendid cathedral which William the Conqueror built at Rouen; for Richard, by a last will, directed that his body should be interred in Fontevrault, "at the feet of his father, to testify his sorrow for the many uneasinesses he had created him during his lifetime." His bowels he bequeathed to Poictou (Grafton has it Carlisle), and his heart to Normandy, out of his great love for the people thereof. Above the relic at Rouen there was erected an elaborate little shrine, which was demolished in 1738, but exactly a hundred years later the heart was found in its old place, and reinterred. It was again exhumed, however, cased in glass, and exhibited in the Musée des Antiquités of the city; but December, 1869, saw it once more replaced in the cathedral, with a leaden plate on the cover, bearing the inscription:

"Hie jacet cor Ricardi Regis Anglorum."

So there finally lies the heart of him who, in chivalry, was the rival of Saladin and Philip Augustus, the hero of the historian, and the novelist, and who was the idol of the English people for many a generation.

When this great crusader's nephew, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and King of the Romans, died, after a stirring life—during which he formed a conspiracy against the king his father, then, like all the wild, pious, and bankrupt lords of those days, took a turn of service in the Holy Land, and next drew his sword in the battle fought at Lewes between Henry the Third and the confederate barons—his body was interred at Hayles, in Gloucestershire, but his heart was deposited at Rewley Abbey, near Oxford, while the heart of his son, who died before him, and for whose tragical fate he died of grief, was laid in Westminster Abbey in 1271.

Two successive holders of the see of Durham made votive offerings of their hearts to two different churches. The first of these was Richard Poore, previously Dean of Salisbury, Bishop of Chichester, and then of Durham, from 1228 to 1237. He was buried in the cathedral of his diocese, but his heart was sent to Tarrant, in Dorsetshire. A successor in the episcopate, Robert de Stitchell, who had formerly been Prior of Finchale, dying on his way home from the Council of Lyons, in 1274, was buried in Durham, but, at his own request, his heart was left behind, as a gift to the Benedictine convent near Arbepellis, in France. At Henley, in Yorkshire, in the old burial vault of the noble family of Bolton, there lies the leaden coffin of a female member of the house, who had died in France, and been brought from thence embalmed, and cased in lead. On the top of the coffin is deposited her heart in a kind of urn. The heart of Agnes Sorel was interred in the abbey of Jumieges.

In Scotland there have been several instances of the separate burial of the human heart. The earliest known is that connected with the founding and erection of Newabbey, or the abbey of Dulce Cor, in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright, by Derorgilla, daughter of Alan the Celtic Lord of Galloway, and wife of John Baliol, of Barnard Castle, father of the unpopular competitor for the Scottish crown. Baliol, to whom she was deeply attached, died an exile in France in 1269; but Derorgilla had his heart embalmed, and as the Scotichronicon records, "lokyt and bunden with sylver brycht;" and this relic so sad and grim she always carried about with her. In 1289, as death approached, when she was in her eightieth year, she directed that "this silent and daily companion in life for twenty years should be laid upon her bosom when she was buried in the abbey she had founded;" the beautiful old church, the secluded ruins of which now moulder by the bank of the Nith. For five centuries and more, in memory of her untiring affection, the place has been named locally the Abbey of Sweet-heart.

History and song have alike made us familiar with the last wish of Robert Bruce, the heroic King of Scotland, when, after two years of peace and contemplation, he died in the north, at Cardross. He desired that in part fulfilment of a vow he had made to march to Jerusalem, a purpose which the incessant war with England baffled, his heart should be laid in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and on his death-bed he besought his old friend and faithful brother soldier, the good Sir James Douglas, to undertake that which was then a most arduous journey, and be the bearer of the relic. "And it is my command," he added, to quote Froissart, "that you do use that royal state and maintenance in your journey, both for yourself and your companions, that into whatever lands or cities you may come, all may know that ye have in charge, to bear beyond the seas, the heart of King Robert of Scotland."

Then all who stood around his bed began to weep, and Douglas replied:

"Assuredly, my liege, I do promise, by the faith which I owe to God and to the order of knighthood."

"Now praise be to God," said the king, "I shall die in peace."

It is a matter of history how Douglas departed on this errand with a train of knights, and, choosing to land on the Spanish coast, heard that Alphonso of Leon and Castile was at war with Osman, the Moorish king of Granada. In the true spirit of the age, he could not resist the temptation of striking a blow for the Christian faith, and so joined the Spaniards. He led their van upon the plain of Theba, near the Andalusian frontier. In a silver casket at his neck he bore the heart of Bruce, which rashly and repeatedly he cast before him amid the Moors, crying:

"Now pass on as ye were wont, and Douglas, as of old, will follow thee or die."

And there he fell, together with Sir William Sinclair, of Roslin, Sir Robert and Walter Logan, of Restalrig, and others. Bruce's heart, instead of being taken to Jerusalem, was brought home by Sir Simon of Lee, and deposited in Melrose Abbey. Douglas was laid among his kindred in Liddesdale, and from thenceforward "the bloody heart," surmounted by a crown, became the cognizance of all the Douglasses in Scotland. Bruce was interred at Dunfermline; and when his skeleton was discovered in 1818, the breast-bone was found to have been sawn across to permit the removal of the heart, in accordance with the terms of his last will.

But of all the treasured hearts of the heroic or illustrious dead, none perhaps ever underwent so many marvellous adventures as that of James, Marquis of Montrose, who was executed by the Scottish Puritans in 1650.

On his body being interred among those of common criminals, by the side of a road leading southward from Edinburgh, his niece, the Lady Napier, whose castle of Merchiston still stands near the place, had the deal box in which the trunk of the corpse lay (the head and limbs had been sent to different towns in Scotland) opened in the night, and his heart, "which he had always promised at his death to leave her, as a mark of the affection she had ever felt towards him," was taken forth. It was secretly embalmed and enclosed in a little case of steel, made from the blade of that sword which Montrose had drawn for King Charles at the battles of Auldearn, Tippermuir, and Kilsythe. This case she placed in a gold filigree box that had been presented by the Doge of Venice to John Napier, of Merchiston, and she enclosed the whole in a silver urn which had been given to her husband by the great cavalier marquis before the Civil War. She sent this carefully guarded relic to the second marquis, afterwards first Duke of Montrose, who was then in exile with her husband; but it never reached either of them, being unfortunately lost by the bearer on the journey.

Years after all these actors in the drama of life had passed away, a gentleman of Gueldres, a friend of Francis, fifth Lord Napier (who died in 1773), recognized, in the collection of a Flemish virtuoso, by the coat-armorial and other engravings upon it, the identical gold filigree box belonging to the Napiers of Merchiston. The steel case was within it; but the silver urn was gone. The former "was the size and shape of an egg. It was opened by pressing down a little knob, as is done in opening a watch-case. Inside was a little parcel containing all that remained of Montrose's heart, wrapped in a piece of coarse cloth, and done over with a substance like glue." Restored by this friend to the Napiers, it was presented to Miss Hester Napier, by her father, Lord Francis, when his speculations in the Caledonian Canal and elsewhere led him to fear the sale of his patrimonial castle of Merchiston, and that he would lose all, even to this relic, on which he set so much store. Miss Napier took it with her on her marriage with Johnstone of Carnsalloch, and it accompanied her when she sailed for India with her husband. Off the Cape de Verd Isles their ship was attacked by Admiral de Suffrien, who was also bound for the East with five French sail of the line. In the engagement which ensued, Mrs. Johnstone, who refused to quit her husband's side on the quarter-deck, was wounded by a splinter in the arm, while carrying in her hand a reticule in which she had placed all her most valuable trinkets, and, among these, the heart of Montrose, as it was feared that the Indiaman would be taken by boarding; Suffrien, however, was beaten off.

At Madura, in India, she had an urn made like the old one to contain the heart, and on it was engraved, in Tamil and Telegu, a legend telling what it held. Her constant anxiety concerning its safety naturally caused a story to be spread concerning it among the Madrassees, who deemed it a powerful talisman. Thus it was stolen, and became the property of a chief; so the loyal heart that had beat proudly in so many Scottish battles, hung as an amulet at the neck of a Hindoo warrior. The latter, however, on hearing what it really was, generously restored it to its owner, and it was brought to Europe by the Johnstones on their return in 1792. In that year they were in France, when an edict of the revolutionary government required all persons to surrender their plate and ornaments for the service of the sovereign people. Mrs. Johnstone intrusted the heart of Montrose to one of her English attendants named Knowles, that it might be secretly and safely conveyed to England; but the custodian died by the way; the relic was again lost, and heard of no more.

In the wall of an aisle of the old ruined church of Culross, there was found, not long ago, enclosed in a silver case of oval form, chased and engraved, the heart of Edward Bruce, second Lord Kinloss (ancestor of the Earls of Elgin), in his day a fiery and gallant young noble, who fought the famous duel with a kindred spirit, Sir Edward Sackville, afterwards Earl of Dorset, a conflict which is detailed at such length, and so quaintly, in No. 133 of the Guardian. Bruce was the challenger, and after a long and careful pre-arrangement, attended by their seconds and surgeons, they encountered each other, with the sword, minus their doublets, and in their shirtsleeves, under the walls of Antwerp, in August, 1613. Sackville had a finger hewn off, and received three thrusts in his body, yet he contrived to pass his rapier twice, mortally, through the breast of his Scottish antagonist, who fell on his back, dying and choking with blood.

"I re-demanded of him," wrote Sir Edward, "if he would request his life; but it seemed he prized it not at so dear a rate to be beholden for it, bravely replying that 'he scorned it,' which answer of his was so noble and worthy, as I protest I could not find in my heart to offer him any more violence."

As Sackville was borne away fainting, he escaped, as he relates, "a great danger. Lord Bruce's surgeon, when nobody dreamt of it, came full at me with his lordship's sword, and had not mine, with my sword, interposed, I had been slain, although my Lord Bruce, weltering in his blood, and past all expectation of life, conformable to all his former carriage, which was undoubtedly noble, cried out, 'Rascal, hold thy hand!'"

Sackville was borne to a neighbouring monastery to be cured, and died in 1652 of sorrow, it was alleged, for the death of Charles the First. Kinloss died on the ground where the duel was fought, and was buried in Antwerp; but his heart was sent home to the family vault, in the old abbey church, which lies so pleasantly half hidden among ancient trees, by the margin of the Forth; and a brass plate in the wall, with a detail of the catastrophe engraved upon it, still indicates its locality to the visitor.

Still more recently there was supposed to be found in the vault of the Maitlands, at St. Mary's Church, in Haddington, an urn containing the heart of the great but terrible duke, John of Lauderdale, the scourge of the Covenanters, a truculent peer, who, for his services to the powers that were, was created Baron Petersham and Earl of Guildford, and who died at Tunbridge Wells in 1682. He was buried in the family aisle, amid the execrations of the peasantry, to whom his character rendered him odious, and his coffin on tressels was long an object of grotesque terror to the truant urchin who peeped through the narrow slit that lighted the vault where the lords of Thirlstane lie. The heart of the unhappy king, James the Second of England, which was taken from his body, and interred separately in an urn, in the church of Sainte Marie de Chaillot, near Paris, was lost at the Revolution, in 1792, while the heart of his queen, Mary d'Este, of Modena, and that of their faithful friend and adherent, Mary Gordon, daughter of Lewis, Marquis of Huntley, and wife of James, Duke of Perth (whilom Lord Justice-General, and High Chancellor of Scotland), were long kept where the ashes of the latter still repose, in the pretty little chapel of the Scottish College, at Paris, in the Rue des Fosses St. Victoire, one of the oldest portions of the city.

When the body of the Emperor Napoleon was prepared for interment at St. Helena, in May, 1821, the heart was removed by a medical officer, to be soldered up in a separate case. Madame Bertrand, in her grief and enthusiasm, had made some vow, or expressed a vehement desire, to obtain possession of this as a precious relic, and the doctor, fearing that some trick might be played him, and his commission be thereby imperilled, kept it all night in his own room, and under his own eye, in a wine-glass. The noise of crystal breaking roused him, if not from sleep, at least from a waking doze, and he started forward, only in time to rescue the heart of the emperor from a huge brown rat, which was dragging it across the floor to its hole. It was rescued by the doctor, soldered up in a silver urn, filled with spirits, by Sergeant Abraham Millington, of the St. Helena Artillery, and placed in the coffin.

During the repair of Christ's Church, at Cork, in 1829, a human heart, in a leaden case, was found embedded among the masonry; but to whom it had belonged, what was its story, the piety or love its owner wished to commemorate, no legend or inscription remained to tell.

In 1774, Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord Le Despenser, seems to have received the singular bequest of a human heart, as the obituaries of that year record, that when "Paul Whitehead, Esq., a gentleman much admired by the literati for his publications, died at his apartments in Henrietta-street, Covent Garden, among other whimsical legacies was his heart, which, with fifty pounds, he bequeathed to his lordship." But of all the relics on record, perhaps the most singular, if the story be true, is that related in the second volume of the memoirs of the Empress Josephine, published in 1829, when the Duc de Lauragnois had not only the heart of his wife, to whom he was tenderly devoted, but her entire body, "by some chemical process reduced to a sort of small stone, which was set in a ring, that the duke always wore on his finger." After this, who will say that the eighteenth century was not a romantic age?

CHAPTER V.
PHANTASMAGORIA.

On the 29th of January, 1719, a Scottish gentleman, named Alexander Jaffray, Laird of Kingswells, was riding across a piece of wide and waste moorland to the westward of Aberdeen, when, about eight o'clock in the morning, he beheld—to his great alarm and bewilderment, as he states in a letter to his friend, Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk (printed by the Spalding Club)—a body of about seven thousand soldiers drawn up in front of him, all under arms, with colours uncased and waving, and the drums slung on the drummers' backs. A clear morning sun was shining, so he saw them distinctly, and also a commander who rode along the line, mounted on a white charger.

Dubious whether to advance or retire, and sorely perplexed as to what mysterious army this was, the worthy Laird of Kingswells and a companion, an old Scottish soldier, who had served in Low Country wars, reined in their horses, and continued to gaze on this unexpected array for nearly two hours; till suddenly the troops broke into marching order, and departed towards Aberdeen, near which, he adds, "the hill called the Stockett tooke them out of sight."

Nothing more was heard or seen of this phantom force until the 21st of the ensuing October, when upon the same ground—the then open and desolate White-myres—on a fine clear afternoon, when some hundred persons were returning home from the yearly fair at Old Aberdeen, about two thousand infantry, clad in blue uniforms faced with white, and with all their arms shining in the evening sun, were distinctly visible; and after a space, the same commander on the same white charger rode slowly along the shadowy line. Then a long "wreath of smoak apiered, as if they had fired, but no noise" followed.

To add to the marvel of this scene, the spectators, who, we have said, were numerous, saw many of their friends, who were coming from the fair, pass through this line of impalpable shadows, of which they could see nothing until they came to a certain point upon the moor and looked back to the sloping ground. Then, precisely as before, those phantoms in foreign uniform broke into marching order, and moved towards the Bridge of the Dee. They remained visible, however, for three hours, and only seemed to fade out or melt gradually away as the sun set behind the mountains. "This will puzzle thy philosophy," adds the laird at the close of his letter to the baronet of Monymusk; "but thou needst not doubt of the certainty of either."

Scottish tradition, and even Scottish history, especially after the Reformation, record many such instances of optical phenomena, which were a source of great terror and amazement to the simple folks of those days; and England was not without her full share of them either; but science finds a ready solution for all such delusions now. They are chiefly peculiar to mountainous districts, and may appear in many shapes and in many numbers, or singly, like the giant of the Brocken, the spectator's own shadow cast on the opposite clouds, and girt with rings of concentric light—or like the wondrous fog-bow, so recently seen from the Matterhorn.

Almost on the same ground where the Laird of Kingswells saw the second army of phantoms, and doubtless resulting from the same natural and atmospheric causes, a similar appearance had been visible on the 12th of February, 1643, when a great body of horse and foot appeared as if under arms on the Brimman Hill. Accoutred with matchlock, pike, and morion, they looked ghost-like and misty as they skimmed through the gray vapour about eight o'clock in the morning; but on the sun breaking forth from a bank of cloud, they vanished, and the green hill-slopes were left bare, or occupied by sheep alone. Much about the same time, another army was seen to hover in the air over the Moor of Forfar. "Quhilkis visons," adds the Commissary Spalding, "the people thocht to be prodigious tokens, and it fell out owre trew, as may be seen hereafter."

Many such omens are gravely recorded as preceding and accompanying the long struggle of the Covenant, and the fatal war in which the three kingdoms were plunged by Charles I. and his evil advisers.

Indigestion, heavy dinners, and heavier drinking had doubtless much to do in creating some of the spectral delusions of those days; and inborn superstition, together with a heated fancy, were often not wanting as additional accessories. But in the gloomy and stormy autumn that preceded the march of the Scottish Covenanters into England, omens of all kinds teemed to a wonderful extent in the land. When Alaster Macdonnel, son of Coll the Devastator, as the Whigs named him, landed from Ireland, at the Rhu of Ardnamurchan, in Morven, to join the Scottish cavaliers under the Marquis of Montrose, then in arms for the king, it was alleged that the hum of cannon-shot was heard in the air, passing all over Scotland from the Atlantic to the German Sea; that many strange lights appeared in the firmament; and that, on a gloomy night in the winter of 1650, a spectre drummer, beating in succession the Scottish and English marches, summoned to a ghostly conference, at the castle-gate of Edinburgh, Colonel Dundas of that Ilk, a corrupt officer, who, on being bribed by gold, afterwards surrendered to Cromwell the fortress, together with some sixty pieces of cannon.

All the private diaries and quaint chronicles, of late years published by the various literary clubs in England and Scotland, teem with such marvels, but the latter country was more particularly afflicted by them; omens, warnings, and predictions of coming peril rendering it, by their number and character, extremely doubtful whether Heaven or the other place was most interested in Scottish affairs.

In 1638, fairy drums were heard beating on the hills of Dun Echt, in Aberdeenshire, according to the narrative of the parson of Rothiemay; in 1643, we hear of the noise of drums "and apparitions of armyes" at Bankafoir in the same county. "The wraith of General Leslie in his buff-coat and on horseback, carrying his own banner with its bend azure and three buckles or, appeared on the summit of a tower at St. Johnstown. Science now explains such visions as the aerial Morgana, produced by the reflection of real objects on a peculiar atmospheric arrangement; but then they were a source of unlimited terror." Law, in his Memorials, records that, in 1676, a wondrous star blazed at noon on the hill of Gargunnock, and a great army of spectres was seen to glide along the hills near Aberdeen.

A folio of Apparitions and Wonders, preserved in the British Museum, records that, at Durham, on the 27th September, 1703, when the evening sky was serene and full of stars, a strange and prodigious light spread over its north-western quarter, as if the sun itself was shining; then came streamers which turned to armed men ranked on horseback. J. Edmonson, the writer of the broadsheet, adds: "It was thought they would see the apparition better in Scotland, because it appeared a great way north; the same," he continues gravely, "was seen in the latter end of March, 1704," and the battle of Hochstadt followed it. This must refer to the second battle fought there, which we call Blenheim, when Marshal Tallard was defeated and taken prisoner by Marlborough. But this wonderful light which turned to armed men at Durham was outdone by a marvel at Churchill, Oxfordshire, where (in the same collection) we find that, on the 9th January, 1705, four suns were all visible in the air at once, "sent for signs unto mankind," adds the publisher, Mr. Tookey of St. Christopher's Court, "and having their significations of the Lord, like the hand-writing unto his servant Daniel."

In 1744, a man named D. Stricket, when servant to Mr. Lancaster of Blakehills, saw one evening, about seven o'clock, a troop of horse riding leisurely along Souter Fell in Cumberland. They were in close ranks, and ere long quickened their pace. As this man had been sharply ridiculed as the solitary beholder of a spectre horseman in the same place in the preceding year, he watched these strange troopers for some time ere he summoned his master from the house to look too. But ere Stricket spoke of what was to be seen, "Mr. Lancaster discovered the aerial troopers," whose appearance was as plainly visible to him as to his servant. "These visionary horsemen seemed to come from the lowest part of Souter Fell, and became visible at a place named Knott; they moved in successive troops (or squadrons) along the side of the Fell till they came opposite to Blakehills, where they went over the mountain. They thus described a kind of curvilinear path, their first and last appearances being bounded by the mountain." They were two hours in sight; and "this phenomenon was seen by every person (twenty-six in number) in every cottage within the distance of a mile," according to the statement attested before a magistrate by Lancaster and Stricket, on the 21st of July, 1745.

During the middle of the last century, a toll-keeper in Perthshire affirmed on oath, before certain justices of the peace, that an entire regiment passed through his toll-gate at midnight; but as no such force had left any town in the neighbourhood, or arrived at any other, or, in fact, were ever seen anywhere but at his particular turnpike, the whole story was naturally treated as a delusion; though the Highlanders sought in some way to connect the vision with the unquiet spirits of those who fought at Culloden, for there, the peasantry aver, that "in the soft twilight of the summer evening, solitary wayfarers, when passing near the burial mounds, have suddenly found themselves amid the smoke and hurly-burly of a battle, and could recognize the various clans engaged by their tartans and badges. On those occasions, a certain Laird of Culduthil was always seen amid the fray on a white horse, and the people believe that once again a great battle will be fought there by the clans; but with whom, or about what, no seer has ventured to predict."

Shadowy figures of armed men were seen in Stockton Forest, Yorkshire, prior to the war with France, as the Leeds Mercury and local prints record; and so lately as 1812, much curiosity and no small ridicule were excited by the alleged appearance of a phantom army in the vicinity of hard-working prosaic Leeds, and all the newspapers and magazines of the time show how much the story amused the sceptical, and occupied the attention of the scientific.

It would appear that between seven and eight o'clock on the evening of Sunday, the 28th October, Mr. Anthony Jackson, a farmer, in his forty-fifth year, and a lad of fifteen, named Turner, were overlooking their cattle, which were at grass in Havarah Park, near Ripley, the seat of Sir John Ingilby, when the lad suddenly exclaimed: "Look, Anthony; what a number of beasts!" "Beasts? Lord bless us!" replied the farmer with fear and wonder, "they are men!" And, as he spoke, there immediately became visible "an army of soldiers dressed in white uniforms, and in the centre a personage of commanding aspect clad in scarlet." These phantoms (according to the Leeds Mercury and Edinburgh Annual Register) were four deep, extended over thirty acres, and performed many evolutions. Other bodies in dark uniforms now appeared, and smoke, as if from artillery, rolled over the grass of the park. On this, Jackson and Turner, thinking they had seen quite enough, turned and fled.

Like the spells of the Fairy Morgana, which were alleged to create such beautiful effects in the Bay of Reggio, and which Fra Antonio Minasi saw thrice in 1773, and "deemed to exceed by far the most beautiful theatrical exhibition in the world," science has explained away, or fully discovered the true source of all such spectral phenomena. The northern aurora was deemed by the superstitious, from the days of Plutarch even to those of the sage Sir Richard Baker, as portentous of dire events; and the fancies of the timid saw only war and battle in the shining streamers; but those supposed spectral armies whose appearance we have noted, were something more, in most instances, than mere deceptio visus, being actually the shadows of realities—the airy reproductions of events, bodily passing in other parts of the country, reflected in the clouds, and imaged again on the mountain slopes or elsewhere, by a peculiar operation of the sun's rays.

CHAPTER VI.
A STRING OF GHOST STORIES.

A belief in the ghost of vulgar superstition is as much exploded in England now as are the opinions advanced by King James in his "Demonologie." Yet the learned Bacon admitted that such things might be. Luther, Pascal, Guy Patin, Milton, Dr. Johnson, and even Southey, believed in the existence of such mediums with the unseen world. "My serious belief amounts to this," wrote the latter: "that preternatural impressions are sometimes communicated to us for wise purposes; and that departed spirits are sometimes permitted to manifest themselves." And had Pope not entertained some similar idea, he had not written:

"'Tis true, 'tis certain, man, though dead, retains
Part of himself; the immortal mind remains:
The form subsists without the body's aid,
Aerial semblance and an empty shade."

Upon the truth or falsehood, the theories or rather hypotheses, of such alleged appearances, we mean not to dwell; but merely to relate a few little anecdotes connected with them, and drawn—save in Lord Brougham's instance—from sources remote and scarce.

In the memoirs of the celebrated Agrippa d'Aubigné, grandfather of Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV., a man famous for his zeal in Calvinism and disbelief in the spiritual world, and one whose integrity was deemed alike rigid and inflexible, we read the following of a spectre like that of a nursery tale:

"I was," he wrote, "in my bed, and entirely awake, when I heard some one enter my apartment; and perceived at my bedside a woman, remarkably pale, whose clothes rustled against my curtains as she passed. Withdrawing the latter, she stooped towards me, and giving me a kiss that was cold as ice, vanished in a moment!"

D'Aubigné started from bed, and was almost immediately after informed of the sudden death, of his mother, to whom he was tenderly attached.

In a letter of Philip, second Earl of Chesterfield, we find a curious story of a double apparition occurring at the same moment, and which, though it somewhat illustrates Ennemoser's theory of polarity, is beyond the pale of modern philosophy.

In the gray daylight of an early morning in 1652, the earl saw a figure in white, "like a standing sheet," appear within a yard of his bedside. He attempted to grasp it; but, eluding him, the figure slid towards the foot of the bed, and melted away. He felt a strange anxiety; but his thoughts immediately turned to the Countess (Lady Anne Percy), who was then at Networth with her father, the Earl of Northumberland, and thither he immediately repaired. On his arrival a footman met him on the staircase, with a packet directed to him from his lady; whom he found with her sister, the Countess of Essex, and a Mrs. Ramsay. He was asked why he had come so suddenly. He told his motive, his alarm and anxiety; and, on perusing the letter in the sealed packet, he found that the countess had written to him, requesting his return; "as she had seen a thing in white, with a black face, by her bedside." These apparitions were identically the same in appearance, and were seen by the earl and countess at the same moment, though they were in two places forty miles apart. No catastrophe followed. The earl, however, survived his lady, and lived till the year 1713.

In the St. James's Chronicle for 1762 we find a strange story of an apparition being the means of revealing a murder, and bringing the guilty parties to the fatal tree at Tyburn. The narrative was said to have been found among the legal papers of a counsellor of the Middle Temple, then recently deceased.

"In the year 1668 a young gentleman of the West Country, named Stobbine, came to London, and soon after, as ill luck would have it, he wedded a wife of Wapping, the youngest daughter of a Mrs. Alceald; and in the space of fifteen months the providence of God sent them a daughter, which (sic) was left under the care of the grandmother, the husband and his wife retiring to their house in the country."

In 1676, when the daughter was six years old, Mrs. Alceald died, and the child was sent home, and remained there till 1679, when a Mrs. Myltstre, her maternal aunt, "having greatly increased her means, forsook the canaille and low habitations of Wapping, came into a polite part of the town, took a house among people of quality, and set up for a woman of fashion," and thither did she invite the Stobbines and their daughter to spend the winter with her. Among her visitors were her husband's brother, who had the title or rank of captain, and who seems to have been a bully and gamester—a "blood," in a flowing wig and laced coat—and there was another relation, who practised as an apothecary.

All these five persons dined together on the birthday of the little girl Stobbine, when a terrible catastrophe ensued. In a spirit of play, it was presumed, she took up a sword that was in the room, and pointing it at Mr. Stobbine, cried, "Stick him, stick him!"

"What!" said he, "would you stab your father?"

"You are not my father; but Captain Myltstre is."

Her father, upon this, boxed her ears, and was instantly run through the body by the captain. "Down he dropped," we are told, and then his wife, her sister, the captain, and the apothecary, all trampled upon him till he was quite dead, and interring him secretly, gave out that he had returned to the West Country. Time passed on, and though inquiries were made, and messengers sent after the missing Stobbine, he was heard of no more for a time. His daughter was sent to a distant school, and her mother, "who pretended to go distracted, was sent to a village a few miles out of town, where the captain had a pretty little box for his convenience."

A memory of the terrible scene she had witnessed haunted the daughter, she had nightly horrible dreams and frights, to the terror of a young lady who slept with her; and she always alleged that a spectre haunted her, a spectre visible to her only, and on these occasions she would exclaim, with every manifestation of horror,

"There is a spirit in the room! It is Mr. Stobbine's spirit. Oh, how terrible it looks!"

These appearances and her paroxysms led to an inquiry before a justice of the peace; and without any warning given, the whole of the guilty parties were apprehended and committed to the Gate-house, tried at the Old Bailey, "and condemned, to the entire satisfaction of the county, the court, and all present."

After this, Stobbine's troubled spirit appeared no more. Mrs. Myltstre was hanged, and her body was thrown into the gully-hole near her old house in Wapping; Mrs. Stobbine was strangled and burned. The captain and the apothecary were hanged at Tyburn, and the latter was anatomized; and so ended this tragedy.

Another remarkable detection of murder through the alleged appearance of a ghost, occurred in 1724.

A farmer, returning homeward from Southam market in Warwickshire, disappeared by the way. Next day a man presented himself at the farmhouse, and asked of the wife if her husband had come back.

"No," she replied; "and I am under the utmost anxiety and terror."

"Your terror," said he, "cannot surpass mine; for last night as I lay in bed, quite awake, the apparition of your poor husband appeared to me. He showed me several ghastly stabs in his body, which is now lying in a marl-pit."

The pit was searched, the corpse was found, and the stabs, in number and position, answered in every way to the description given by the ghost-seer, to whom the spectre had named a certain man as the culprit; and this person was committed to prison and brought to trial at Warwick for the crime, before a jury and the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Robert (afterwards Lord) Raymond, who was succeeded in 1733 by Sir Philip Yorke. The jury would speedily have brought in a verdict of guilty; but he checked them by saying,

"Gentlemen, you lay more stress on the allegations of this apparition than they will bear. I cannot give credit to these kind of stories. We are now in a court of law, and must determine according to it; and I know not of any law which will admit of the testimony of an apparition; nor yet if it did, doth the ghost appear to give evidence. Crier," he added, "call the ghost."

The farmer's spirit being thrice summoned in vain, Sir Robert again addressed the jury on the hitherto unblemished character of the man accused, and stoutly asserted a belief in his perfect innocence; adding, "I do strongly suspect that the gentleman who saw the apparition was himself the murderer, and knew all about the stabs and the marl-pit without any supernatural assistance; hence I deem myself justified in committing him to close custody till further inquiries are made."

The result of these was, that on searching his house sufficient proofs of his guilt were found; he confessed his crime, and was executed at the next assize.

In the list of the officers of the 33rd Regiment, when serving under Lord Cornwallis in America, and then called the 1st West York, will be found the names of Captain (afterwards Sir John Coape) Sherbrooke and Lieutenant George Wynward. The former had recently joined the 33rd from the 4th, or King's Own Regiment. These young men, being similar in tastes and very attached friends, spent much of their time in each other's society, and when off duty were seldom apart. One evening Sherbrooke was in Wynward's quarters. The room in which they were seated had two doors, one that led into the common passage of the officers' barrack, the other into Wynward's bedroom, from which there was no other mode of egress.

Both officers were engaged in study, till Sherbrooke, on raising his eyes from a book, suddenly saw a young man about twenty years of age open the entrance door and advance into the room. The lad looked pale, ghastly, and thin, as if in the last stage of a mortal malady. Startled and alarmed, Captain Sherbrooke called Wynward's attention to their noiseless visitor; and the moment the lieutenant saw him he became ashy white and incapable of speech, and, ere he could recover, the figure passed them both and entered the bedroom.

"Good God—my poor brother!" exclaimed Wynward.

"Your brother!" repeated Sherbrooke in great perplexity. "There must be some mistake in all this. Follow me."

They entered the little bedroom—it was tenantless; and Sherbrooke's agitation was certainly not soothed by Wynward expressing his conviction that from the first he believed they had seen a spectre; and they mutually took note of the day and hour at which this inexplicable affair occurred. Wynward at times tried to persuade himself that they might have been duped by the practical joke of some brother officer; yet his mind was evidently so harassed by it, that when he related what had occurred, all had the good taste to withhold comments, and to await with interest the then slow arrival of the English mails. When the latter came, there were missives for every officer in the regiment except Wynward, whose hopes began to rise; but there was one solitary letter for Sherbrooke, which he had no sooner read than he changed colour and left the mess table. Ere long he returned and said,

"Wynward's younger brother is actually no more!" The whole contents of his note were as follows: "Dear John, break to your friend Wynward the death of his favourite brother."

He had died at the very moment the apparition had appeared in that remote Canadian barrack. Strange though the story, the veracity of the witnesses was unimpeachable; and Arch-deacon Wrangham alludes to it in his edition of Plutarch, who, like Pliny the younger, believed in spectres. Of Wynward, we only know that he was out of the regiment soon after his brother's death; and of Sherbrooke, that he lived to see the three days of Waterloo, became Colonel of the 33rd, Commander of the Forces in North America, and died a General and G.C.B.

Prior to accompanying his regiment, the 92nd Highlanders, in the Waterloo campaign, the famous Colonel John Cameron, of Fassifern, a grandson of the Lochiel of the "Forty-five," dined with Lieutenant-colonel Simon Macdonell, of Morar, who had formerly been in the corps when it was embodied at Aberdeen as the old 100th, or Gordon Highlanders. On the occasion of this farewell dinner there were present other officers of the regiment, some of whom died very recently, and it occurred in the house of Morar, at Arasaig, a wild part of Ardnamurchan, on the western coast of Inverness-shire.

As the guests were passing from the drawing-room towards the dining-room, old Colonel Macdonell courteously paused to usher in Cameron before him, and in doing so he was observed to stagger and become pale, while placing his hands before his face, as if to hide something that terrified him. Cameron saw nothing of this, though others did; and all were aware that subsequently, during dinner, their host seemed disconcerted and "out of sorts."

Those unbidden visions known as the taisch, or second-sight, were alleged to be hereditary in the family of Morar; and hence when Cameron fell at Quatre Bras a few weeks afterwards, the old Colonel asserted solemnly, that at the moment when Cameron passed before him he saw his figure suddenly become enveloped in a dark shroud, which had blood-gouts upon it about the region of the heart; but no shroud enveloped the gallant Cameron when his foster-brother buried him in the allée verte of Brussels, where his body lay for six months, till it was brought home to Kilmalie, and buried under a monument on which is an inscription penned by Scott.

One of the latest testimonies of the existence of a spiritual world is that given in the Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham, written by himself.

In volume first, he tells us that after he left the High School of Edinburgh to attend the University, one of his most intimate friends there was a Mr. G——, with whom, in their solitary walks in the neighbourhood of the city, he frequently discussed and speculated on the immortality of the soul, the possibility of ghosts walking abroad, and of the dead appearing to the living; and they actually committed the folly of drawing up an agreement, written mutually with their blood, to the effect, "that whichever died first should appear to the other, and thus solve any doubts entertained of the life after death."

G—— went to India, and after the lapse of a few years Brougham had almost forgotten his existence, when one day in winter—the 19th of December—as he was indulging in the half sleepy luxury of a warm bath, he turned to the chair on which he had deposited his clothes, and thereon sat his old college-chum G——, looking him coolly, quietly, and sadly in the face. Lord Brougham adds that he swooned, and found himself lying on the floor. He noted the circumstance, believing it to be all a dream, and yet, when remembering the compact, he could not discharge from his mind a dread that G—— must have died, and that his appearance even in a dream, was to be received as a proof of a future state. Sixty-three years afterwards the veteran statesman and lawyer appends the following note to this story of the apparition:

"Brougham, Oct. 16, 1862.—I have just been copying out from my journal the account of this strange dream, certissima mortis imago. Soon after my return there arrived a letter from India announcing G——'s death, and stating that he died on the 19th of December! Singular coincidence! Yet when one reflects on the vast number of dreams which night after night pass through our brains, the number of coincidences between the vision and the event are perhaps fewer and less remarkable than a fair calculation of chances would warrant us to expect."

THE END.

BILLING, PRINTER, GUILDFORD, SURREY.