I am indebted to my friend, Thomas Hill, Esq., the eminent landscape painter, for the singularly appropriate adaptation of weird figures to letters on the cover of my book, and also for the very felicitous representation of the “Ghost.” His magic pencil masters the alphabet as well as the higher regions of art, and I feel assured that my readers will be pleased that I had, in my need, so able an assistant in helping me to make my humble effort acceptable.

J. B.

CONTENTS.

PAGE
Preliminary Remarks[9]
I.The Roads[11]
II.The Incidents[18]
III.The Scene[22]
IV.The Brook[25]
V.The Dogs[30]
VI.The Flat Bridge[34]
VII.Suspected[41]
VIII.The Murder-Rock[45]
IX.Suspicion[49]
X.Was it a Ghost?[57]
XI.The Tests[67]
XII.Tests[75]
XIII.The Doctor’s Story[94]
XIV.My Plan of Punishment[101]
XV.The Children[110]
XVI.Ghosts[113]
XVII.Manifestations[123]

PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

The main circumstances that form, in part, the topic of my recital, excited, at the time of their occurrence, a feeling of unprecedented horror. They came upon the public sensibility with a force that even the previous recital of the bloody events of the civil war could not lessen. Habituation to horror had not deadened the public susceptibility; for there was around the incidents a belt of mystery and affright that defied the approach of justice, and baffled private speculation.

No necessity, even in the tortuous excuses of crime, was apparent for the deed; for the victims had had no opportunities to establish, individually of themselves, hostile relations with any one, and their condition placed them beyond or beneath the chance of social importance. They were claimants to no estate in litigation, stood in no man’s way to advancement, could have produced no rivalry, had inspired neither revenge, nor jealousy, nor love. They had, in fine, none of those means that men and women have to incite to crime; for they were children, and yet they were subjected to a fate that few, if any, children, had confronted before.

The commission of the deed was a barbarity; its motives, apparently, a paradox.