While you ought, my young friends, to feel happy and grateful in being taught what these natural things really are, and released from all superstitious fears or notions respecting them; you should be most careful not to forget what you owe to a purer faith, of which the character is to invite you to inquire into, and to know everything within your reach.
I shall say something to you respecting the cause of the Spectre, in a future chapter.
CHAPTER VIII.
SOME OTHER INSTANCES OF AERIAL REFLECTION.
There has been something very like the Spectre of the Brocken, seen on Souter Fell, a mountain about half a mile high, in Cumberland.
One summer's evening, in the year 1743, as a farmer, named John Wren, and his servant were sitting at the door of his cottage, they saw a man with a dog furiously chasing some horses along a ledge on the side of the mountain which they knew was so narrow that a horse could hardly stand upon it. They seemed to go round one end of the mountain, and disappeared.
The next morning the farmer and his servant went round the track which the horses and man had seemed to take, fully expecting to find that they had fallen over and been killed. You may guess how surprised they were to find no trace whatever of them, not even the mark of a hoof on the ground.
Well, they said nothing of what they had seen, and perhaps they almost forgot it by nearly the same season in the following year, when the servant, whose name was Daniel Strickett, saw one evening a whole troop of horsemen trot along the mountain-side, near the same spot. It seems that he had been laughed at by those to whom he had related the other apparition, so he was rather timid, and resolved to be well assured of the reality of this one before he mentioned it. He looked at the figures for a considerable time, and then called another person to witness the sight with him. Several others afterwards joined them, and continued looking at the aerial horsemen till it was quite dark. All these circumstances were attested before a magistrate in the year 1785: twenty-six persons are said to have been spectators of the sight.