Before you answer the above question, however, it may be convenient to let you know certain other facts which were clearly established upon the inquest that was very properly held upon the body which in so strange a manner we had discovered.
I purposely avoid details, and without assigning the depositions respectively to the witnesses who made them, shall restrict myself to a naked outline of the evidence as it appeared.
The body I have described was identified as that of Abraham Smith, an unfortunate lunatic, who had, upon the day but one preceding, made his escape from the neighboring parish workhouse, where he had been for many years confined. His hallucination was a strange, but not by any means an unprecedented one. He fancied that he had died, and was condemned; and, as these ideas alternately predominated, sometimes spoke of himself as an "evil spirit," and sometimes importuned his keepers to "bury him;" using habitually certain phrases, which I had no difficulty in recognizing as among those which he had addressed to me. He had been traced to the neighborhood where his body was found, and had been seen and relieved scarcely half a mile from it, about two hours before my visit to the church-yard! There were, further, unmistakable evidences of some person's having climbed up the trellis-work to my window on the previous night, the shutter of which had been left unbarred, and, as the window might have been easily opened with a push, the cold which I experienced, as an accompaniment of the nocturnal visit, was easily accounted for. There was a mark of blood upon the window-stool, and a scrape upon the knee of the body corresponded with it. A multiplicity of other slight circumstances, and the positive assertion of the chamber-maid that the window had been opened, and was but imperfectly closed again, came in support of the conclusion, which was to my mind satisfactorily settled by the concurrent evidence of the medical men, to the effect that the unhappy man could not have been many hours dead when the body was found.
Taken in the mass, the evidence convinced me; and though I might still have clung to the preternatural theory, which, in the opinion of some persons, the facts of the case might still have sustained, I candidly decided with the weight of evidence, "gave up the ghost," and accepted the natural, but still somewhat horrible explanation of the occurrence. For this candor I take credit to myself. I might have stopped short at the discovery of the corpse, but I am no friend to "spurious gospels;" let our faith, whatever it is, be founded in honest fact. For my part, I steadfastly believe in ghosts, and have dozens of stories to support that belief; but this is not among them. Should I ever come, therefore, to tell you one, pray remember that you have to deal with a candid narrator.
DEATH OF CROMWELL.
The flowers of autumn, withering fast.
Before the bitter Northern blast;
The earth with hoary frost o'erspread,
And Nature's leafy mantle shed,
Proclaimed abroad through earth and sky
That winter's gloomy reign drew nigh.
And he, whose hand, with mighty stroke,
Oppression's chains had often broke,
Whose patriot heart and fearless voice
Had made oppression's slaves rejoice,
Like autumn's beauty, day by day,
Was passing rapidly away.
Life's spring had brought him hopes and fears,
Its summer many toils and cares;
Autumn had brought him power and fame,
But autumn passed—life's winter came;
And then, like nature, seeking rest,
His head a dying pillow pressed.
A furious storm, with dreadful roar,
Shook Britain's isle from shore to shore,
The raging sea, with thundering sound,
Spread ruin, fear, and death around;
And seem'd to tell throughout the land
Some dire event was near at hand.