gown was scoured”; and she cried that the gown was described exactly, for, said she, “I helped her to make it up.”  And next we have the silly attempts made to discredit the history.  Even Mr. Veal, her brother, was obliged to allow that the gold was found, but with a difference, and pretended it was not found in a cabinet, but elsewhere; and, in short, we have all the gossip of says I, and thinks I, and says she, and thinks she, which disputed matters usually excite in a country town.

When we have thus turned the tale, the seam without, it may be thought too ridiculous to have attracted notice.  But whoever will read it as told by De Foe himself, will agree that, could the thing have happened in reality, so it would have been told.  The sobering the whole supernatural visit into the language of the middle or low life, gives it an air of probability even in its absurdity.  The ghost of an exciseman’s housekeeper, and a seamstress, were not to converse like Brutus with his Evil Genius.  And the circumstances of scoured silks, broken tea-china, and such like, while they are the natural topics of such persons’ conversation, would, one might have thought, be the last which an inventor would have introduced into a pretended narrative betwixt the dead and living.  In short, the whole is so distinctly circumstantial, that, were it not for the impossibility, or extreme improbability at least, of such an occurrence, the evidence could not but support the story.

The effect was most wonderful. Drelincourt upon Death, attested by one who could speak from experience, took an unequaled run.  The copies had hung on the bookseller’s hands as heavy as a pile of lead bullets.  They now traversed the town in every direction, like the same balls discharged from a field-piece.  In short, the object of Mrs. Veal’s apparition was perfectly attained.—­[See The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., vol. iv. p. 305, ed. 1827.]

CANON ALBERIC’S SCRAP-BOOK

BY MONTAGUE RHODES JAMES

St. Bertrand de Comminges is a decayed town on the spurs of the Pyrenees, not very far from Toulouse, and still nearer to Bagneres-de-Luchon.  It was the site of a bishopric until the Revolution, and has a cathedral which is visited by a certain number of tourists.  In the spring of 1883 an Englishman arrived at this old-world place—­I can hardly dignify it with the name of city, for there are not a thousand inhabitants.  He was a Cambridge man, who had come specially from Toulouse to see St. Bertrand’s Church, and had left two friends, who were less keen archaeologists than himself, in their hotel at Toulouse, under promise to join him on the following morning.  Half an hour at the church would satisfy them, and all three could then pursue their journey in the direction of Auch.  But our Englishman had come early on the day in question, and proposed to himself