With respect to this nurse, I must mention that I believe no more perfectly trustworthy servant was ever employed in her capacity; and, in addition to her integrity, she was remarkably gifted with sound common sense.

One morning, I think about three or four weeks after our arrival, I was sitting at the parlour window which looked to the front, when I saw the little iron door which admitted into the small garden that lay between the window where I was sitting and the public road, pushed open by a woman who so exactly answered the description given by Smith of the woman who had visited his room on the night of his arrival as instantaneously to impress me with the conviction that she must be the identical person.  She was a square, short woman, dressed in soiled and tattered clothes, scarred and pitted with small-pox, and blind of an eye.  She stepped hurriedly into the little enclosure, and peered from a distance of a few yards into the room where I was sitting.  I felt that now was the moment to clear the matter up; but there was something stealthy in the manner and look of the woman which convinced me that I must not appear to notice her until her retreat was fairly cut off.  Unfortunately, I was suffering from a lame foot, and could not reach the bell as quickly as I wished.  I made all the haste I could, and rang violently to bring up the servant Smith.  In the short interval that intervened, I observed the woman from the window, who having in a leisurely way, and with a kind of scrutiny, looked along the front windows of the house, passed quickly out again, closing the gate after her, and followed a lady who was walking along the footpath at a quick pace, as if with the intention of begging from her.  The moment the man entered I told him—­“the blind woman you described to me has this instant followed a lady in that direction, try to overtake her.”  He was, if possible, more eager than I in the chase, but returned in a short time after a vain pursuit, very hot, and utterly disappointed.  And, thereafter, we saw her face no more.

All this time, and up to the period of our leaving the house, which was not for two or three months later, there occurred at intervals the only phenomenon in the entire series having any resemblance to what we hear described of “Spiritualism.”  This was a knocking, like a soft hammering with a wooden mallet, as it seemed in the timbers between the bedroom ceilings and the roof.  It had this special peculiarity, that it was always rythmical, and, I think, invariably, the emphasis upon the last stroke.  It would sound rapidly “one, two, three, four—­one, two, three, four;” or “one, two, three—­one, two, three,” and sometimes “one, two—­one, two,” &c., and this, with intervals and resumptions, monotonously for hours at a time.