dreams, presentiments, or sudden and unaccountable resolutions and terrors. Having just read this, I was determined, as far as I was concerned, the author should not have written in vain, so I obeyed my impulse at once, and took up my lamp and departed."

The cook regarded her master with open-eyed terror.

"I wouldn't read no such book, sir, if I wes you," she said. "There's books, so I've heered tell, that raise spirits, and brings homens round a house, and thic's waun of 'em, I reckon. I was down to Aun' Nancy's at the lodge this murnin' to taake her down a caake, and I streeve hard to maake her come up to-night with aal the rest of 'em. But she wedn't hire of it-she wedn't. She'd had a token, she said, that her sperrit was caaled away. A little bird had flyed ento her room every evening this week paast. Would you caal thic a homen or a warning, sir?" asked cook, in conclusion.

My father always listened as kindly to servants as he did to children, but I expected, in answer, to hear poor Aunt Nancy's superstition rebuked. I was surprised, then, when he replied softly that doubtless by some mysterious presentiment the poor old woman knew her end to be approaching, or she would not so firmly have expressed her conviction that such was the fact.

What were they all saying now? I could not tell, I only heard my father's words:

"I assure you, my dear, I heard footsteps on the gravel. The villagers the singers would not come to the front of the house-that's nonsense. I'll send some of the servants round to see—or stay, as they are all so happy, I will not disturb them; I'll go myself, and take only Zeke."

These words unlocked my tongue. I sprang forward, and clinging to my father's arm, implored him not to go. But the power to utter what I had seen seemed still denied me. My faculties were numbed by the conflicting waves of terror, shame, doubt, indecision, that swept rapidly over my brain, and, above all, a nameless, undefinable dread withheld me. I still saw that hideous face, and the uplifted weapon threatening me with death if I spoke.

My father, my mother-all now remarked my paleness, my agitation, and crowding around me with kind words and caresses the cold oppression at my heart gave way, and I found relief in a passionate burst of tears.

They put it down to the score of my having stayed up too late, and I, exhausted and convulsed with sobs, was in no state to combat the general opinion. Still I was able to wring a faithful promise from my father that he would not leave the house, before, half-choked with hot negus, stifled with kisses, and my pockets crammed with sweetmeats, I was half led, half carried up to bed, Sarah promising to stop with me.

III.

THE next morning-the happy Christmas morning to which I had looked forward so long-I was awoke by an eager whispering. I sat up within my white curtains to listen.

"Murdered!" I heard Sarah's voice say. "Good heavens! when?" "Last night, between eleven and twelve, they think."

I tore back the curtains, and seized Sarah's arm. "Who is murdered?" I screamed.

"Don't be frightened, Master Gerald," answered Sarah; "it is poor old Aunt Nancy down at the lodge. She was murdered last night, some time or other; but it was not found out till about seven this morning, when our cart wanting to go through the gate, and the man not being able to make her hear, he opened the lodge door, and found her lying dead on the planchen. The doctor, who comed as fast as he could from Kerryer Church-town, says she was hit on the head with a hatchet, or some such thing as that. And poor old Nancy's own hatchet is missing, so for certain that's what the murderer killed her with, and he has taken it away with him, or hid it."

I fell back on my pillow. What was that thing that had gleamed in the light last night as the murderer-I felt sure he was the murderer-had raised it to threaten me? I knew now; it was a hatchet. And where was it to-day? Like a flash of light it seemed to be revealed to me that I knew.

Close by the library-into the window of which the murderer must have looked, on the quiet figure of my father reading-there was a narrow path, dark, partly with the shade of many small trees and shrubs thickly planted, and partly with the shadow of an old and crumbling wall. We children never ran down that path to play, for it led to a deep pit, black and dangerous itself, but rendered more horrible by the legends of superstitious terror in which its history was shrouded. At rare intervals, and only when a servant accompanied us, we had stood on its dark brink, and with cautious step and fearful hand had thrown in the pebbles, whose noise, as they rattled against its unknown sides, or fell at last with a heavy sound into its black waters, curdled our young blood, and drove the colour from our little blanched faces.

It was of this place I thought now as I pressed my hands on my burning eyes, to shut out the vision of the hatchet, that appeared to me lying in silence and darkness at the bottom of the gloomy pit.

I might have told now of the man I had seen at the window; but as I lay pale and trembling, gathering force to speak, Sarah began eagerly to relate how the poor old woman had been found with the bread-knife in her hand, the loaf lying at her feet. All the blows were on the back of her head. The murderer had struck her treacherously while she was cutting him the bread his poverty or his hunger demanded of her.

"And so everyone thinks," continued Sarah, "'tis thic trapesing vagabon', Phil Thorn, has done it. He was alwis going to her for the bread and butter he was too lazy to earn for hisself, and she never sent 'un away empty. She has often got up in the middle of the night to cut it off for 'un, tha glassenbury dog! However, there's waun comfort-tha villain ain't goet nothing by his deed; for though he paertly rifled tha house, ha missed her little hoard of savings, ha ded. And even ef he'd found 'em they was little enough to commit murder for-to kill a poor, dear, kind old soul like Aun' Nancy, weth no more strength in her than a tomtit," concluded Sarah with a burst of tears.

During the few days that elapsed before this stranger and tramp (Phil Thorn) was discovered and lodged in prison, my secret weighed heavily on my heart, and my dread of him was so great that I could not bear to be left alone, or to lose sight of my father and mother for a moment. His vengeance, I thought, would fall, not on me, but on them. "Tell," I could hear him whisper, "and I'll kill them both!" And to my imaginative mind, fanciful and superstitious, it appeared likely that some demon helped him, and would carry the tale to his ears, if I dared to confess that I had seen him.

When I heard he was in gaol I breathed more freely. I played again, or I climbed my favourite fir-tree for a safer solitude than the grounds could give me, and hid among its dark-green foliage with my beloved books.

But then came the dreadful news that Phil Thorn was discharged; there was not sufficient evidence for his committal, and the missing hatchet could nowhere be found. I was terror-stricken. In every gust of wind that moaned and lingered dismally in our old ghostly house, in every creaking stair or jarring door, I heard the murderer's step or voice and felt his presence. In every passing shadow, in every time-worn portrait on the walls, I saw his frightful face glaring down on me with fierce and threatening hate.

I could not have borne this long; but in February, when our western sun was shining warmly upon banks of primroses and violets, we heard that Phil Thorn was gone over the sea.

As the distance lengthened between us and the escaped assassin, so did my tranquillity return. Perhaps he ceased to bear always in his brain the image of the little child who had seen him ghastly from his deed, with the betraying weapon in his hand; and as I faded from his brain so did he from mine, and the wonderful power and sympathy that links brain to brain ceased to magnetise or paralyse me into terror and silence.

He had won the victory. In the silence of his cell, in the noise of the crowded court, all his thoughts must have been concentrated on the little child who held his life in his hand. All the force of his desire, his passion, his will, must have been united in the wish to keep me silent. And in all the torture, the anguish, the fear, beneath which I writhed I had not spoken.

He was safe now across the sea, his name, his identity lost, and his wicked brain relaxed the tight fibres of thought that bound my image to him with murderous desires of revenge and hate. He flung me off from him, and I grew happy and tranquil.

Gradually the hot steam of that cruel murder was lost in the sheen of the summer sky. The fair fresh leaves that shook fragrant in the breeze, and the flowers that starred the earth, covered poor Nancy's blood, and she was forgotten.

YEARS passed away.

IV.

We left Cornwall, and I was a great boy, nearly fifteen, when, riding out one day with a brother a year or two younger than myself, my pony lost a shoe. We stopped at the first village to have it replaced, and in the little parlour of the inn I took up an old paper to beguile the time. I was interested when I found it was a Cornish journal, and I went on reading though it was dated some months back. But what was my surprise when, turning the page, I saw a long account of Phil Thorn's second arrest, his committal this time, his trial and subsequent acquittal!

He had enlisted under a false name, had gone to one of the colonies, and after some years' service had been invalided home. On board ship, during the voyage, he was seized with fever, and in his delirium raved of a murdered woman-murdered treacherously while she was charitably cutting bread for him. With gasping breath he told how he had come softly behind her, and struck her down with her own hatchet, which he had found on the table; then with mad laughs and curses he spoke of his hurried search for her money, his disappointment, and flight. In shuddering terror he screamed that her spirit was haunting him, and he pointed with shaking finger to where she stood by his bed, silent but accusing. On the night of the murder, he said, she followed him everywhere. No sooner had he struck her down than she stood upright by his side, and it was the horror of her presence that hindered him from finding the little hoard for which he had killed her. In his wild flight she accompanied him, standing over him in the woods where he lurked, or beckoning to him from lighted windows of houses round which he hovered.

On the arrival of the ship in port the horrified listeners gave him into custody. In gaol he recovered, and in the hardness of renewed health denied the raving of his fever.

On his trial there was little evidence could be brought against him, and these delirious wanderings counted for nothing. The murderer was again at large.

I rode home hastily, and related to my father the strange vision I had seen at the window on that Christmas Eve-the night of the murder.

He questioned me closely, and discovering I could not venture to swear that the gleaming weapon held in the man's hand was a hatchet,

and deeming it most improbable that at this distance of time I could identify the horrible face of that night with the bronzed and changed features of the soldier Phil Thorn, he judged it best to let things rest as they were.

And to this day the murder remains unpunished; but I, thinking of it, often wonder if the silence of a child saved the murderer, and I ask myself by what power I was numbed and tongue-tied. And who can account by any philosophy for the sudden extinguishing of the lights in both rooms, as the assassin's face touched the glass? Did this circumstance hinder the commission of a succession of crimes, by interposing a providential darkness between our lives and his desperate hand?

I cannot tell. There are mysteries abroad and around us everywhere, which the deepest efforts of human thought have not yet answered.

Sometimes a vision of the hatchet, rusty with the blood of the only human being that was kind to the wanderer Phil Thorn, floats before me, unfound, unthought of, lying at the bottom of the old gloomy well.

Is it there?

I believe so, but neither time nor chance in this world will ever tell.