But it is in vain that you long for a similar experience, my dear Laura Matilda.  Being the first, we are also the last women to whom these subterranean passages will yield their mysteries, their windings, and their wonders.  Against all of my own sex the Pandemonian depths of the Minnesota Mines are henceforth as obstinately barred as ever were the golden gates of the Mohammedan Paradise.

A LONELY HOUSE.

  “Some weighty crime that Heaven could not pardon,
  A secret curse, on that old building hung,
  And its deserted garden.”

HOOD’S Haunted House.

One autumn evening, not very long ago, I was driving out with my uncle.  I had been spending several weeks at his house, and in that time had driven with him very often, so that I supposed myself familiar with nearly all the roads that stretched away from the pleasant village where he resided; but on this occasion he proposed taking me in an entirely new direction, over a tract of country I had never before seen.

For a mile or two after we left home, we bowled rapidly along on a well-travelled turnpike; then a sudden turn to the right brought us, with slackened speed, into a quiet country-road.  Passing through the fields that bordered the highway, we came into a wild, romantic region of hill and dale that fully deserved all that my uncle had said in its praise.

Giving ourselves up to the sweet influences of the scene, we trotted our horses slowly, past dusky bits of forest that made the air fragrant with the damp smell of the woods, and by occasional shining pools adorned with floating pond-lilies, and shaded with thick, low bushes of witch-hazel.  The sunlight had that orange glow that comes only on autumn evenings, the long, slant rays striking across the yellow fields and lighting up the dark evergreens which dotted the landscape with a tawny illumination, like dull flames.  The locusts hummed drowsily, as if they were almost asleep, and the frogs in the ponds sent out an occasional muffled croak.  Altogether, it was deliciously calm and deserted; we did not meet a human being or a habitation for miles, as we wound along the secluded path, now up and now down, but on the whole gradually ascending, till we reached the summit of a hill larger and steeper than the rest.

Here there stood a lonely house.

Pausing to allow our horses a moment’s rest, my eye was caught by its deserted and dilapidated appearance.  It had evidently been uninhabited for years.  The fence had gone to decay, the gate lay rotting on the ground, and a forlorn sleigh, looking strangely out of place in contrast with the summer-flowers that had over-grown it, was drawn up before the entrance.  The grass had obliterated every trace of the path that once led to the decayed steps, bushes had grown up thickly around the lower story of the house, and tangled vines, creeping in through the broken panes of the