The alarm of robbers and smugglers gradually subsided after a week or two; but we were again to hear news from the nursery.  Our second little girl, then between seven and eight years of age, saw in the night time—­she alone being awake—­a young woman, with black, or very dark hair, which hung loose, and with a black cloak on, standing near the middle of the floor, opposite the hearthstone, and fronting the foot of her bed.  She appeared quite unobservant of the children and nurse sleeping in the room.  She was very pale, and looked, the child said, both “sorry and frightened,” and with something very peculiar and terrible about her eyes, which made the child conclude that she was dead.  She was looking, not at, but in the direction of the child’s bed, and there was a dark streak across her throat, like a scar with blood upon it.  This figure was not motionless; but once or twice turned slowly, and without appearing to be conscious of the presence of the child, or the other occupants of the room, like a person in vacancy or abstraction.  There was on this occasion a night-light burning in the chamber; and the child saw, or thought she saw, all these particulars with the most perfect distinctness.  She got her head under the bed-clothes; and although a good many years have passed since then, she cannot recall the spectacle without feelings of peculiar horror.

One day, when the children were playing in the back garden, I asked them to point out to me the spot where they were accustomed to see the woman who occasionally showed herself as I have described, near the stable wall.  There was no division of opinion as to this precise point, which they indicated in the most distinct and confident way.  I suggested that, perhaps, something might be hidden there in the ground; and advised them digging a hole there with their little spades, to try for it.  Accordingly, to work they went, and by my return in the evening they had grubbed up a piece of a jawbone, with several teeth in it.  The bone was very much decayed, and ready to crumble to pieces, but the teeth were quite sound.  I could not tell whether they were human grinders; but I showed the fossil to one of the physicians I have mentioned, who came out the next evening, and he pronounced them human teeth.  The same conclusion was come to a day or two later by the other medical man.  It appears to me now, on reviewing the whole matter, almost unaccountable that, with such evidence before me, I should not have got in a labourer, and had the spot effectually dug and searched.  I can only say, that so it was.  I was quite satisfied of the moral truth of every word that had been related to me, and which I have here set down with scrupulous accuracy.  But I experienced an apathy, for which neither then nor afterwards did I quite know how to account.  I had a vague, but immovable impression that the whole affair was referable to natural agencies.  It was not until some time after we had left the house,