room dore is opened, and an apparition, in shape of a country tradsman, came in, and opened the courtains without speaking a word’.  The doctor determined not to begin a conversation, so the apparition lighted the candles, brought them to the bedside, and backed to the door.  Dr. Rule, like old Brer Rabbit, ‘kept on a-saying nothing’.  ’Then the apparition took an effectuall way to raise the doctor.  He caryed back the candles to the table, and, with the tongs, took doun the kindled coals, and laid them on the deal chamber floor.’  Dr. Rule now ’thought it was time to rise,’ and followed the appearance, who carried the candles downstairs, set them on the lowest step, and vanished.  Dr. Rule then lifted the candles, and went back to bed.  Next morning he went to the sheriff, and told him there ‘was murder in it’.  The sheriff said, ‘it might be so,’ but, even if so, the crime was not recent, as the house for thirty years had stood empty.  The step was taken up, and a dead body was found, ’and bones, to the conviction of all’.  The doctor then preached on these unusual events, and an old man of eighty fell a-weeping, confessing that, as a mason lad, he had killed a companion, and buried him in that spot, while the house was being built.  Consequently the house, though a new one, was haunted from the first, and was soon deserted.  The narrator, Mr. Mercer, had himself seen two ghosts of murdered boys frequently in Dundee.  He did not speak, nor did they, and as the rooms were comfortable he did not leave them.  To have talked about the incident would only have been injurious to his landlady.  ’The longer I live, the more unexpected things I meet with, and even among my own relations,’ says Mr. Wodrow with much simplicity.  But he never met with a ghost, nor even with any one who had met with a ghost, except Mr. Mercer.

In the same age, or earlier, Increase Mather represents apparitions as uncommonly scarce in New England, though diabolical possession and witchcraft were as familiar as influenza.  It has been shown that, in nearly forty years of earnest collecting, Mr. Wodrow did not find a single supernatural occurrence which was worth investigating by the curious.  Every tale was old, or some simple natural cause was at the bottom of the mystery, or the narrative rested on vague gossip, or was a myth.  Today, at any dinner party, you may hear of bogles and wraiths at first or at second hand, in an abundance which would have rejoiced Wodrow.  Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe vainly brags, in Law’s Memorialls, that ’good sense and widely diffused information have driven our ghosts to a few remote castles in the North of Scotland’ (1819).  But, however we are to explain it, the ghosts have come forth again, and, like golf, have crossed the Tweed.  Now this is a queer result of science, common-sense, cheap newspapers, popular education, and progress in general.  We may all confess to a belief in ghosts, because we call them ‘phantasmogenetic agencies,’ and in as much of witchcraft as we style ‘hypnotic suggestion’.  So great, it seems, is the force of language! {303}