“Humbert Birk, a burgess of note in the town of Oppenheim, had a country-house, called Berenbach.  He died in the month of November, 1620, a few days before the feast of St. Martin.  On the Saturday which followed his funeral they began to hear certain noises in the house where he had lived with his first wife; for at the time of his death he had married again.  The master of this house, suspecting that it was his brother-in-law who haunted it, said to him:  ’If you are Humbert, my brother-in-law, strike three times against the wall.’  At the same time they heard three strokes only, for ordinarily he struck several times.  Sometimes, also, he was heard at the fountain where they went for water, and he frightened all the neighborhood.  He did not utter articulate sounds; but he would knock repeatedly, make a noise, or a groan or a shrill whistle, or sounds as of a person in lamentation.”

This went on, at intervals, for a year, when the ghost found a voice, and told them to tell the cure to come there; and when he came he said he wanted three masses said for him, and alms given to the poor.  The author has the following sensible observations on the modes in which ghost stories originate:—­

“We call to our assistance the artifices of the charlatans, who do so many things which pass for supernatural in the eyes of the ignorant.  Philosophers, by means of certain glasses, and what are called magic lanterns; by optical secrets, sympathetic powders:  by their phosphorus, and, lately, by means of the electric machine, show us an infinite number of things which the simpletons take for magic, because they know not how they are produced.  Eyes that are diseased do not see things as others see them, or else behold them differently.  A drunken man will see objects double; to one who has the jaundice they will appear yellow:  in the obscurity people fancy they see a spectre, where there is but the trunk of a tree.

“A mountebank will appear to eat a sword; mother will vomit coals, or pebbles.  One will drink wine, and send it out again at his forehead; another will cut off his companion’s head, and put it on again.  You will think you see a chicken dragging a beam.  The mountebank will swallow fire, and vomit it forth; he will draw blood from fruit; he will send from his mouth strings of iron nails; he will put a sword on his stomach, and press it strongly, and instead of running into him, it will bend back to the hilt.  Another will run a sword through his body without wounding himself.  You will sometimes see a child without a head, then a head without a child and all of them alive.  That appears very wonderful; nevertheless, if it were known how all these things are done, people would only laugh, and be surprised that they could wonder at and admire such things.”

If we are so easily deceived in these matters, is it strange that in peculiar states of mind or body, we are so completely imposed on in others?  At p. 353 we have the story on which Goethe has founded a singular exploit of Mephistopheles in the cellar of Auerbach.