“Who can that be?” asked the husband in amazement.  “I fastened all the doors and windows before we left the lower rooms.”

Again came the loud call, this time with an accent of agonized entreaty:  “Caroline! oh, Caroline! come down—­do come!”

The young couple hesitated no longer, but hastened down stairs.  There was no one there.  Doors and windows were securely fastened, and the old house looked as solitary as when they had first entered it.

“Very strange!” said the gentleman.  “But now that we are down here, Caroline, suppose we take a look at the garden?” So they sallied forth to examine that portion of their new domain, but scarcely had they entered it when they were startled by a loud crash within the house.  Looking up, they saw volumes of what appeared to be smoke issuing from the window of the room they had just quitted, and fearing that the room was on fire, they quickly returned to it.  There was no fire:  what had appeared to be smoke was only a cloud of dust, for the massive and elaborately ornamented ceiling had fallen, and the heavy centre-piece had crushed to fragments the table against which the young wife had so lately been leaning.  But for the warning voice her destruction would have been inevitable.  My informant went on to state that the pieces of the shattered table were preserved as sacred relics by his parents, and that his mother always declared that she had recognized in the mysterious voice that of a dear relative long before deceased.

It was once my fortune to pass some weeks in a “haunted house.”  I was quite young then, a mere school-girl in fact, and the friend whom I came to visit was also very young; and both of us were too gay and frolicsome to care much for whatever was strange or startling in our surroundings.  Not that we ever saw anything—­my friend herself, the daughter of the house, had never done so—­but the sounds we heard were sufficiently odd and inexplicable to fill us with astonishment, if not with terror.  Twice during my visit I was roused from a sound slumber by a loud, heavy crash, resembling that which might be caused by the overthrow of a marble-topped washstand or bureau, or some other equally ponderous piece of furniture.  The room actually vibrated, and yet a close scrutiny of that and the adjoining apartments failed to reveal any cause for the peculiar noise.  It was a sound which could not possibly have been produced by cracking furniture, falling bricks, scampering rats, or any other of the numerous causes of supposed ghostly sounds.  The room overhead was used as a linen-room, and was always kept locked; and besides, the noise (which I afterward heard on another occasion in broad daylight, when I was wide awake) was unmistakably in the room where we found ourselves.  My friend told me that she had heard it very often—­so often, in fact, that she had got quite used to it, and no longer felt any emotion save that of curiosity.