Other stories of the same kind are numerous and well known.  The apparition of the Brocken mountain, after having occasioned great admiration and some fear, is now ascertained by philosophers to be a gigantic reflection, which makes the traveller’s shadow, represented upon the misty clouds, appear a colossal figure of almost immeasurable size.  By a similar deception men have been induced, in Westmoreland and other mountainous countries, to imagine they saw troops of horse and armies marching and countermarching, which were in fact only the reflection of horses pasturing upon an opposite height, or of the forms of peaceful travellers.

A very curious case of this kind was communicated to me by the son of the lady principally concerned, and tends to show out of what mean materials a venerable apparition may be sometimes formed.  In youth this lady resided with her father, a man of sense and resolution.  Their house was situated in the principal street of a town of some size.  The back part of the house ran at right angles to an Anabaptist chapel, divided from it by a small cabbage-garden.  The young lady used sometimes to indulge the romantic love of solitude by sitting in her own apartment in the evening till twilight, and even darkness, was approaching.  One evening, while she was thus placed, she was surprised to see a gleamy figure, as of some aerial being, hovering, as it were, against the arched window in the end of the Anabaptist chapel.  Its head was surrounded by that halo which painters give to the Catholic saints; and while the young lady’s attention was fixed on an object so extraordinary, the figure bent gracefully towards her more than once, as if intimating a sense of her presence, and then disappeared.  The seer of this striking vision descended to her family, so much discomposed as to call her father’s attention.  He obtained an account of the cause of her disturbance, and expressed his intention to watch in the apartment next night.  He sat accordingly in his daughter’s chamber, where she also attended him.  Twilight came, and nothing appeared; but as the gray light faded into darkness, the same female figure was seen hovering on the window; the same shadowy form, the same pale light-around the head, the same inclinations, as the evening before.  “What do you think of this?” said the daughter to the astonished father.  “Anything, my dear,” said the father, “rather than allow that we look upon what is supernatural.”  A strict research established a natural cause for the appearance on the window.  It was the custom of an old woman, to whom the garden beneath was rented, to go out at night to gather cabbages.  The lantern she carried in her hand threw up the refracted reflection of her form on the chapel window.  As she stooped to gather her cabbages the reflection appeared to bend forward; and that was the whole matter.