had to use considerable effort to withdraw the ring from the dead finger.  The effect of the whole disastrous event upon her was to leave her for several months afflicted with an affection of the eyes, which represented half of the face of every person she saw with the swollen, livid, and distorted features of her drowned cousin; a horrible and ghastly result of the nervous shock she had undergone, which she feared she should never be delivered from, but which gradually wore itself out.

The only time I ever saw an apparition was under singularly unfavorable circumstances for such an experience.  I was sitting at midday in an American railroad car, which every occupant but my maid and myself had left to go and get some refreshment at the station, where the train stopped some time for that purpose.  I was sitting with my maid in a small private compartment, sometimes occupied by ladies travelling alone, the door of which (wide open at the time) communicated with the main carriage, and commanded its entire length.  Suddenly a person entered the carriage by a door close to where I sat, and passed down the whole length of the car.  I sprang from my seat, exclaiming aloud, “There is C——!” and rushed to the door before, by any human possibility, any one could have reached the other end of the car; but nobody was to be seen.  My maid had seen nothing.  The person I imagined I had seen was upwards of two hundred miles distant; but what was to me the most curious part of this experience was that had I really met the person I saw anywhere, my most careful endeavor would have been to avoid her, and, if possible, to escape being seen by her; whereas this apparition, or imagination, so affected my nerves that I rushed after it as if desirous of pursuing and overtaking it, while my deliberate desire with regard to the image I thus sprang towards would have been never to have seen it again as long as I lived.  The state of the atmosphere at the time of this occurrence was extraordinarily oppressive, and charged with a tremendous thunder-storm, a condition of the air which, as I have said, always acts with extremely distressing and disturbing influence upon my whole physical system.

                    ST. JAMES STREET, BUCKINGHAM GATE, February, 1828. 
     MY DEAREST H——­,

I have this instant received your letter, and, contrary to John’s wise rule of never answering an epistle till three days after he receives it, I sit down to write, to talk, to be with you.  Pray, when your potatoes flourish, your fires are put out by the sun, and your hills are half hid in warm mist, wish one hearty wish for me, such as I spend by the dozen on you.  I confess I am disappointed, as far as I can be with a letter of yours, at finding you had not yet received my parcel, for my vanity has been in considerable anxiety respecting your judgment on my production.  Now that the effervescence of my poetical furor has subsided, and that repeated perusals have