supernatural that came in his way.  The ring was made from the iron of a cross on which a criminal had been executed, and doubtless had the same value in Eucrates’ eyes that a piece of the rope with which a man has been hung possesses in the eyes of a gambler to-day.  On this particular occasion he had left his men at work in the vineyard, and was resting quietly at midday, when his dog began to bark.  At first he thought it was only a favourite boy of his indulging in a little hunting with some friends; but on looking up he saw in front of him a woman at least three hundred feet high, with a sword thirty feet long.  Her lower extremities were like those of a dragon, and snakes were coiling round her neck and shoulders.  Eucrates was not in the least alarmed, but turned the seal of his ring, when a vast chasm opened in the earth, into which she disappeared.  This seems rather to have astonished Eucrates; but he plucked up courage, caught hold of a tree that stood near the edge, and looked over, when he saw all the lower world lying spread before him, including the mead of asphodel, where the shades of the blessed were reclining at ease with their friends and relations, arranged according to clans and tribes.  Among these he recognized his own father, dressed in the clothes in which he was buried; and it must have been comforting to the son to have such good evidence that his parent was safely installed in the Elysian Fields.  In a few moments the chasm closed.

Dio Cassius[108] relates how Trajan was saved in the great earthquake that destroyed nearly the whole of Antioch by a phantom, which appeared to him suddenly, and warned him to leave his house by the window.  A similar story is told of the poet Simonides, who was warned by a spectre that his house was going to fall, and thus enabled to make his escape in time.

I will include here a couple of stories which, if they cannot exactly be classed as stories of warning apparitions, are interesting in themselves, and may at least be considered as ghost stories.  Pliny the Younger[109] tells us how a slave of his, named Marcus, imagined that he saw someone cutting his hair during the night.  When he awoke, the vision proved to have been a true one, for his hair lay all round him.  Soon afterwards the same thing happened again.  His brother, who slept with him, saw nothing; but Marcus declared that two people came in by the windows, dressed in white, and, after cutting his hair, disappeared.  “Nothing astonishing happened,” adds Pliny, “except that I was not prosecuted, as I undoubtedly should have been, had Domitian lived; for this happened during his principate.  Perhaps the cutting of my slave’s hair was a sign of my approaching doom, for accused people cut their hair,” as a sign of mourning.  One may be allowed to wonder whether, after all, a fondness for practical joking is not even older than the age of the younger Pliny.