Before the story is commenced, the understanding gentlewoman (not the Justice of Peace), who is the reporter, takes some pains to repel the objections made against the story by some of the friends of Mrs. Veal’s brother, who consider the marvel as an aspersion on their family, and do what they can to laugh it out of countenance.  Indeed, it is allowed, with admirable impartiality, that Mr. Veal is too much of a gentleman to suppose Mrs. Bargrave invented the story—­scandal itself could scarce have supposed that—­although one notorious liar, who is chastised towards the conclusion of the story, ventures to throw out such an insinuation.  No reasonable or respectable person, however, could be found to countenance the suspicion, and Mr. Veal himself opined that Mrs. Bargrave had been driven crazy by a cruel husband, and dreamed the whole story of the apparition.  Now all this is sufficiently artful.  To have vouched the fact as universally known, and believed by every one, nem. con., would not have been half so satisfactory to a skeptic as to allow fairly that the narrative had been impugned, and hint at the character of one of those skeptics, and the motives of another, as sufficient to account for their want of belief.  Now to the fact itself.

Mrs. Bargrave and Mrs. Veal had been friends in youth, and had protested their attachment should last as long as they lived; but when Mrs. Veal’s brother obtained an office in the customs at Dover, some cessation of their intimacy ensued, “though without any positive quarrel.”  Mrs. Bargrave had removed to Canterbury, and was residing in a house of her own, when she was suddenly interrupted by a visit from Mrs. Veal, as she was sitting in deep contemplation of certain distresses of her own.  The visitor was in a riding-habit, and announced herself as prepared for a distant journey (which seems to intimate that spirits have a considerable distance to go before they arrive at their appointed station, and that the females at least put on a habit for the occasion).  The spirit, for such was the seeming Mrs. Veal, continued to waive the ceremony of salutation, both in going and coming, which will remind the reader of a ghostly lover’s reply to his mistress in the fine old Scottish ballad:—­

Why should I come within thy bower? 
I am no earthly man;
And should I kiss thy rosy lips,
Thy days would not be lang.

They then began to talk in the homely style of middle-aged ladies, and Mrs. Veal proses concerning the conversations they had formerly held, and the books they had read together.  Her very recent experience probably led Mrs. Veal to talk of death, and the books written on the subject, and she pronounced ex cathedra, as a dead person was best entitled to do, that “Drelincourt’s book on Death was the best book on the subject ever written.”  She also mentioned Dr. Sherlock, two Dutch books which had been translated, and several others; but Drelincourt, she said, had the clearest