“Presently it seemed to me that I returned to myself, and then those others became part of me by being taken up, one by one, and so lost in my own life.

“My father and mother came up, hand in hand, looking more real than any of the rest.  Their figures vanished, and they seemed to have become a part of me; for I felt all at once the longing to live over the life they had led, on the sea and in strange countries.

“Another figure was just like the one we called the Major, who was a very strong, hearty-looking man, and who is said to have drank hard sometimes, though there is nothing about it on his tombstone, which I used to read in the graveyard.  It seemed to me that there was something about his life that I did not want to make a part of mine, but that there was some right he had in me through my being of his blood, and so his health and his strength went all through me, and I was always to have what was left of his life in that shadow-like shape, forming a portion of mine.

“So in the same way with the shape answering to the portrait of that famous beauty who was the wife of my great-grandfather, and used to be called the Pride of the County.

“And so too with another figure which had the face of that portrait marked on the back, Ruth Bradford, who married one of my ancestors, and was before the court, as I have heard, in the time of the witchcraft trials.

“There was with the rest a dark, wild-looking woman, with a head-dress of feathers.  She kept as it were in shadow, but I saw something of my own features in her face.

“It was on my mind very strongly that the shape of that woman of our blood who was burned long ago by the Papists came very close to me, and was in some way made one with mine, and that I feel her presence with me since, as if she lived again in me; but not always,—­only at times,—­and then I feel borne up as if I could do anything in the world.  I had a feeling as if she were my guardian and protector.

“It seems to me that these, and more, whom I have not mentioned, do really live over some part of their past lives in my life.  I do not understand it all, and perhaps it can be accounted for in some way I have not thought of.  I write it down as nearly as I can give it from memory, by request, and if it is printed at this time had rather have all the real names withheld.

“Myrtle hazard.”

NOTE BY THE FRIEND.

“This statement must be accounted for in some way, or pass into the category of the supernatural.  Probably it was one of those intuitions, with objective projection, which sometimes come to imaginative young persons, especially girls, in certain exalted nervous conditions.  The study of the portraits, with the knowledge of some parts of the history of the persons they represented, and the consciousness of instincts inherited in all probability from these