country than Lower Canada, those who might have employed such means would not perhaps have had an opportunity of seeing their enterprise crowned with success; but in our country districts, where the people believe in ghosts and bugbears, it would almost certainly produce the desired effect.  This expedient, instead of being ridiculous, was atrocious.  The employment of it could not fail to cause Mrs V—­ to suffer the most painful agonies, and her neighbors the torments of doubt.

The credulity of the French-Canadian is the work of the clergy; they invent and relate, in order to excite their piety, the most marvellous things.  For example:  the priests say that souls in purgatory desiring alleviation come and ask masses of their relatives, either by appearing in the same form they had in life, or by displacing the furniture and making a noise, as long as they have not terminated the expiation of their sins.  The Catholic clergy, by supporting these fabulous doctrines and pious lies, lead their flock into the baleful habit of believing things the most absurd and destitute of proof.

The day after Miss V—­’s funeral, everybody in the parish was talking of the woeful cries which had been heard the night before near her grave.  The inhabitants of the place, imbued with fantastic ideas that their rector had kept alive, were dupes of the artifice employed by some of their own number.  They became convinced that there is no safety outside of the church, of which they formed a part.  Seized with horror they determined never to pass a night near the grave of the cursed one, as they already called the young Protestant.  Mrs. V—­ by the instinctive effect of prejudices inculcated when she was a Catholic, was at first a prey to deadly anxiety; but recalling the holy life of her daughter, she no longer doubted of her being among the number of the elect.  She guessed at the cause of the noise which was heard near the grave of her child.  In order to assure herself of the justness of her suspicions, she besought the two neighbors of whom I have already spoken, to conceal themselves there the following night.  These persons were glad of an occasion to test the accuracy of what a curate of their acquaintance had told them; who had asserted that a spirit free from the body could yet manifest itself substantially to the living, as speaking without tongue, touching without hands.

They discovered the man who was paid to play the ghost; they seized him, and in order to punish him, tied him to a tree, at the foot of which Miss V—­ was buried.  The poor creature the next morning no longer acted the soul in torment, but shouted like a person who very much wanted his breakfast.  At noon one of his friends passed by who, hearing him implore assistance, approached and set him free.  Overwhelmed with questions and derision, the false ghost confessed he had acted thus only to obtain the reward which had been promised him.  You may easily guess that the ridicule and reprobation turned upon those who had made him their instrument.