ounted-for disappearance. It is only
unaccounted for in one generation. But disappearances never to be
accounted for on any supposition are not uncommon, among the traditions
of the last century. I have heard (and I think I have read it in one of
the earlier numbers of _Chambers's Journal_), of a marriage which took
place in Lincolnshire about the year 1750. It was not then _de rigueur_
that the happy couple should set out on a wedding journey; but instead,
they and their friends had a merry jovial dinner at the house of either
bride or groom; and in this instance the whole party adjourned to the
bridegroom's residence, and dispersed, some to ramble in the garden,
some to rest in the house until the dinner-hour. The bridegroom, it is
to be supposed, was with his bride, when he was suddenly summoned away
by a domestic, who said that a stranger wished to speak to him; and
henceforward he was never seen more. The same tradition hangs about
an old deserted Welsh Hall standing in a wood near Festiniog; there,
too, the bridegroom was sent for to give audience to a stranger on his
wedding-day, and disappeared from the face of the earth from that time;
but there, they tell in addition, that the bride lived long,--that she
passed her three-score years and ten, but that daily during all those
years, while there was light of sun or moon to lighten the earth, she
sat watching,--watching at one particular window which commanded a view
of the approach to the house. Her whole faculties, her whole mental
powers, became absorbed in that weary watching; long before she died,
she was childish, and only conscious of one wish--to sit in that long
high window, and watch the road, along which he might come. She was as
faithful as Evangeline, if pensive and inglorious.

That these two similar stories of disappearance on a wedding-day
"obtained," as the French say, shows us that anything which adds to
our facility of communication, and organization of means, adds to our
security of life. Only let a bridegroom try to disappear from an untamed
_Katherine_ of a bride, and he will soon be brought home, like a
recreant coward, overtaken by the electric telegraph, and clutched back
to his fate by a detective policeman.

Two more stories of disappearance, and I have done. I will give you the
last in date first, because it is the most melancholy; and we will wind
up cheerfully (after a fashion). Some time between 1820 and 1830, there
lived in North Sh