asant turn to our thoughts after we had retired to
our rooms. Being an invalid, I had a small bed to myself--resigning the
four-poster to my wife. The candle was extinguished, but a night-light
was burning. I was coming up stairs, and she, already in bed, had just
dismissed her maid, when we were both startled by a wild scream from her
room; I found her in a state of the extremest agitation and terror. She
insisted that she had seen an unnaturally tall figure come beside her
bed and stand there. The light was too faint to enable her to define any
thing respecting this apparition, beyond the fact of her having most
distinctly seen such a shape, colourless from the insufficiency of the
light to disclose more than its dark outline.

We both endeavoured to re-assure her. The room once more looked so
cheerful in the candlelight, that we were quite uninfluenced by the
contagion of her terrors. The movements and voices of the servants down
stairs still getting things into their places and completing our
comfortable arrangements, had also their effect in steeling us against
any such influence, and we set the whole thing down as a dream, or an
imperfectly-seen outline of the bed-curtains. When, however, we were
alone, my wife reiterated, still in great agitation, her clear assertion
that she had most positively seen, being at the time as completely awake
as ever she was, precisely what she had described to us. And in this
conviction she continued perfectly firm.

A day or two after this, it came out that our servants were under an
apprehension that, somehow or other, thieves had established a secret
mode of access to the lower part of the house. The butler, Smith, had
seen an ill-looking woman in his room on the first night of our arrival;
and he and other servants constantly saw, for many days subsequently,
glimpses of a retreating figure, which corresponded with that so seen by
him, passing through a passage which led to a back area in which were
some coal-vaults.

This figure was seen always in the act of retreating, its back turned,
generally getting round the corner of the passage into the area, in a
stealthy and hurried way, and, when closely followed, imperfectly seen
again entering one of the coal-vaults, and when pursued into it, nowhere
to be found.

The idea of any thing supernatural in the matter had, strange to say,
not yet entered the mind of any one of the servants. They had heard some
stories of smugglers hav