, or at least with very little embellishment, of a story
that I remembered being struck with in my childhood, when told at the
fireside by a lady of eminent virtues and no inconsiderable share of
talent, one of the ancient and honourable house of Swinton. She was
a kind of relation of my own, and met her death in a manner so
shocking--being killed, in a fit of insanity, by a female attendant who
had been attached to her person for half a lifetime--that I cannot now
recall her memory, child as I was when the catastrophe occurred, without
a painful reawakening of perhaps the first images of horror that the
scenes of real life stamped on my mind.

This good spinster had in her composition a strong vein of the
superstitious, and was pleased, among other fancies, to read alone in
her chamber by a taper fixed in a candlestick which she had had formed
out of a human skull. One night this strange piece of furniture acquired
suddenly the power of locomotion, and, after performing some odd circles
on her chimney-piece, fairly leaped on the floor, and continued to roll
about the apartment. Mrs. Swinton calmly proceeded to the adjoining room
for another light, and had the satisfaction to penetrate the mystery on
the spot. Rats abounded in the ancient building she inhabited, and one
of these had managed to ensconce itself within her favourite MEMENTO
MORI. Though thus endowed with a more than feminine share of nerve, she
entertained largely that belief in supernaturals which in those times
was not considered as sitting ungracefully on the grave and aged of
her condition; and the story of the Magic Mirror was one for which she
vouched with particular confidence, alleging indeed that one of her own
family had been an eye-witness of the incidents recorded in it.

"I tell the tale as it was told to me."

Stories enow of much the same cast will present themselves to the
recollection of such of my readers as have ever dabbled in a species
of lore to which I certainly gave more hours, at one period of my life,
than I should gain any credit by confessing.

AUGUST 1831.

AUNT MARGARET'S MIRROR.

"There are times
When Fancy plays her gambols, in despite
Even of our watchful senses--when in sooth
Substance seems shadow, shadow substance seems--
When the broad, palpable, and mark'd partition
'Twixt that which is and is not seems dissolved,
As if the mental eye gain'd power to gaze
Beyond the limits of the ex