id that. But
there was no good in looking for the scamp; he was gone.

A memory not preoccupied with that lake and its omens, and a
presentiment about himself, would not have noted such things. But _his_
mind they touched indelibly; and he was ashamed of his childish slavery,
but could not help it.

The foundation of all this had been laid in the nursery, in the winter's
tales told by its fireside, and which seized upon his fancy and his
fears with a strange congeniality.

There is a large bedroom at Mardykes Hall, which tradition assigns to
the lady who had perished tragically in the lake. Mrs. Julaper was sure
of it; for her aunt, who died a very old woman twenty years before,
remembered the time of the lady's death, and when she grew to woman's
estate had opportunity in abundance; for the old people who surrounded
her could remember forty years farther back, and tell everything
connected with the old house in beautiful Miss Feltram's time.

This large old-fashioned room, commanding a view of Snakes Island, the
fells, and the lake--somewhat vast and gloomy, and furnished in a
stately old fashion--was said to be haunted, especially when the wind
blew from the direction of Golden Friars, the point from which it blew
on the night of her death in the lake; or when the sky was overcast, and
thunder rolled among the lofty fells, and lightning gleamed on the wide
sheet of water.

It was on a night like this that a lady visitor, who long after that
event occupied, in entire ignorance of its supernatural character, that
large room; and being herself a lady of a picturesque turn, and loving
the grander melodrama of Nature, bid her maid leave the shutters open,
and watched the splendid effects from her bed, until, the storm being
still distant, she fell asleep.

It was travelling slowly across the lake, and it was the deep-mouthed
clangour of its near approach that startled her, at dead of night, from
her slumber, to witness the same phenomena in the tremendous loudness
and brilliancy of their near approach.

At this magnificent spectacle she was looking with the awful ecstasy of
an observer in whom the sense of danger is subordinated to that of the
sublime, when she saw suddenly at the window a woman, whose long hair
and dress seemed drenched with water. She was gazing in with a look of
terror, and was shaking the sash of the window with vehemence. Having
stood there for a few seconds, and before the lady, who beheld al