ssibly not; nor dare we
profess to be utterly sceptical--simply as Christians--to all narratives
of this description; but, allowing the possibility, nay, the necessity in
some cases, of supernatural agency, still, a spirit should have some just
and striking reason for its permitted appearance; and we cannot exactly
discover the object of Sir Tristram's mission. Would it be unfair to
hazard a conjecture that the lady, being a Catholic, married in Captain
Georges a Protestant (a supposition which the double performance of the
marriage ceremony with him seems to favour), whom, being anxious to
convert to her own faith, she thought to deceive, by the "cunningly
devised fable" of a spirit with a burning hand, into the Papistical tenet
of purgatory? and, that by a confusion of real circumstances with her
original fiction, is derived the remarkable family tradition recorded?
Leaving this speculation for the private rumination of our readers, we
proceed:

The stories of the young lady suffocated by accidentally enclosing herself
in a chest with a spring lock[7]--of the girl frightened into complete
idiotcy by those who placed a skeleton, or, as some say, a skull only, in
her bed[8]--and of ladies, bishops, &c. obtaining their livelihoods
privately by highway robbery[9], with similar narratives, rather romantic
than superstitious, are general property, and to be met with under various
modifications throughout England. The tale of the King of the Cats[10], a
German tradition, has its exact counterpart in an Irish one, related to us
as an original Hibernian legend, and published some time since in an
excellent work, which having now disappeared, we may perhaps venture to
give, as a novelty, the little tradition in these pages:

A man passing, late at night, a ruined house, observed that it was
lighted, and heard a great mewing, as of a conclave of cats, within. As he
marvelled at the circumstance, a cat jumped upon one of the broken walls,
and said--"Tell Dildrum that Doldrum's dead." The man, little dreaming of
these words being addressed to him, pursued his way home; where, when he
arrived, a good, fire, an excellent supper, and his wife's conversation,
seem to have banished for a time from his recollection what he had seen
and heard. At last, he began to laugh so heartily that he was nearly
choked, and his wife pressed him to tell her the cause of his mirth. This
he did; but no sooner had he uttered the words "Tell Dildrum that