rsons now living at the Withers
Homestead, or The Poplars, as it was more commonly called of late years,
we must take a brief inventory of some of their vital antecedents. It
is by no means certain that our individual personality is the single
inhabitant of these our corporeal frames. Nay, there is recorded an
experience of one of the living persons mentioned in this narrative,--to
be given in full in its proper place, which, so far as it is received
in evidence, tends to show that some, at least, who have long been dead,
may enjoy a kind of secondary and imperfect, yet self-conscious life,
in these bodily tenements which we are in the habit of considering
exclusively our own. There are many circumstances, familiar to common
observers, which favor this belief to a certain extent. Thus, at one
moment we detect the look, at another the tone of voice, at another some
characteristic movement of this or that ancestor, in our relations or
others. There are times when our friends do not act like themselves, but
apparently in obedience to some other law than that of their own proper
nature. We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise us.
Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in. No less than eight
distinct personalities are said to have coexisted in a single female
mentioned by an ancient physician of unimpeachable authority. In this
light we may perhaps see the meaning of a sentence, from a work which
will be repeatedly referred to in this narrative, viz.: "This body in
which we journey across the isthmus between the two oceans is not a
private carriage, but an omnibus."

The ancestry of the Withers family had counted a martyr to their faith
before they were known as Puritans. The record was obscure in some
points; but the portrait, marked "Ann Holyoake, burned by ye bloudy
Papists, ano 15.." (figures illegible), was still hanging against
the panel over the fireplace in the west parlor at The Poplars. The
following words were yet legible on the canvas: "Thou hast made a
covenant O Lord with mee and my Children forever."

The story had come down, that Ann Holyoake spoke these words in a prayer
she offered up at the stake, after the fagots were kindled. There had
always been a secret feeling in the family, that none of her descendants
could finally fall from grace, in virtue of this solemn "covenant."

There had been also a legend in the family, that the martyred woman's
spirit exercised a kind of supervisi