quires no confirmation. An ignorant or superstitious man fallen into
this state, may find good reason to tell ghost stories to his neighbors.
Disease, and the debility preceding death, make people on their
death-beds very liable to plays of this kind on their failing faculties;
and one solemnity or cause of dread, thus being added to another, seems
to give the strength of reason to a superstitious feeling.

Concerning my own experience, which comes under the class of natural
ghost-seeing above mentioned, I may mention in good faith, that, if such
phantoms were worth recalling, I could fill up an hour with the
narration of those spectral sights and sounds which were most prominent
among the illusions of my childhood. Sights and sounds were equally
distinct and lifelike. I have run up-stairs obedient to a spectral call.
Every successive night for a fortnight, my childish breath was stilled
by the proceedings of a spectral rat, audible, never visible. It
nightly, at the same hour, burst open a cupboard door, scampered across
the floor, and shook the chair by my bedside. Wide awake and alone in
the broad daylight, I have heard the voices of two nobodies gravely
conversing, after the absurd dream fashion, in my room. Then as for
spectral sights:--During the cholera of 1832, I, then a boy, walking in
Holborn, saw in the sky the veritable flaming sword which I had learnt
by heart out of a picture in an old folio of "Paradise Lost." And round
the fiery sword there was a regular oval of blue sky to be seen through
parted clouds. It was a fact not unimportant, that this phantom sword
did not move with my eye, but remained for some time, apparently, only
in one part of the heavens. I looked aside and lost it. When I looked
back, there was the image still. These are hallucinations which arise
from a disordered condition of the nervous system; they are the seeing
or the hearing of what is not, and they are not by any means uncommon.
Out of these there must, undoubtedly, arise a large number of
well-attested stories of ghosts, seen by one person only. Such ghosts
ought to excite no more terror than a twinge of rheumatism, or a nervous
headache.

There can be no doubt, however, that, in our minds or bodies, there are
powers latent, or nearly latent, in the ordinary healthy man, which, in
some peculiar constitutions, or under the influence of certain agents,
or certain classes of disease, become active, and develope themselves in
an e