nts which are so at variance with every-day life, that the
ordinary epithet bestowed on them is "supernatural."

And be my readers few or many, there will be no small proportion of them
to whom once, at least, in the course of their existence, a something
strange and eerie has occurred,--a something which perplexed and
baffled rational conjecture, and struck on those chords which vibrate to
superstition. It may have been only a dream unaccountably verified,--an
undefinable presentiment or forewarning; but up from such slighter and
vaguer tokens of the realm of marvel, up to the portents of ghostly
apparitions or haunted chambers, I believe that the greater number of
persons arrived at middle age, however instructed the class, however
civilized the land, however sceptical the period, to which they belong,
have either in themselves experienced, or heard recorded by intimate
associates whose veracity they accept as indisputable in all ordinary
transactions of life, phenomena which are not to be solved by the wit
that mocks them, nor, perhaps, always and entirely, to the contentment
of the reason or the philosophy that explains them away. Such phenomena,
I say, are infinitely more numerous than would appear from the instances
currently quoted and dismissed with a jest; for few of those who have
witnessed them are disposed to own it, and they who only hear of them
through others, however trustworthy, would not impugn their character
for common-sense by professing a belief to which common-sense is a
merciless persecutor. But he who reads my assertion in the quiet of his
own room, will perhaps pause, ransack his memory, and find there, in
some dark corner which he excludes from "the babbling and remorseless
day," a pale recollection that proves the assertion not untrue.

And it is, I say, an instance of the absorbing tyranny of everyday life,
that whenever some such startling incident disturbs its regular tenor of
thought and occupation, that same every-day life hastens to bury in its
sands the object which has troubled its surface; the more unaccountable,
the more prodigious, has been the phenomenon which has scared and
astounded us, the more, with involuntary effort, the mind seeks to rid
itself of an enigma which might disease the reason that tries to solve
it. We go about our mundane business with renewed avidity; we feel the
necessity of proving to ourselves that we are still sober, practical
men, and refuse to be unfitte