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in that quarter consisted of a few comfortable hut-like cottages, some of them more than a mile apart. Vulgar credulity was exercised by rumours of resurrectionism and apparitions; and if only a tithe of what was gossiped about had happened, the ghostly flittings must have been incessant from curfew to sunrise. If one were disposed to give the subject any serious consideration, it would be found utterly untenable ; for assuming the reality of a pro-medical raid, there would be no company left to perform in the hobgoblin pantomimes declared to be of c o m m o n occurrence. If the graves so gave up their dead for the pecuniary advantage of the h u m a n night-ghouls known in Cockney slangdom as " bone-grubbers," it is not to be supposed that the ghosts would remain behind, though where they would betake themselves is not so certain. T h e looting and the spiritualistic theories are therefore irreconcilable. T h e "body-snatching" scare, I have little doubt, was kept alive by the drunken maunderings of a once Collins Street denizen, w h o was transported from England for plundering a London cemetery; and whenever he over-indulged (frequently the case) he loved to fight his churchyard battles o'er again, and prate of the unholy exploits in which he was concerned before the London slums saw the last of him. Certainly at the time I write of, there were no public institutions where a practitioner could procure a subject for surgical experiments. W e had no Professors of Anatomy, no University Medical School or students requiring ocular demonstration in the science of dissection, and the Doctors and Surgeons of Melbourne were, as a rule, a jolly easy-going race, satisfied with a paying practice, and not troubling their heads m u c h in adding to their; store of demonstrative physiological knowledge. I have, therefore, not the slightest hesitation in pronouncing the wholesale assertion so m a d e as simply preposterous, though I have heard of three cases which did really occur. T h e operators at the graves and in the surgery have, like the abstracted bodies, passed out of this world to account for themselves in another. T h e children of some of them are n o w holding positions of consideration in the present generation, and I have therefore, no intention of awaking the silence of the tomb by mentioning names. T h e following incident was communicated to m e recently by a friend to w h o m I a m m u c h indebted in connection with m y Old T i m e C H R O N I C L E S . S o m e years ago in company with a Melbourne mechanic (since dead) he was passing the Old Cemetery, at which the companion warningly pointed, and with an ominous shake of the head, exclaimed, " "Well, Sir, I should not like to have been buried yonder in the old times." O n being asked why, his answer was that once upon a time the vault of an old colonist in which his wife was supposed to rest in peace, was believed to require some repairing in consequence of the wet having penetrated the foundation. H e was commissioned to have the work done, and in doing so the vault was opened, and a careful look inside revealed the extraordinary circumstance that the lid had been shifted from the lady's coffin, and the coffin was empty. Shocked at this disclosure the repairer did not know well h o w to act, but had the presence of mind to re-adjust the lid without an assistant workman becoming aware of the circumstances. T h e vault was then put to rights, and it was a source of anxious thought with the discoverer of the corpse abstraction, whether he should communicate the shocking occurrence to the husband. After mature consideration he m a d e up his mind that as the harm had been done and the period of the crime was uncertain, no good could result from simply rendering the unsuspecting husband miserable, w h o consequently remained in utter ignorance of a diabolical outrage, which it would be impossible for him to avenge. So the abduction of the lady corpse remained a close secret, and is n o w given to the public for thefirsttime, but without the slightest notion of establishing any identity. T h e ghost stories were even m u c h more unreliable, though strictly they could not be denied a "shade" of probability. Whenever a person at all notable died, the body was hardly cold in the earth, when it was rumoured the deceased appeared in some place or other; and though no person in sober senses was ever forthcoming to bear witness to the fact, the mystic canards obtained a large share of belief. John Batman, it was solemnly averred, perambulated his favourite hill at "high twelve" every night, and continued "beating the boundaries" until even after thefirstcrow of cock. His ghost-ship was effectually laid when in 1870, the levelling of the hill commenced, and he never troubled it after. Twice he was said to have haunted his venomous rival "Johnny" Fawkner; once at Pascoe Vale on the M o o n e e Ponds, where J. P. F. resided for several years, and once in Smith Street, Collingwood, •*