178
NIGHTMARE ABBEY.
day and hour, as it afterwards appeared, he had perished by shipwreck.
The whole party now drew round in a circle, and each related some ghostly anecdote, heedless of the flight of time, till, in a pause of the conversation, they heard the hollow tongue of midnight sounding twelve.
Mr. Hilary.
All these anecdotes admit of solution on psychological principles. It is more easy for a soldier, a philosopher, or even a saint, to be frightened at his own shadow, than for a dead man to come out of his grave. Medical writers cite a thousand singular examples of the force of imagination. Persons of feeble, nervous, melancholy, temperament, exhausted by fever, by labour, or by spare diet, will readily conjure up, in