dismay with which certain horror-stricken watchers saw footsteps printing themselves off, one by one, on the level spotless surface—footsteps plain and palpable, but of the Fearful Presence nothing more!
As with houses in those, so is it with men in these days. Most of the people I have known in life were haunted: so haunted, indeed, that, for some the infliction has led at last to madness, though, in most instances, productive only of abstracted demeanour, wandering attention, idiotic cross-purposes, general imbecility of intellect, and, on occasion, reckless hilarity with quaint, wild, incoherent talk. These haunted head-pieces, too, get more and more dilapidated every day; but how to exorcise them, that is the difficulty! What spells shall have power to banish the evil spirit from its tenement, and lay it in the Red Sea? if, indeed, that is the locality to which phantoms should properly
