fear, and feeling very ill, he begged to be allowed
to descend, and the stranger, in parting from
him under the northern portico, said,
"Remember! you are the slave of the man of the
mirror!" When he afterwards consulted Dr.
Arnould, he was completely possessed with the
idea that this diabolical old gentleman had entire
command over him, could see him at every
minute of the day, hear all he said, and read his
inmost thoughts. "In some part of the building
which we passed in coming away," said the
sufferer to his medical adviser, " he showed me
what he called a great bell, and I heard sounds
which came from it, and which went to it;
sounds of laughter, and of anger, and of pain:
there was a dreadful confusion of sounds, and,
as I listened with wonder and affright, he said,
' This is my organ of hearing; this great bell is
in communication with all other bells within the
circle of hieroglyphics, by which every word
spoken by those under my control is made
audible to me.' " The poor man was of course
insane. He was sent to a private asylum, and
in about two years was discharged in good
mental health. His delusion was full of a
grimly fantastic spirit, but it had one element
of the ludicrous. The unfortunate gentleman
said that the enchanter's hieroglyphics consisted
of the words " Day and Martin" and " Warren's
Blacking," and that these, inscribed on walls
and palings, marked the limits of his dominions.

The Tower is the most haunted ground in
London, and it would be strange if it were not,
remembering the tragedies that were acted
there during many successive centuries. An
old tradition affirms that the mortar used in the
original construction was tempered with the
blood of wild beasts; and certainly a bloody
spirit seems to have brooded heavily over the
old building throughout the dark ages, and even
as late as the time of the Second Pretender, if
we may not say up to 1820, in which year
Arthur Thistlewood, of the Cato-street
conspiracy, was imprisoned in the Tower, previous
to being hanged at the Old Bailey. Not only
have many miserable wretches lain within those
walls, eating their hearts in despair until they
have been taken out on to the scaffold and
beheaded, but a list of six persons secretly
murdered there—beginning with Henry VI., and
ending with Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex (1638)
—may be derived from its annals. The gloomy
old fortress, with its Bloody Tower and its
Traitors' Gate, ought to be, and is, the
stronghold of ghosts. It is believed by some
that the spirit of Raleigh yet glides about
the place; and a chamber in the Bloody
Tower, the walls of which are adorned with
paintings representing men put to the
torture, is said to be permanently haunted.
Recently, Mr. Edward Lenthal Swifte, formerly
keeper of the crown jewels in the Tower, has
put forth an extraordinary narrative of an
appearance which he saw in the Jewel House in
the year 1817. One night in October, about
twelve o'clock, as he, his wife, their little boy,
and his wife's sister, were sitting at supper, his
wife, when about to drink a glass of wine-and-
water, suddenly exclaimed, " Good God! What
is that?" Mr. Swifte looked up, and saw a
cylindrical figure, like a glass tube, seemingly
about the thickness of his arm, hovering between
the ceiling and the table. It appeared to be
filled with a dense fluid, white and pale azure,
incessantly rolling and mingling within the
cylinder. In about two minutes it moved
towards Mrs. Swifte's sister, then passed before
the boy and Mr. Swifte, and ultimately floated
behind Mrs. Swifte, who instantly crouched
down, covered her shoulders with both hands,
and exclaimed, in the utmost terror, "Oh,
Christ! It has seized me!" Mr. Swifte caught
up his chair, and struck at the wainscot behind
her; then rushed up-stairs into the children's
room, and told the nurse what he had seen. The
phantom had previously crossed the upper end
of the table, and disappeared. The strangest
part of the business is, that neither the sister-
in-law nor the boy saw anything of this
appearance. Mr. Swifte says he is bound to state
that, shortly before the event, some young lady
residents in the Tower had been suspected of
making phantasmagorial experiments at their
windows; but he alleges that those windows did
not command any in his dwelling, and on the
night in question the doors were all closed, and
heavy dark cloth curtains were let down over
the casements. The only light in the room was
that of two candles on the table. Very shortly
after this strange affair, one of the night sentries
at the Jewel Office was alarmed by the figure of
a huge bear issuing from underneath the door;
he thrust at it with his bayonet, which stuck in
the door, and he then dropped in a fit, and
in two or three days died. The sergeant
declared that such appearances were not
uncommon. The sentry, it is alleged, was not
asleep nor drunk at the time; but he may have
been on the eve of a fit from natural causes,
and the vision may have been the result of his
state of health. Mr. Swifte's vision is more
difficult to account for, from the fact of its
having been seen by two of the persons present,
and not by the two others; yet one cannot very
well give a supernatural interpretation to so
absurd and purposeless an appearance.

NO FOLLOWERS.

WHAT'S the hardest of all things to follow?
An ostrich, I'm told, tries our mettle;
But there's something that beats that quite hollow
As, in singing, a lark beats a kettle.

A chamois, they say, 's not a trifle
In steep Alpine passes to follow,
But a chamois you'll " down" with a rifle,
There's that beats the chamois quite hollow.

A fox is a puzzle sometimes,
That baffles the best in a chase;
Or, sound-led by far-away chimes,
One wanders a wearisome pace.

A lady's a hard thing to follow,
Coquettish and full of vagaries,
Who feeds you with snubs, hard to swallow,
And acts by " the rule of contraries."