and to receive what placid amusement he
could from watching the little passings to and
fro of the villagers. He could not move from
his bed to his chair without help. One hot
and sultry June day, all the village turned
out to the hay-fields. Only the very old and
the very young remained.

The old father of whom I have spoken, was
carried out to bask in the sunshine that afternoon
as usual, and his son and daughter-in-law
went to the hay-making. But when they
came home in the early evening, their
paralysed father had disappeared—was gone! and
from that day forwards, nothing more was
ever heard of him. The old lady, who told
this story, said with the quietness that always
marked the simplicity of her narration, that
every inquiry which her father could make
was made, and that it could never be
accounted for. No one had observed any
stranger in the village; no small household
robbery, to which the old man might have
been supposed an obstacle, had been
committed in his son's dwelling that afternoon.
The son and daughter-in-law (noted too for
their attention to the helpless father) had
been a-field among all the neighbours the
whole of the time. In short it never was
accounted for; and left a painful impression
on many minds.

I will answer for it the Detective Police
would have ascertained every fact relating to
it in a week.

This story from its mystery was painful,
but had no consequences to make it tragical.
The next which I shall tell, (and although
traditionary, these anecdotes of disappearances
which I relate in this paper are
correctly repeated, and were believed by my
informants to be strictly true,) had
consequences, and melancholy ones too. The scene
of it is in a little country-town, surrounded
by the estates of several gentlemen of large
property. About a hundred years ago there
lived in this small town an attorney, with his
mother and sisters. He was agent for one of
the squires near, and received rents for him
on stated days, which of course were well
known. He went at these times to a small
public-house, perhaps five miles from——-,
where the tenants met him, paid their rents,
and were entertained at dinner afterwards.
One night he did not return from this
festivity. He never returned. The gentleman
whose agent he was, employed the Dogberrys
of the time to find him and the missing cash;
the mother, whose suppoi't and comfort he
was, sought him with all the perseverance of
faithful love. But he never returned; and
by-and-by the rumour spread that he must
have gone abroad with the money; his mother
heard the whispers all around her, and could
not disprove it; and so her heart broke, and
she died. Years after, I think as many as
fifty, the well-to-do butcher and grazier of
——- died; but, before his death, he confessed
that he had way-laid Mr. ——- on the heath
close to the town, almost within call of his
own house, intending only to rob him, but
meeting with more resistance than he
anticipated, had been provoked to stab him; and
had buried him that very night deep under the
loose sand of the heath. There his skeleton
was found; but too late for his poor mother
to know that his fame was cleared. His sister,
too, was dead, unmarried, for no one liked
the possibilities which might arise from being
connected with the family. None cared if he
was guilty or innocent now.

If our Detective Police had only been in
existence!

This last is hardly a story of unaccounted-
for disappearance. It is only unaccounted
for in one generation. But disappearances
never to be accounted for on any supposition,
are not uncommon, among the traditions of
the last century. I have heard, (and I think
I have read it in one of the earlier numbers
of " Chambers's Journal ") of a marriage which
took place in Lincolnshire about the year
1750. It was not then de rigueur that the
happy couple should set out on a wedding
journey; but instead, they and their friends
had a merry jovial dinner at the house of
either bride or groom; and in this instance
the whole party adjourned to the bridegroom's
residence, and dispersed, some to ramble in
the garden, some to rest in the house until the
dinner hour. The bridegroom, it is to be
supposed, was with his bride, when he was
suddenly summoned away by a domestic, who
said that a stranger wished to speak to him;
and henceforward he was never seen more.
The same tradition hangs about an old de-
serted Welsh Hall standing in a wood near
Festiniog; there, too, the bridegroom was sent
for to give audience to a stranger on his
wedding-day, and disappeared from the face
of the earth from that time; but there, they tell
in addition, that the bride lived long,—that
she passed her three-score years and ten, but
that daily during all those years, while there
was light of sun or moon to lighten the earth,
she sat watching,—watching at one particular
window which commanded a view of the
approach to the house. Her whole faculties,
her whole mental powers, became absorbed in
that weary watching; long before she died,
she was childish, and only conscious of one
wish—to sit in that long high window, and
watch the road, along which he might come.
She was as faithful as Evangeline, if pensive,
and inglorious.

That these two similar stories of disap-
pearance on a wedding-day " obtained," as
the French say, shows us that anything which
adds to our facility of communication and
organisation of means, adds to our security of
life. Only let a bridegroom try to disappear
from an untamed Katherine of a bride, and
he will soon be brought home like a recreant
coward, overtaken by the electric telegraph,
and clutched back to his fate by a Detective
policeman.