knew not Sahagun, was matter for the Psychical Society. Perhaps some physical examination would be more likely to discover the actual origin of the sounds of tree-felling. I was not aware, however, till Mr. Leslie Stephen pointed it out, that the Galapagos Islands, “suthard of the line,” were haunted by the Midnight Axe. De Quincey, who certainly had not heard the Ceylon story, and who probably would have mentioned Sahagun’s had he known it, describes the effect produced by the Midnight Axe on the nerves of his brother, Pink:— So it was, and attested by generations of sea-vagabonds, that every night, duly as the sun went down and the twilight began to prevail, a sound arose—audible to other islands and to every ship lying quietly at anchor in that neighborhood—of a woodcutter’s axe.... The close of the story was that after, I suppose, ten or twelve minutes of hacking and hewing, a horrid crash was heard, announcing that the tree, if tree it were, that never yet was made visible to daylight search, had yielded to the old woodman’s persecution.... The woodcutter’s axe began to intermit about the earliest approach of dawn, and, as light strengthened, it ceased entirely, after poor Pink’s ghostly panic grew insupportable.[40] [40] _Autobiographic Sketches_, p. 337. I offer no explanation of the Midnight Axe, which appears (to superstitious minds) to be produced by the _Poltergeist_ of the forests. A much more romantic instance, savage and civilised, of a haunted woodland may perhaps be regarded as a superstition transmitted by French settlers to the natives of New Caledonia. The authority for the following anecdote is my friend and kinsman, Mr. J. J. Atkinson, of Viewfield, Noumea, New Caledonia.