told me, but it was to say I need trouble myself no further, as the man was already beyond all aid, having died about the middle of the night. I never felt so strangely in my life as when they told me this, and my brain almost reeled as the events of the previous day and night passed through my mind in rapid succession. That I had seen something supernatural in the darkness of the night, I had never doubted, but when the sun shone brightly into my room in the morning, through the same window, where I had seen so frightful and strange a sight by the spectral light of the moon, I began to believe more it was a dream, and endeavored to ridicule myself out of all uncomfortable feelings, which, nevertheless, I could not quite shake off. Haunted by what I considered a painful dream, I left my room, and the first thing I heard was a confirmation of what I had been for the last hour endeavoring to reason and ridicule myself out of believing. It was some hours before I could recover my ordinary tranquillity; and then it came back, not slowly as you might have expected, as the impression gradually wore off, and time wrought his usual changes in mind as in body, but suddenly--by the discovery that our large white owl had escaped during the night, and had honored my window with a visit before he became quite accustomed to his liberty." [From the London Critic.] SKETCHES OF LIFE. BY A RADICAL. It was an error to call this work[25] the autobiography of an individual. It is a picturing--faithful, minute, and eloquent--of the hardships, the sufferings, and the miseries endured by a large mass of our fellow men. It is an earnest and honest exposure of the hollowness that infests English society--an insight to the weakness of the substratum. It shows what education should have done, and what corruption really has done. ALTON LOCKE is also a personification of the failings, as well as of the sufferings, that make up the sum of existence of a large class.