The reader will perceive, then, that I am convinced of the equal impolicy and impropriety of resting the claims of my clients (ghosts in general) upon facts which will not stand the test of an impartial, and even a skeptical scrutiny. And, perhaps, I can not give a happier illustration of the temper of my philosophy, at once candid and cautious, than is afforded by the following relation, for every tittle of which I solemnly pledge my character at once as a gentleman and as a metaphysician. There is a very agreeable book by Mrs. Crowe, entitled "The Night Side of Nature," and which among a _dubia caena_ of authentic tales of terror, contains several which go to show the very trivial causes which have from time to time caused the reappearance of departed spirits in this grosser world. A certain German professor, who, for instance, actually _persecuted_ an old college friend with preternatural visitations for no other purpose, as it turned out, than to procure a settlement of some small six-and-eightpenny accounts, which he owed among his trades-people at the time of his death. I could multiply, from my own notes, cases still odder, in which sensible and rather indolent men, too, have been at the trouble to re-cross the awful interval between us and the invisible, for purposes apparently still less important--so trivial, indeed, that for the present I had rather not mention them, lest I should expose their memories to the ridicule of the unreflecting. I shall now proceed to my narrative, with the repeated assurance, that the reader will no where find in it a single syllable that is not most accurately and positively true. About four-and-thirty years ago I was traveling through Denbighshire upon a mission which needed dispatch. I had, in fact, in my charge, some papers which were required for the legal preliminaries to a marriage, which was about to take place in a family of consideration, upon the borders of that county.