There are a great many people who have a natural tendency to superstitions of all kinds. They have excellent common sense, for example, in everything except in matters of a religious nature. A family of such people may be divided into religious partisans of the bitterest stamp; the one may be a Baptist, for instance, and believe that all the rest, who disagree with him, must be lost. Another member may be a modern "Adventist," deny the doctrine of the essential immortality of the soul, and think his brother, who does believe in it, guilty of a proud and sinful assumption and godless vanity in so doing. Another may become an English churchman, and gravitate from that character into the Roman Catholic church, and feel that all the rest,--the Baptist, the Adventist, etc.,--must "perish eternally," unless they come into the fold of the Roman see. And still another may be a modern Spiritualist, and believe in the return of "departed souls" to earth, to commune directly, or through "mediums," with poor mortals here, etc. It seems to depend very much upon how the superstitious element in each member of such families is first or finally addressed, as to what each may become. The reader will please conceive of an old, respectable family of Knickerbockers, into whose veins was infused a little Yankee blood, imported from near Boston, Mass., a family whose sires held in the past high rank and official position in the state and nation--a family not a little proud of its far-off Dutch and English stock--reared in wealth and luxury, well bred, of course, at home, and well educated, both the males and the females; with a large amount of landed estate in various parts of the country, and blessed with a plenty of houses and building lots in the cities of New York and Brooklyn; and, in fact, I have been told that their property could be pointed out all along the road, from Jersey City to Morristown, New Jersey. In fact it was by the possession of city lots, and the constant increase of value thereof, that the family acquired the larger portion of their estate. Add to this that the relatives of the family are mostly rich, and that such of them as are not rich, belong to that highly respectable, humdrum sort of people, who are here and there found in the midst of the stir and bustle of New York, who persist in representing old notions, old modes of doing business, and whose chief pride exercises and delights itself in talking over what their fathers did, who their grandfathers were, etc., or in preserving, perhaps, some legend, that when Washington had his residence near Bowling Green, their grand-uncle, or some other relative, was a welcome visitor there. It is necessary to bring to the mind's eye this class of people in order to comprehend the commotion which bestirred them at the time when I was called to "work up a case" in their midst.