Some Catholic fanatics of the vicinity assembled secretly the day after the funeral of Miss V-- to discuss the best means for arresting the progress that the reformed religion was making in the parish. After long deliberation they resolved to hire a poor man to go every evening for a whole week and groan near the grave of Miss V---. Their object was to make the widow and neighbors believe that the young girl was damned; and that God permitted her to show her great unhappiness by lamentations, so that they might avoid her fate by remaining faithful to the belief of their fathers. In any other country than Lower Canada, those who might have employed such means would not perhaps have had an opportunity of seeing their enterprise crowned with success; but in our country districts, where the people believe in ghosts and bugbears, it would almost certainly produce the desired effect. This expedient, instead of being ridiculous, was atrocious. The employment of it could not fail to cause Mrs V-- to suffer the most painful agonies, and her neighbors the torments of doubt. The credulity of the French-Canadian is the work of the clergy; they invent and relate, in order to excite their piety, the most marvellous things. For example: the priests say that souls in purgatory desiring alleviation come and ask masses of their relatives, either by appearing in the same form they had in life, or by displacing the furniture and making a noise, as long as they have not terminated the expiation of their sins. The Catholic clergy, by supporting these fabulous doctrines and pious lies, lead their flock into the baleful habit of believing things the most absurd and destitute of proof. The day after Miss V--'s funeral, everybody in the parish was talking of the woeful cries which had been heard the night before near her grave. The inhabitants of the place, imbued with fantastic ideas that their rector had kept alive, were dupes of the artifice employed by some of their own number. They became convinced that there is no safety outside of the church, of which they formed a part. Seized with horror they determined never to pass a night near the grave of the cursed one, as they already called the young Protestant. Mrs. V-- by the instinctive effect of prejudices inculcated when she was a Catholic, was at first a prey to deadly anxiety; but recalling the holy life of her daughter, she no longer doubted of her being among the number of the elect. She guessed at the cause of the noise which was heard near the grave of her child. In order to assure herself of the justness of her suspicions, she besought the two neighbors of whom I have already spoken, to conceal themselves there the following night. These persons were glad of an occasion to test the accuracy of what a curate of their acquaintance had told them; who had asserted that a spirit free from the body could yet manifest itself substantially to the living, as speaking without tongue, touching without hands.