I have told my ghost-story with no attempt at explanation of psychical phenomena. After all these years I fall back, when questioned as to hypotheses, upon my father’s terse dicta: “How do I account for it? I don’t account for it at all!” XXI TWO MONUMENTAL FRIENDSHIPS EVEN at that period, when I visited my father’s Northern kindred, I failed to bring them to a right comprehension of the frank, and oftentimes intimate, relations existing between the young people of both sexes in my Virginia home. I have marvelled within myself since, how these relations came to be established at the first. We brought to the New World, and retained, scores of English customs of domestic management, and traditions of social obligations. It was never the fashion in England, or in her Northern colonies, for boys to begin “visiting the young ladies” before they discarded roundabouts, and to keep up the fascinating habit until they tottered into the grave at fourscore. For the same dozen young fellows to call at least once a week upon as many young girls; to read, chat, jest, flirt, drive, ride, and walk with them, month after month, and year after year, perhaps choosing one of the dozen as a lifelong partner, and quite as often running off for a season to another county or State, and bringing home a wife, with whom the philosophic coterie speedily got acquainted amiably, widening the circle to take her in, with never a thought of chagrin. The thumbnail sketches I have jotted down in my “purposeful” chapter, bring in the same names, again and again. They were, indeed, and in truth, household words. None of the young men and maidens catalogued in the Christmas doggerel I shall speak of, presently, intermarried. Two—perhaps four—had secret intentions that tended toward such a result in the fulness of time. Intentions, that interfered in nowise with their participation in the general hilarity. If there were any difference in the demeanor of the engaged, or partially betrothed, pairs from the behavior of the fancy-free, it was in a somewhat too obvious show of impartiality. Engagements were never “announced,” and if suspected, were ignored in general society. Thus it often happened that a direct proposal took a girl utterly by surprise. I was but sixteen, and on a summer vacation in Albemarle County, when a collegian of nineteen, who was swinging me “under green apple boughs”—lazily, because the rapid rush through the air would interfere with the chat we were carrying on, in full sight of groups scattered on the porch steps and about the lawn—brought down my thoughts—which had strayed far afield under the influence of the languorous motion, the sunset and the soft mingling of young voices—with stunning velocity, by declaring that he adored me, and “couldn’t keep it to himself any longer.”