This good spinster had in her composition a strong vein of the superstitious, and was pleased, among other fancies, to read alone in her chamber by a taper fixed in a candlestick which she had had formed out of a human skull. One night this strange piece of furniture acquired suddenly the power of locomotion, and, after performing some odd circles on her chimney-piece, fairly leaped on the floor, and continued to roll about the apartment. Mrs. Swinton calmly proceeded to the adjoining room for another light, and had the satisfaction to penetrate the mystery on the spot. Rats abounded in the ancient building she inhabited, and one of these had managed to ensconce itself within her favourite MEMENTO MORI. Though thus endowed with a more than feminine share of nerve, she entertained largely that belief in supernaturals which in those times was not considered as sitting ungracefully on the grave and aged of her condition; and the story of the Magic Mirror was one for which she vouched with particular confidence, alleging indeed that one of her own family had been an eye-witness of the incidents recorded in it. “I tell the tale as it was told to me.” Stories enow of much the same cast will present themselves to the recollection of such of my readers as have ever dabbled in a species of lore to which I certainly gave more hours, at one period of my life, than I should gain any credit by confessing. AUGUST 1831. AUNT MARGARET’S MIRROR. “There are times When Fancy plays her gambols, in despite Even of our watchful senses--when in sooth Substance seems shadow, shadow substance seems-- When the broad, palpable, and mark’d partition ‘Twixt that which is and is not seems dissolved, As if the mental eye gain’d power to gaze Beyond the limits of the existing world. Such hours of shadowy dreams I better love Than all the gross realities of life.” ANONYMOUS.