I rose up and stood aloof in fear. I was about to speak, when the ghost put her finger on her lip, and, stepping forward, stood upon the middle of the table. There was something awful about this scene, and I felt chilled, with a creeping horror, to my very heart. The creature reached out a kind of crumpled hand, and in a sort of frenzy I clasped it. But no sooner had I touched it, than the image vanished, and I found in my grasp a roll of paper. This I unfolded, and found it to be an immense sheet, written over in a neat, close hand. Casting my eye at the beginning, I saw that it read as follows: “THE REMINISCENCES OF A RAG. “As the rising sun was just peeping over the bosom of the Atlantic, and tinging with gold the waters that play along the borders of Amelia Island, a negro man, named Bob Squash, was seen putting some little seeds into the ground, upon the eastern slope of said island. This event occurred on the 4th of March, 1839, as the wooden clock of the plantation was on the stroke of four. “The seed was covered up in the ground, but in a few days it shot forth, and, in process of time, it became a large plant, covered with tufts of cotton. These were gathered by Bob Squash, and rolled into a wad and from this time I began to have a consciousness of existence. That ball of cotton was myself. I was packed into a bag with an immense heap of other cotton, and being put into a mill, we were awfully torn to pieces, in order to separate the seeds from the fibres. The teeth of the mill, which consisted of a thousand hooks, went through and through us, and thus we were parted forever from the seeds which had been born and bred with us, and which we had cherished from our infancy. The seeds, however, were black, and the combing process made us look very nice and clean. “I was now taken, with the rest of the cotton-wool, and put into a large, coarse sack, and, in order to make us lie snug, a little negro got into the sack and trod us down. He didn’t stop to consider how we might like it, but he went on stamping and jumping, and singing Jim Crow, all the time. When the bag was full, the mouth was sewed up, and we were marked as weighing three hundred and seventy-five pounds. In this state we were called a bale of cotton.