recognise in this singular tradition a kind of soul or Naiad of the spring, susceptible of offence, and conscious of the attentions paid to it; and the passage of the waters beneath the sea reminds us of the river Alpheus sinking at Peloponnesus to rise in Sicily. [Sidenote: SINGULAR TEST OF CHARACTER.] Next in degree to the pleasure I have enjoyed in collecting these traditions, is the satisfaction which I have felt in contemplating the various cabinets, if I may so speak, in which I found them stored up according to their classes. For I soon discovered that the different sorts of stories were not lodged indiscriminately in every sort of mind--the people who cherished the narratives of one particular class frequently rejecting those of another. I found, for instance, that the traditions of the third class, with all their machinery of wraiths and witches, were most congenial to the female mind; and I think I can now perceive that this was quite in character. Women, taken in the collective, are more poetical, more timid, more credulous than men. If we but add to these general traits one or two that are less so, and a few very common circumstances; if we but add a judgment not naturally vigorous, an imagination more than commonly active, an ignorance of books and of the world, a long-cherished belief in the supernatural, a melancholy old age, and a solitary fireside--we have compounded the elements of that terrible poetry which revels among skulls, and coffins, and enchantments, as certainly as Nature did when she moulded the brain of a Shakspere. The stories of the second class I have almost never found in communion with those of the third; and never heard well told--except as jokes. To tell a story avowedly untrue, and to tell it as a piece of humour, requires a very different cast of mind from that which characterized the melancholy people who were the grand depositories of the darker traditions: they entertained these only because they deemed them mysterious and very awful truths, while they regarded open fictions as worse than foolish. Nor were their own stories better received by a third sort of persons, from whom I have drawn some of my best traditions of the first class, and who were mostly shrewd, sagacious men, who, having acquired such a tinge of scepticism as made them ashamed of the beliefs of their weaker neighbours, were yet not so deeply imbued with it as to deem these beliefs mere matters of amusement. They did battle with them both in themselves and the people around them, and found the contest too serious an affair to be laughed at. Now, however (and the circumstance is characteristic), the successors of this order of people venture readily enough on telling a good ghost story, when they but get one to tell. Superstition, so long as it was living superstition, they deemed, like the live tiger in his native woods, a formidable, mischievous thing, fit only to be destroyed; but now that it has perished, they