For a girl of ten years of age, Margaret Swinton was possessed of much good sense and solidity of character. She heard herself doomed to a solitary confinement of six hours without shrinking; or thought, at least, that she would have no difficulty in beguiling the time by means of her new book—the Pilgrim’s Progress. So long as the steps and voices of her kindred were heard about the house, she felt quite at her ease. But, in reality, the trial was too severe for the nerves of a child of her tender age. When she heard the outer door locked by the last person that left the house, she felt the sound as a knell. The shot of the bolt echoed through the long passages of the empty house with a supernatural loudness; and, next moment after, succeeded that perceptible audible quiet, the breath-like voice of an untenanted mansion, which, like the hum of the vacant shell, seems still as if it were charged with sounds of life. There was no serious occasion for fear, seeing that nothing like real danger could be apprehended; nor was this the proper time for the appearance of supernatural beings: yet the very loneliness of her situation, and the speaking stillness of all around her, insensibly overspread her mind with that vague negative sensation which is described by the native word _eeriness_. From her window nothing was visible but the cold blue sky, which was not enlivened by even the occasional transit of a cloud. By and by the desolating wind of autumn began to break upon the moody silence of the hour. It rose in low melancholy gusts, and, whistling monotonously through every chink, spoke to the mind of this little child, of withering woods, and the lengthened excursions of hosts of leaves, hurried on from the scene of their summer pride into the dens and hollows where they were to decay. The sound gradually became more fitful and impetuous, and at last appeared to her imagination as if it were the voice of an enemy who was running round and round the house, in quest of admission—now and then going away as if disappointed and foiled, and anon returning to the attack, and breathing his rage and vexation in at every aperture. She soon found her mind possessed by a numerous train of fantastic fancies and fearful associations, drawn from the store of nursery legends and ballads which she was in the habit of hearing night after night, at the fireside in the hall, and which were infinitely more dreadful than the refined superstitions of modern children. She thought of the black bull of Norway, which went about the world destroying whatever of human life came within its reach; of the weary well at the World’s End, which formed the entrance into new regions, from whence no traveller ever returned; and of the fairies or _good neighbours_, a small green-coated race of supernatural creatures, who often came to the dwellings of mortals, and did them many good and evil turns. She had been told of persons yet alive, who