imaginary unintelligible sounds; and my imagination was both original and fertile in the invention of such. But my mind was too active to be often subjected to such influences. Indeed life would have been hardly endurable, had these moods been of more than occasional occurrence. As I grew older, I almost outgrew them. Yet sometimes one awful dread would seize me—that, perhaps, the prophetic power manifest in the gift of second sight, which had belonged to several of my ancestors, according to the testimony of my old nurse, had been in my case transformed in kind, without losing its nature, and had transferred its abode from the sight to the hearing, whence resulted its keenness, and my fear and suffering. One summer evening, I had lingered longer than usual in my rocky retreat: I had lain half-dreaming in the mouth of the cave, till the shadows of evening had fallen, and the gloaming had deepened half-way towards the night. But the night had no more terrors for me than the day. Indeed, in such regions there is a solitude, for the recognition of which there almost seems to exist a peculiar sense in the human mind, and upon which the shadows of night seem to sink with a strange relief, closing in around, and hiding from the eye the wide space which yet they throw more open to the imagination. When I lifted my head, a star here and there caught my eye; but when I looked intently into the depths of blue gray, I saw that they were crowded with twinkles. The mountain rose before me a huge mass of gloom; but its several peaks stood out against the sky with a clear, pure, sharp outline, and seemed nearer than the chaos from which they rose heavenwards. One star trembled and throbbed upon the very tip of the loftiest, the central peak, which seemed the spire of a mighty temple, where the light was worshipped—crowned, therefore, in the darkness, with the emblem of the day. This fancy was still in my thought, when I heard, clear, though faint and far away, the sound as of the iron-shod hoofs of a horse, in furious gallop along an uneven rocky surface. It was more like a distinct echo than an original sound. It seemed to come from the face of the mountain, where I knew no horse could go at that speed, even if its rider courted his certain destruction. There was a peculiarity too in the sound—a certain tinkle, or clank, which seemed only to mingle with the body of the sound, and which I fancied myself able, by auricular analysis, to separate from it, assigning to it a regular interval of recurrence. Supposing the sound to be caused by the feet of a horse, the peculiarity was just such as would result from one of the shoes being loose. A strange terror seized me, and I hastened home. The sounds gradually died away as I descended the hill. I could not account for them, except on the supposition that they were an echo from the precipice. But I knew of no road lying so that, if a horse were galloping upon it, the sounds would be reflected from the mountain