So much for my last hold upon the supernatural! Let me repeat--the phantom key, a mere mechanical defect; the spot of blood, a mere stain of paint; and the midnight spectre, an optical illusion! But the reader may ask, how I account for the resemblance between the woman of my vision and the portrait of the ill-fated Madeleine Van Der Vaughan? I answer, that at this distance of time, I regard it as the effect of imagination only, as was the whole vision! It was about two months after the conclusion of my Christmas visit that I was summoned to Wolfbrake to act as bridesmaid for Mathilde, for it was immediately after the rising of Congress upon the fourth of March, that Mr. Howard went up to claim the hand of his betrothed. They were married upon the seventh. It was a wedding in the fine, old-fashioned country style, with a ball and supper the same evening, and dinner parties and dancing parties, given successively by the neighbors, in honor of the bride, almost every day and night for the next two weeks. They have now been married several years, and have several children--boys and girls. Frank Howard now holds a "high official" position in the present administration. And old Mr. Legare is justly proud of his gifted son-in-law. As Mathilde is too much of a Creole to bear the rigor of a New England climate they divide the year, spending the summer in Massachusetts and the winter in Virginia "with the old folks at home." And year after year I have visited them there, and slept in the haunted chamber, but never, since the locks were mended, have I been troubled by an opening door, or a midnight ghost! THE PRESENTIMENT. CHAPTER I. THE QUADROON. Oh! yet we hope that, somehow, good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt and taints of blood.--TENNYSON. There was an account of an execution item that met my eyes in glancing over the columns of a newspaper. It made no more impression upon me at the time than such paragraphs make upon you or any of us. My glance slided over that to the next items, chronicling in order the success of a benevolent ball, the arrival of a popular singer, etc.; and I should have forgotten all about it had not the execution occurred near the plantation of a dear friend, with whom I was accustomed to pass a part of every year. From that friend I heard the story--a domestic tragedy, which, for its inspirations of pity and terror equaled any old Greek drama that I ever read. I know not if I can do anything like justice to the subject by giving the story in my own words. Near the city of M----, on the A---- river, stood the plantation of Red Hill. It was one of the largest cotton plantations in the South, covering several square miles, but it was ill-cultivated and unprofitable. The plantation house was situated a mile back from the river, in a grove of trees on the brow of the hill quite out of the reach of fog and miasma.