Here, again, the foreknowledge and evident design, as well as the power of manifesting it, are extremely curious—more especially as the antitype of the figure was neither in a trance nor asleep, but perfectly conscious, walking and talking. If any particular purpose were to be gained by the information indicated, the solution might be less difficult. One object, it is true, may have been, and indeed was attained, namely, the change in the opinions of the wife; and it is impossible to say what influence such a conversion may have had on her after-life. It must be admitted that these cases are very perplexing. We might, indeed, get rid of them by denying them; but the instances are too numerous, and the phenomenon has been too well known in all ages, to be set aside so easily. In the above examples, the apparition, or wraith, has been in some way connected with the death of the person whose visionary likeness is seen; and, in most of these instances, the earnest longing to behold those beloved seems to have been the means of effecting the object. The mystery of death is to us so awful and impenetrable, and we know so little of the mode in which the spiritual and the corporeal are united and kept together during the continuance of life, or what condition may ensue when this connection is about to be dissolved, that while we look with wonder upon such phenomena as those above alluded to, we yet find very few persons who are disposed to reject them as utterly apocryphal. They feel that in that department, already so mysterious, there may exist a greater mystery still; and the very terror with which the thoughts of present death inspires most minds, deters people from treating this class of facts with that scornful skepticism with which many approximate ones are denied and laughed at. Nevertheless, if we suppose the person to have been dead, though it be but an inappreciable instant of time before he appears, the appearance comes under the denomination of what is commonly called a ghost; for whether the spirit has been parted from the body one second or fifty years, ought to make no difference in our appreciation of the fact, nor is the difficulty less in one case than the other.