That our interest in whatever has much concerned us in this life accompanies us beyond the grave, seems to be proved by many stories I meet with, and the following is of undoubted authenticity: Some years ago, a music-master died at Erfert at the age of seventy. He was a miser, and had never looked with very friendly eyes on Professor Rinck, the composer, who he knew was likely to succeed to his classes. The old man had lived and died in an apartment adjoining the class-room; and the first day that Rinck entered on his office, while the scholars were singing _Aus der tiefe ruf ich dich_, which is a paraphrase of the _De profundis_, he thought he saw, through a hole or bull’s eye in the door, something moving about the inner chamber. As the room was void of every kind of furniture, and nobody could possibly be in it, Rinck looked more fixedly, when he distinctly saw a shadow, whose movements were accompanied by a strange rustling sound. Perplexed at the circumstance, he told his pupils that on the following day he should require them to repeat the same choral. They did so; and while they were singing, Rinck saw a person walking backward and forward in the next room, who frequently approached the hole in the door. Very much struck with so extraordinary a circumstance, Rinck had the choral repeated on the ensuing day,—and this time his suspicions were fully confirmed; the old man, his predecessor, approaching the door, and gazing steadfastly into the class-room. “His face,” said Rinck—in relating the story to Dr. Mainzer, who has obligingly furnished it to me as entered in his journal at the time—“was of an ashy-gray. The apparition,” he added, “never more appeared to me, although I frequently had the choral repeated.” “I am no believer in ghost-stories,” he added, “nor in the least superstitious; nevertheless, I can not help admitting that I have seen this: it is impossible for me ever to doubt or to deny that which I know I saw.” CHAPTER X. THE FUTURE THAT AWAITS US.