There was once a caravan journeying from Nubia to Cairo, which met the Savans attending on the expedition of Napoleon into Egypt, among whom was Rigo, the painter. Struck with the deep character of expression in the face of one of the Nubians, Rigo induced him, with gold, to sit for his portrait. The African sat calmly perusing its progress until the laying on of the _colours_, when, with a cry of terror, he rushed from the house, and, to his awe-struck companions, affirmed that his head and half his body had been cut off by an enchanter. And this impression was not solitary, for an assemblage of the Nubians were equally terror-struck, and (somewhat like those _monomaniacs_ who refuse to drink water which reflects their faces, believing that they are _swallowing their friends_,) could never be dispossessed of the notion that the picture was formed of the loppings and toppings of the human frame. We believe these influences the more, because we see that, even to some few men wiser than they, a leaning to superstition will warp a simple fact into a wonder; and that mere sensitiveness of mind may work as great a fear. Suetonius tells us that Caligula and Augustus were the most abject cowards in a thunder-storm; and the bishop of Langres D’Escaro fell in a fainting-fit whenever an eclipse took place,—a weakness which at length proved his death. There was an old house in Angoulême, the “Chateau du Diable,” on the spot where the sable fiend was wont to repair to enjoy his moonlight walk. The house was never finished, for the devil, jealous of this usurpation, like Michael Scott’s spirit, destroyed every night the walls which had been erected during the day. At length the men abandoned their work in despair. On the twenty-fifth night in May (1840), the ruined windows seemed on an instant in brilliant illumination, which struck the inhabitants of the little village of “Petit-Rochford” with wonder and dismay. Some dauntless heroes, however, sallied forth with weapons to storm the enchanted castle. In an upper room, lighted by eight blood-red wax candles, they discovered a man of a strange and melancholy aspect, tracing cabalistic figures on the sanded floor. He was conveyed to the maire, and was proved to be a poor sawyer, named Favreau, who, bound by a superstitious oath, self-administered, had thus created a sensation of terror throughout a whole community.