In the photograph which, by the kindness of General Milman, I was permitted to have taken of the axe, the background is formed by the masonry of the Bloody Tower, which has the appearance of a grisly pile of human skulls, a not inappropriate circumstance. Although the processional axe was only used as an emblem of law and justice, it is closely connected with many a Tower tragedy. It is not known when this axe was first used in those solemn processions when it preceded the prisoner to and from trial, nor is its age certain. It was last used at the State trials of the Jacobite lords in the years 1746 and 1747. It is now kept in the study of the Lieutenant of the Tower, whence it is only removed on such State occasions as the installation of a new Constable. On the first floor of the King’s House, overlooking the Thames, is the Council Room in which Guy Fawkes was examined before Cecil and the Council of State. It was on this occasion that Cecil wrote to James I. that Guy Fawkes “was no more dismayed than if he were taken for a poor robbery in the highway.” Fawkes was not, as is sometimes stated, tortured in this room, for torture was only applied in the dungeons below the White Tower, which fact should disprove the legend that the cries of the tortured conspirator are heard on stormy nights proceeding from the Council Chamber. But there is another legend connected with this part of the Tower, to the effect that the shadow of an axe is sometimes seen spreading its form on Tower Green, and appearing on the walls of the White Tower. Indeed, a likelier or a more proper place for ghostly visitations of all kinds than the Tower can hardly be found anywhere in the world, if it be true that ghosts “do walk.” For this reason it is disappointing that there are so few legends of apparitions to chronicle, and of these few the following have the best authentication. In _Notes and Queries_ for September 1860, some letters appeared relating to Tower ghosts, and amongst them Mr E. Le Swifte (the same individual, I believe, who so courageously saved the Regalia during the great fire in the Tower in 1841, when the Armoury was destroyed) writes an account of a ghostly visitant which appeared to his wife and himself in the Martin Tower, where the Regalia, of which he had charge, were then placed. Swifte was appointed to the post of Keeper of the Crown Jewels in 1814, which he held until 1852, living with his family in the Martin Tower. One evening in the month of October 1817, whilst at supper, his little son and his wife’s sister were startled at seeing an apparition, “like a glass tube” of the thickness of Mrs Swifte’s arm, which hovered between the ceiling and the supper table. It seemed to contain, adds Swifte, “a clear fluid.” This spectral shape appeared for a few moments, causing the family the greatest alarm. Shortly afterwards, one of the sentinels outside the Martin Tower saw a “huge bear issuing from underneath the door of the