Had he been chief warder of a beleaguered fort, Lord Fulmer could not have examined every gate and sally port of the castle more carefully than he did, when he descended from the walls. The figure which he had beheld had evidently seemed to come from the castle; but how it had issued forth he could not divine. Every postern was barred, bolted, and chained; and the porter, and the porter's men were all snoring in their dens, of which he had ocular proof before he retired. The fat old porter, whom he had roused and informed of what he had seen, treated the matter lightly, saying, half sleeping, half waking, it was impossible: it must have been the moonlight on the bank, or a white thorn coming into flower. But, when Fulmer reminded him that the month of May was still far off, and told him he had seen the figure move for some distance, he quietly replied-- "Then it must have been a spirit. There are plenty hereabout;" and, lying down on his pallet again, he was asleep before the young nobleman had quited the lodge. Fulmer almost felt inclined to believe that the porter's last supposition was correct, and that the music he had heard was a strain of unearthly melody. Perhaps there have been few ages in the world's history more grossly superstitious than those which immediately preceded the reformation. The process of darkening the human mind, by which alone the errors of the church of Rome can be maintained, had been going on for so many centuries, that it had almost reached completeness; and the art of printing, the precursor of Luther, had not yet fulfilled its mission; and though here and there a few great minds were to be found which shook off the garment of superstition with which the papal church had liveried the world--though Wicliffe and John Huss had given the first terrible blow to Rome, yet her partizans laboured but the more strenuously to retain for her the shadowy empire she had created. At this very time new saints were made, and their days appointed to be honoured; and the festivals of old saints were, in many instances, ordered to receive double celebration. In England, especially, every false, abominable, and idolatrous dogma was more sternly and clearly defined, in order to prevent the escape of the Wicliffites through any ambiguity of language. It was solemnly declared that not one particle of the sacramental bread remained bread after consecration, that every drop of the cup was blood. Pilgrimages, the worship of saints, the adoration of the cross and of relics, were enjoined under the penalty of fire; and everything that could lead or tend to superstition was encouraged and upheld. Taught to believe so much of the supernatural within the church, it is not wonderful that the great mass of the people, high and low, should believe in much of the supernatural beyond the church, and that the priest should encourage them in so doing.