Lord D---- was lying on a sofa, covered with a Scotch plaid, and embarrassed me a little by his first address. "You don't know me," said he, "and yet we saw each other very often thirty years ago." Now as I was in frocks at the time he spoke of, I was obliged to beg for a further explanation, though I cannot say I was much delighted at having my age so fully discussed before all the company,--for you know I claim not to look more than thirty. However, I could but admire Lord D----'s memory. He remembered every circumstance of his visit to my parents with the Duke of Portland, and recalled to me many a little forgotten incident. What originals were then to be found, and how joyously and heartily people entered into all sorts of amusement in those days, his conversation gave me new and very entertaining proof of. He mentioned among others a certain Baron, who believed as firmly in ghosts as in the Gospel, and held Cagliostro for a sort of Messias. One day when he went out alone, to skate on the lake near our house, the whole party dressed themselves in sheets and other things borrowed from the wardrobe of the theatre, and presented to the eyes of the terrified Illuminatus the awful appearance of a party of ghosts, in broad daylight, on the ice. In mortal terror he fell on his knees, spite of his skates; and with a volubility which the venerable Lord could not think of, even now, without laughing, uttered "Abracadabra," and bits of Faust's incantations, interspersed with fragments of quavering psalms. During this, one of the ghosts, who, with the help of a long stick under his sheet, made himself sometimes tall and sometimes low, slipped and fell, stripped of all disguise, directly before the knees of the praying Baron. His faith was too robust, however, to be shaken by such a trifle. On the contrary, his terror was increased to such a pitch, that he sprang up, fell again, in consequence of his unlucky 'chaussure,' but soon scrambled up, and with a dexterity no one gave him credit for before, vanished like the wind, amid the cheers of the whole company. Even the confession of the whole joke by the actors in it never could convince him that he had been hoaxed, and no power on earth could ever induce him to see the frightful lake again as long as he remained at M----.