Somebody who was asked if he had ever seen a ghost? replied, gravely, "No; but I was once _very near_ seeing one!" In the same manner I was once _very near_ being a witness to one of these ghostly confabs. Late one evening, having left my sketch-book in the gallery, I went to seek it. I made my way up the great stone staircase with considerable intrepidity, passed through one end of the council-chamber without casting a glance through the palpable obscure, the feeble ray of my wax-light just spreading about a yard around me, and lifting aside the tapestry door, stepped into the gallery. Just as the heavy arras fell behind me, with a dull echoing sound, a sudden gust of wind came rushing by, and extinguished my taper. Angels and ministers of grace defend us!--not that I felt afraid--O no! but just a little what the Scotch call "eerie." A thrill, not altogether unpleasant, came over me: the visionary turn of mind which once united me in fancy "with the world unseen," had long been sobered and reasoned away. I heard no "viewless paces of the dead," nor "airy skirts unseen that rustled by;" but what I did see and hear was enough. The wind whispering and moaning along the tapestried walls, and every now and then rattling twenty or thirty windows at once, with such a crash!--and the pictures around just sufficiently perceptible in the faint light to make me fancy them staring at me. Then immediately behind me was the very recess, or rather abyss, where Queen Elizabeth was at that moment settling her farthingale, to sally out upon me; and before me, but lost in blackest gloom, the spectral door, where Mary--not that I should have minded encountering poor Mary, provided always that she had worn her own beautiful head where heaven placed it, and not carried it, as Bertrand de Born carried _his_ "a guisa di lanterna."[60] As to what followed, it is a secret. Suffice it that I found myself safe by the fireside in my bedroom, without any very distinct recollection of how I got there.