The ghost of the murdered King of Denmark spoke the truth, as other ghosts by judicial testimony have done; but they were the old-fashioned ghosts, standing by themselves without the aid of human machinery, without the table or the easily assimilated trance, responsible for their coming and for what they told or what they desired to be done by their informing. They came and made short work of it, impressing belief by solemn utterances or majestic gestures. In this case again, the man, who should have been interested more than any other man, comes through the arm and fingers of a stranger, a living being, and is assumed to have written out, at that solemn investigation, a deposition,—not made upon the Holy Book, holier than all books, but with lips sanctified by the kiss of death,—and vaguely points to some unfortunate, and declares with all the potency of his supernal condition that ere the fifth of the approaching month the discovery would be made, and the hands of the law laid upon the person of the murderer of his children; and the fifth of that long-passed month lies strewn with the leaves of several autumns, buried far back in the dead annals, and no revelation has confirmed his prophecy. How is this? Or was it, as I have said before, left to these pages to revive that miserable event, and glare it to those eyes that have so often seen the vision of the dead; to awaken in that drowsing conscience the phantoms that he had half lulled to sleep, and force him to some act by which the law may be able to read, without the farther aid of business mediums, the mark of Cain that God has put upon his brow? Who knows, and who can tell as yet, the meaning of my ghost that came to me upon the hill?