For many days and many years afterwards, no trace could be had of W----B----, nor was there ever even so much as whispered a single statement of any one who had seen him either alive or dead. The food for speculation which the mysterious affair afforded to the minds of the inhabitants was for a time increased by the total want of success which attended all the efforts of inquiry; and, after the fancies of all had been exhausted by the vain work of endeavouring to discover that which seemed to be hid by a higher power from human knowledge, the circumstance degenerated into one of the wonders of nature, supplying the old women with the material of a fireside tale, for the amusement or terror of children. But it would seem that the energies of vulgar everyday life are arrayed with inveterate hostility against the luxury of a mystery so greedily grasped at by all people, however thoroughly liberated from the prejudices of early education or of late sanctification; and accordingly, one day many years after the occurrences now mentioned, as some boys were amusing themselves among the ruins of the old castle, they discovered lying in a hole--called the Piper's Hole, from the circumstance of a piper having once entered it with a pair of bagpipes, which he intended to play on till he reached the end of it, but never returned--the body of a man, reduced to a skeleton, but retaining on his bare bones the clothes which he had worn when in life. It was the body of W---- B----. On searching his pockets, there was found in one of them a few pence, and in another a bottle, with a paper label, marked "Laudanum." This discovery cleared up all mystery. The unfortunate man had intended to kill himself in such a way as would put his suicidal act beyond the knowledge of his friends, and had resorted to the extraordinary plan of creeping up into the dark and narrow passage, where the action of the fatal soporific had produced the delusion that he was in the place appointed for the wicked, with the soliloquy already detailed, and then death. The physical mystery was cleared up; but a mystery of a moral nature remains, which will bid defiance to the revealing efforts of philosophers--the strength and peculiarity of feeling which, working on a sane mind, produced a purpose so extraordinary, and the resolution to carry it into effect. END OF VOL. XVI