its locality, excited as much terror in Carey as even the skeleton. This was no other than a large grey owl, sitting as demure as grimalkin, with its goggle eyes at their utmost stretch, glaring in the light of the taper like fiery balls, and rolling as if in anger at being interrupted by the intruder in its enjoyment of eating a mouse, which, dead and mangled, was firmly clenched in its claws. The few minutes that served Carey to examine these extraordinary appearances, whose reality he doubted against all the clearness of his rubbed eyes, enabled Cuthbert Grandison to crawl into the place, through the limited aperture opening in its side. The moment he got in, he shut the door carefully, and threw his eyes up to the pane of glass through which Carey was looking, without, however, observing him, as he instantly drew back his head. When Carey again directed his eyes to the object of his curiosity and awe, he was lying prostrate by the side of the bones of the larger skeleton. He then rose up, threw a look of recognition to the owl, who went on with his repast, heedless of the ceremony with which he had been honoured. The necromantic appearance, attitude, and acts of the hunchbacked living skeleton, who thus stood, as it were, in the midst of the dead, communing with them by a secret and mysterious power, realized in the mind of the neophite all the stories he had heard and read of the wonderful and the terrific. The subsequent conduct of the performer was not less extraordinary. His ceremonies and operations occupied a full hour. Everything was noticed by Carey; and if what we have attempted to describe produced wonder, what we have at present abstained from narrating, from a regard to what is due to the importance of other circumstances waiting for detail, was not calculated to lessen that feeling.