hand, as he spoke, beneath the folds of his greatcoat, and seemed extricating some weapon from his belt. “In upon him, lads!” shouted out the tall officer, “devil though he be, he is but one; the rest are all captured.” In a moment, two of the officers had thrown themselves upon him; the third laid hold of his father. A tremendous struggle ensued;--the lamp was overturned and extinguished. The smuggler, with a Herculean effort, shook off both his assailants, and as they rushed in again to close with him, he dealt one of them so terrible a blow that he rolled, stunned and senseless, on the floor. The elder Macleod, a hale old man, had extricated himself at the same moment, and mistaking, in the imperfect light, his son for one of the officers, and the fallen officer for his son, he seized on the kitchen poker, and just as the champion had succeeded in mastering his other opponent, he struck at him from behind, and felled him in an instant. In less than half an hour after he was dead. The unfortunate old man did not long survive him; for after enduring, for a few days, the horrors of mingled grief and remorse, his anguish of mind terminated in insanity, and he died in the course of the month. For some time after, the house he had inhabited lay without a tenant, and stories were circulated among the town’s-folks of it being haunted. One David Hood, a tailor of the place, was frightened almost out of his wits in passing it on a coarse winter night, when neither fire nor candle in the whole range of houses on either side, showed him that there was anybody awake in town but himself. A fearful noise seemed to proceed from one of the lower rooms, as if a party of men were engaged in some desperate struggle;--he could hear the dashing of furniture against the floor, and the blows of the assailants; and after a dull hollow sound twice repeated, there was a fearful shriek, and a mournful exclamation in the voice of the deceased shopkeeper, “I have murdered my son! I have murdered my son!” The house was occupied, notwithstanding, some years after, though little to the comfort of the tenants. Often were they awakened at midnight, it is said, by noises, as if every piece of furniture in the apartment was huddled into the middle of the floor, though in the morning not a chair or table would be found displaced; at times, too, it would seem as if some person heavily booted was traversing the rooms overhead; and some of the inmates, as they lay a-bed, have seen clenched fists shaken at them from outside the windows, and pale, threatening faces looking in upon them through half-open doors. There is one of the stories which, but for a single circumstance, I should deem more authentic, not merely than any of the others, but than most of the class to which it belongs. It was communicated to me by a sensible and honest man--a man, too, of very general information. He saw, he said, what he seriously believed to be the apparition of the younger Macleod; but as he was a