child of only six years at the time, his testimony may, perhaps, be more rationally regarded as curiously illustrative of the force of imagination at a very early age, than as furnishing any legitimate proof of the reality of such appearances. He had a sister, a few years older than himself, who attended some of the younger members of the family, which tenanted, about sixty years ago, the house once occupied by the shopkeeper. One Sunday forenoon, when all the inmates had gone to church except the girl and her charge, he stole in to see her, and then amused himself in wandering from room to room, gazing at the furniture and the pictures. He at length reached one of the garrets, and was turning over a heap of old magazines in quest of the prints, when he observed something darken the door, and looking up, found himself in the presence of what seemed to be a very tall, broad-shouldered man, with a pale, ghastly countenance, and wrapt up in a brown dreadnought greatcoat. A good deal surprised, but not at all alarmed, for he had no thought at the time that the appearance was other than natural, he stepped down stairs and told his sister that there was a “muckle big man i’ the top of the house.” She immediately called in a party of the neighbours, who, emboldened by the daylight, explored every room and closet from the garrets to the cellar, but they saw neither the tall man nor the dreadnought greatcoat. [Sidenote: THE STORY OF SANDY WOOD.] The old enclosure of the burying-ground, which seems originally to have been an earthen wall, has now sunk into a grassy mound, and on the southern and western sides some of the largest trees of the fence--a fine stately ash, fluted like a Grecian column, a huge elm roughened over with immense wens, and a low bushy larch with a bent twisted trunk, and weeping branches--spring directly out of it. At one place we see a flat tombstone lying a few yards outside the mound. The trees which shoot up on every side fling so deep a gloom over it during the summer and autumn months, that we can scarcely decipher the epitaph; and in winter it is not unfrequently buried under a wreath of withered leaves. By dint of some little pains, however, we come to learn from the darkened and half-dilapidated inscription, that the tenant below was one Alexander Wood, a native of Cromarty, who died in the year 1690; and that he was interred in this place at his own especial desire. His wife and some of his children have taken up their places beside him; thus lying apart like a family of hermits; while his story--which, almost too wild for tradition itself, is yet as authentic as most pieces of written history--affords a curious explanation of the circumstance which directed their choice.