matter than that they had been very cold when they fell asleep, and warm and comfortable when they awoke. At length, however, the girl was enabled to explain the circumstance in a manner that had the effect of tempering the severity of the stepmother all her life after. Her brother had fallen asleep, she said, but _she_ was afraid, and could not sleep; she was, besides, very cold, and so she lay awoke till near the middle of the night, when the door opened, and there entered a lady all dressed in white. The fire was blazing brightly, and she could see as clearly as by day the large chest lying locked in the corner; but when the lady went to it the hasp flew open, and she took out the blankets and wrapt them carefully round her brother and herself in the bed. The lady then kissed her brother, and was going to kiss her too, when she looked up in her face, and saw it was her first mother. And then she went away without opening the door. [Sidenote: THE PEDLAR.] “I remember another ghost story,” continued my companion, “the scene of which I shall point out to you when we have entered the parish of Tarbat. There is a little muddy lake in the upper part of the parish which almost dries up in the warmer seasons, and on the further edge of which we shall be able to trace the remains of what was once a farmhouse. Considerably more than a century ago, a young man who travelled the country as a packman suddenly disappeared, no one knew how; and several years after, in a dry summer, which reduced the lake to less than half its usual size, there was found a human skeleton among the mud and rushes at the bottom. Long ere the discovery, however, the farmhouse was haunted by a restless, mischievous spectre, wrapped up in a grey plaid. Like most murdered folk of those days, the pedlar walked, restricting his appearance, however, to the interior of the cottage, which at length came to be deserted; and falling into decay, it lay for the greater part of a half century as a roofless grass-covered ruin. Its old inmates had died off in extreme penury and wretchedness, and both they and the pedlar were nearly forgotten, when a young man, no way related to either, availing himself of the site of the cottage and the portions of its broken walls which still remained, rebuilt it when on the eve of his marriage, and removed to it with his young wife. On the third evening, when all the wedding guests had returned to their respective homes, the young couple were disturbed by strange noises in an adjoining room, and shortly after the door of the apartment fell open, and there entered a figure wrapped up in a grey plaid. ‘Who are you?’ said the man, leaping out of bed and stretching forth his arms to grapple with the figure. ‘The unhappy pedlar,’ replied the spectre, stepping backwards, ‘who was murdered sixty years ago in this very room, and his body thrown into the loch below. But I shall trouble you no more. The murderer has gone to his place, and in