to be human, but was that authority reliable? was that doctor skilled
in comparative anatomy? If not, the bones might have been those of a
sheep, buried perchance in the cellar by a provident dog.

The house still stands, or did recently, in Washington street. The
builder was a sea-captain returning after a long absence with plenty
of money, supposed by the townspeople to have been acquired in the
slave-trade or by piracy. There was also a young woman, house-keeper
to this Captain Kidd, who disappeared about the time that he did
himself.

Mrs. M---- was fond of narrating this story, and, having a pretty
talent that way, she had versified it; though I am bound to say that
in plain prose it was much more effective. She was an Englishwoman,
had seen much of the world, and was a person of considerable reading
and cultivation. She had moral and physical courage in an uncommon
degree, and was thoroughly reliable, so that this story is to me as
well authenticated as one can well be at second hand.

I have another incident of the same shadowy and quasi-supernatural
kind to relate, which took place in the same street of that town,
formerly much affected by ghosts and other supernatural appearances.
I say formerly, for what spirit, however perturbed, could revisit the
glimpses of the moon in a modern villa, or abide long within the sound
of the steam-whistle?

Some years ago I was living in Newport in an old-fashioned house, also
built by a retired sea-captain in the early part of the century, but,
unlike the other, there were no tales of terror connected with it
that I ever heard of. At 1 p.m. on a winter's day, in the midst of a