think, those dear ones, that the dead stands listening in the glimmer of
the firelight, and is almost gifted with a visible shape by the fond
intensity of their remembrance.

Now shall the reader know a grief of the poor ghost that speaks to him;
a grief, but not a helpless one. Since I have dwelt among the graves,
they bore the corpse of a young maiden hither, and laid her in the old
ancestral vault, which is hollowed in the side of a grassy bank. It has
a door of stone, with rusty iron hinges, and above it, a rude sculpture
of the family arms, and inscriptions of all their names who have been
buried there, including sire and son, mother and daughter, of an ancient
colonial race. All of her lineage had gone before, and when the young
maiden followed, the portal was closed forever. The night after her
burial, when the other ghosts were flitting about their graves, forth
came the pale virgin's shadow, with the rest, but knew not whither to
go, nor whom to haunt, so lonesome had she been on earth. She stood by
the ancient sepulchre, looking upward to the bright stars, as if she
would, even then, begin her flight. Her sadness made me sad. That
night and the next, I stood near her, in the moonshine, but dared not
speak, because she seemed purer than all the ghosts, and fitter to
converse with angels than with men. But the third bright eve, still
gazing upward to the glory of the heavens, she sighed, and said, "When
will my mother come for me?" Her low, sweet voice emboldened me to
speak, and she was kind and gentle, though so pure, and answered me
again. From that time, always at the ghostly hour, I sought the old
tomb of her fathers, and either found her standing by the door, or
knocked, and she appeared. Blessed creature, that she was; her chaste
spirit hallowed mine, and imparted such a celestial buoyancy, that I
longed to grasp her hand, and fly,--upward, aloft, aloft! I thought,
too, that she only lingered here, till my earthlier soul should be