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him what brought him to Edinburgh. The butler replied, "To meet your honor, and solicit your interference with my lord to recover a sum duo to me, which the steward at the last settlement did not pay." Lord Erskine then told the butler to step with him into a bookseller's shop close by, but on turning round again he was not to be seen. Puzzled at this he found out the man's wife, who lived in Edinburgh, when he learnt for the first time that the butler was
dead, and that he had told his wife, on his death-bed, that the steward had wronged him of some money, and that when Master Tom returned he would see her righted. This Lord Erskine promised to do, and shortly afterwards kept his promise.' Lady Morgan then says, ' Either Lord Erskine did or did not believe this strange story: if he did, what a strange aberration of intellect ! if he did not, what a stranger aberration from truth! My opinion is that he did believe it.' Mr. Owen deals with the hypothesis that aberration of intellect was in question, and gives several excellent reasons for rejecting that hypothesis; and he arrives at the conclusion that the butler's phantom had really appeared after his death. 'The natural inference from the facts, if they are admitted, is,' he says, ' that under certain circumstances, which as yet we may be unable to define, those over whom the death-change has passed, still interested in the concerns of earth, may for a time at least retain the power of occasional interference in these concerns; for example, in an effort to right injustice done.' He thus adopts what, for want of a better word, may be called the supernatural interpretation. But it does not appear from the narrative (assuming it to be true) that the butler was dead at the moment when Erskine saw the vision and heard the words. If this moment preceded the moment of the butler's death, the story falls into the category of those which seem explicable by the theory of brain-waves. I express no opinion.
I had intended to pass to the consideration of those
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