we sat in the carriage. 'Well,' I said by-and-by; 'what about the housemaid?' 'Oh, don't you know? That is the ghost!' I laughed at the notion, for there was certainly nothing ghost-like about the figure I was watching. At a sign from my host, the carriage advanced a few paces, and instantly the woman at the window vanished. I saw at the same moment that the window at which I had seen the figure belonged to the ruined portion of the hall. The apparition was of course nothing more than a curious optical illusion, the effect of the lights and shadows from the carved stone-work adjoining the window; but so real was the spectral appearance, that I was not surprised that local tradition claimed it unhesitatingly as the ghost of a building which, if tradition speaks truly of its former owners, might certainly well be haunted.

But it is not Seaton Delavel Hall, it is the engine-house of a colliery that stands within a stone's throw of the gates at the foot of the long avenue, that furnishes the haunted ground of this part of Northumberland. As I drove up to the well-remembered pit-buildings, I was surprised to see that smoke was issuing from the tall chimney, and that there were signs of cheerful life about the place. When last I had seen it the shadow of doom hung over it, and the rusting ironwork, the mouldering pit-heap, the disused tramways all told their own tale of ruin and death. Four-and-thirty years ago, in the month of January 1862, all England was awaiting in breathless suspense the issue of a struggle which was being carried on at this spot. More than 200 men and boys had been made prisoners in the pit, by the blocking of the single shaft which gave admission to it. The accident was due to the breaking of the great beam of a pumping-engine, which worked directly above the opening of the shaft. When the beam broke one-half fell into the pit, and choked it. For a whole week, a bitter week in mid-winter, I was one of those who stood on this pit-heap and watched the ceaseless and heroic efforts of brave men to rescue the imprisoned miners. To the last we hoped against hope, telling ourselves tales of the signalling we had heard from the prisoners beneath our feet, and fondly deluding ourselves with the idea that, as they had a sufficiency of food and water, they must be safe. Only a few men could work at once in the confined space of the shaft, and their task was one of excessive peril. They hung suspended by ropes in the depths of the pit, with water pouring incessantly upon them, with the crumbling sides of the shaft continually giving way, threatened at every moment by a terrible death, but not for a single instant by day or night desisting from their efforts. In the meantime, all England was thrilled with the story of the imprisoned miners, and shared in the suspense which chained the wives and mothers of the captives to the pit-heap, day after day throughout that week of anguish. It was in the dead of the winter night that those of us who stood upon the platform at the mouth of the pit learned the dreadful truth. A sharp signal had

been given from below, and at once the sinkers working in the shaft had been drawn up. For a moment we hoped that the signal meant that the lost had been recovered, and our hearts beat quickly with joyous anticipation. But too soon the bitter truth was made clear. As the sinkers were brought to the surface, it was found that all were unconscious, and we knew that they had succumbed to the deadly gases of the mine. Restoratives were at hand, but before they could be applied to the victims, the master-sinker, Coulson by name, whose own son was among the men lying on the pit-heap unconscious, stooped and kissed his boy, and then calmly took his place in the dangling noose, and bade them lower him into the shaft. There was not one of us who would have given sixpence for his life at that moment. That has always seemed to me to have been the bravest deed I ever witnessed.

When Coulson disappointed our fears by coming back to the surface alive he told the awful tale. The obstruction had been at last removed, but the pit was foul,' and we knew that it held none but the dead. As I look at the place on this bright July day of 1896, I find it difficult to realise all the horrors of which I was a witness here thirty-four years ago. Yet I can still see the uncoffined dead being brought to bank-twenty hours being occupied in that task alone. I can recall the smile of peace which rested upon every grimy face; ay, and I recollect the tears with which the brave men who had gone down into the depths of the pit told me of how they had found the victims sitting in long rows side by side, waiting for the help which was to come too late, and of how the fathers had their boys folded in their arms, whilst brothers and friends sat with clasped hands, in patient silence. One slight record of the captivity was left in the shape of a cheap memorandum book, in which one of the prisoners had pencilled a few words telling of the prayer meeting that had been held and the exhortation' that had been given in the early hours of their imprisonment. But the record broke off little more than four-and-twenty hours after the closing of the shaft, and we comforted ourselves with the thought that their agony had been brief, as their end was undoubtedly painless. Away yonder stands the grey tower of Earsdon Church, steeped in the summer sunlight. At its foot, in one vast common grave, lie the two hundred men and boys who died thus in the New Hartley Pit in January 1862. I can still see the long procession of coffins being carried between the leafless hedges. I seem to hear again the wail of the old hymn, ‘O God, our help in ages past,' which filled the air as the whole manhood of the village of Hartley was borne to the tomb. It is haunted ground, truly, on which I stand; and I realise afresh not only the perils and heroism of the miner's daily life, but the fact that the man who, after the lapse of a generation, revisits the home of his youth, must of necessity sojourn among ghosts.

WEMYSS REID.

AN ATTEMPT AT OPTIMISM

It seems at the present moment probable that pessimism and consequent dejection will share the fate of all the pegs on which men have hung their theories since they have begun to think consecutively. They are momentarily in possession of the field; therefore pessimism and its result dejection are made to appear the sufficient cause of masses of phenomena for which they do not really account.

An important consideration seems to be ignored, not only in the easy and cheap form of pessimism to be found as the keynote of books of inferior value, but in some works of real merit. It deals with the necessity of realising, however positive our knowledge, that the margin which extends beyond it is limitless. There is more comfort to be derived from the 'Je ne sais pas' of Pascal than from the 'Que sais-je?' of Montaigne; for in that unknown tract which lies beyond our powers of conception, our imagination can conjure up the possibility of the sudden appearance of a factor, at present undiscovered, which may alter the aspect of the problem so completely as sometimes to appear almost to reverse it.

Instances of this may be shown in the study of, let us say, the science of chemistry, where the qualities of a chemical substance may be altered by combination with a new element. And what of the inexact sciences, medicine for instance, all the greater for being inexact—for where would the sudden inspiration of the great physician come in if he could fall back on exact knowledge? This difficulty is still greater in the scientific study of heredity; with the countless possibilities of unknown and undiscoverable elements making anything like a rigid deduction from the known to the unknown a sheer impossibility. We are confronted here by a double puzzle; since, if deluded for an instant by the belief that we are in possession of undoubted facts unrolling themselves in orderly sequence from generation to generation, we are immediately repulsed by the perception that the effect of peculiar and special surroundings on each agent must modify the problem as a whole and make it more complex than ever. And there are greater mysteries than either of these behind the science of the Psychology or the Pathology of mind. The human brain-its marvellous powers, its dismal failures, its latent and unexplored potentialities—who can

fathom it? It is of the utmost importance that men of science should wholly refuse to admit the authority of any hypothesis which cannot be proved; but they are the first to own that they deal only with relative truths subject to the conditions of time, space, and the construction of our own brain.

Mr. Pearson (the author of National Life, &c.) says with some justice that science being thus positive in the assertion of the omnipotence and the irrevocableness of law, fatalism and consequent dejection must needs follow-a dejection and horror greater than any produced by the gloom and spiritual fear consequent on a belief in predestination. True, it may be that a knowledge of the laws of heredity and of the subjugating effect of surroundings is sufficient to drive a weak spirit, nay, even a strong one, into an abyss of horror and despair, and to take from it all power of volition. But let us admit for an instant that we have only got hold of a fragment of the whole truth, would it not be wiser, instead of bewailing this, to summon up all the courage we can muster and try fully to grasp that it is not and never can be any more than a fragment; that there is an immense margin of the unknown round the very small nucleus of positive (though relative) knowledge which we have within our reach, for we must accept and be content with incompleteness, as we have no choice in the matter.

All honour, we repeat, to the men of science who guard this relative knowledge and protect it from the inroads of fanciful and unstable reasoning. The wretched attempt to disparage philosophic thought on the laws of evolution, and the desire to ridicule the logical deduction of the inevitableness of the succession of phenomena by demonstrating, as M. Bourget seeks to do in Le Disciple, that if a man be an evolutionist he must needs be a villain, a liar, and a profligate, is really an attempt below the line of talent of that very clever author. The consequences of an opinion, philosophic or scientific, are not to be considered for a moment in a serious discussion. It is of no avail to point out that the holder of such an opinion, and they whom he may persuade to hold it, will, by their beliefs or unbeliefs, hasten the decay of all aspirations, all strivings after the ideal. That is not the question, and to bring such considerations into court at all only complicates an already too perplexing and difficult problem. Yet, after doing homage to the relatively true, it is refreshing to return for a moment to the mysterious unknown. It is obvious that to multiply the terms of an equation is not to solve it. If it be true that by means of the telescope and the microscope we have now to apprehend that billions instead of thousands of worlds exist within and yet beyond our ken, infinity and immensity may seem to overwhelm us, but the mystery underlying all remains the same.

The following propositions are indisputable. With our greatest efforts of thought we find that we can get comparatively no distance

whatever from the 'here' of space and the 'now' of time, and that the present' as a mathematical point appears to be hurrying and bearing us with it along the line stretching from the past to future eternity; but in reality we are no further from the one or nearer to the other. If it is also indisputable that nothing exists as we suppose it to be, that nothing we do or say or think is apparently of any importance in short, that nothing matters-it is impossible that the human brain should not reel before this sea of uncertainty. The pressure, the sensation of being hemmed in on all sides, by infinities and immensities, until we fail to grasp the position in which we stand in this endless spiral, beginning nowhere, ending nowhere, seems too much for endurance, and our poor powers of thought, if we pursue the investigation, will finally fail us. Has the moment then arrived when pessimism must of necessity be the outcome of such speculations ? No; it only means that our ignorance is more profound than we imagined. Do we say nothing matters? It is more true to say that everything matters.

How valueless every thought, word, and deed? Perhaps each is full of infinite meaning and importance. Light and sound never cease vibrating in space, so that these poor thoughts, words, and acts of ours have gone forth never to be lost or recalled. Each day-what a limited thought is conveyed by this form of speech and this division of time-may be filled by an awful sense of mystery and of the poetry of the unknown, and this sense will pursue us in the form most congenial to each personality.

In everyday life we must needs adopt the ways of science and stand courageously by our relative knowledge, and, in homely language, do our best' according to the light that is in us; but when weighed down and crushed by the sense of evil apparently incurable and by the incomprehensibility of the most elementary data, it would be well bravely to turn to the other side. Surely the balance is more evenly hung than pessimists would have us think. A single detail in the discussion will show that we cannot go by any foregone conclusion. It seems strange that, as more of life lies behind us and less prospect of joy and happiness before us, while fewer possibilities of enjoyment and appreciation remain to us, so does the force of the optimistic view increase, and it happens that with decreasing powers and diminished energy life becomes brighter. It is a paradox, but, like many other paradoxes, undeniably true. Why is it true? Because things of beauty become more and more precious to those who are no longer young; they gladden the old with a sense of surprise at their own power of appreciation, a power which in youth is often neglected in the hot pursuit of the unattainable and the mad desire for untested experience. The old turn more willingly away than the young from that scale of the balance in which are cruelty, injustice, cowardice, sickness, misery-the whole brood of