upright in the air. We were fairly on the spot when the servant, who had been into the barton, and had, she said, heard the noise while there, made her appearance at the opposite side of the court, running towards the door. We placed the table in its normal position, and made a careful examination of the locality, without discovering anything in the slightest degree suspicious.

"One more piece of furniture-tumbling completed the evening's performance. On one side of the passage, and within two or three feet of the kitchen door, there stood a mahogany table, perhaps three feet long and two feet wide. Mr. Travis had described to us, early in the evening, a number of extraordinary gymnastic feats which this piece of furniture had performed at different times. Indeed, it bore the marks of very violent usage. The top was split from end to end, and pieces of veneer were missing in various places along the edges. At nine o'clock, several of Mr. Travis's labourers were in the kitchen, taking their supper. The passage door was wide open, so that they could see the table, and the clock which stood near it. At the opposite end of the passage, the door of the large sitting room, in which several persons were talking, was also wide open. The distance from one door to the other greatly exceeded 15 feet. One of our party had just left for Langport, and the rest of us were at the front door with Mr. Travis, preparing to leave, when we were startled by a noise very much like, but far louder than, that which accompanied the falling of the kitchen table. This time, moreover, it was accompanied by a shrill scream. We were within four or five paces of the spot from which these sounds proceeded (the inner passage), and were there in a twinkling. The mahogany table, in two or three pieces, was lying close to, indeed almost within, the kitchen doorway, in full sight of the men who were at supper. The servant, pale and breathless, with her hand pressed upon her side, was lying back upon the stairs, which leads out of the passage opposite the clock, and is therefore within a few inches of a straight line with the entrance passage in which we were standing when the crash occurred. We picked up the pieces of the table and propped them up against the side of the passage as well as we could, and then made inquiries. One of the men, who sat opposite the passage door, said he saw the table rear up at one end before being dashed violently on the floor; and the girl said that, as she was passing, either the table, or one of the pieces of it, struck her on the side, and threw her into the staircase in the position in which we had found her. If her fright was assumed, all we can say is that she is an inimitable actor. We noticed that, when passing the remains of the table some time afterwards she

unconsciously put out her hand towards it, as if to protect herself from another surprise.

"This grand smash of the mahogany table was the last act of the evening up to ten o'clock, when we left.

"It may not be amiss to recapitulate the various manifestations which occurred while we were present, and to see which of them (if any) might have been caused by trickery. They were as follow:

"1.-The knocking on our arrival.-As we were not fairly in the house when this occurred, and have no idea whence the sound came and where the immates were at the time, we may pass this over.

"2.-The knocking in the neighbourhood of the kitchen table. In this case, the servant was alone in the kitchen, and certainly may have caused the noise.

"3.-The movement of the kitchen table.-This occurred when both Mrs. Hawker and the girl were present, and may have been the result of either accident or design, though we cannot see how it could have resulted from the former.

"4.-The overturning of the kitchen table.-This was the only occurrence at which nobody was present. It was, we believe, utterly impossible that the girl could have caused the upset with her hands and then escape to the spot at which we first saw her, before our arrival. If she did play any trick, moreover, she played it, in this case, at the imminent risk of detection, for the table was visible from the farm premises on one side, and (through a window) from the inner passage on the other, and some of our party or of the other inmates were in the passage well nigh every minute.

"5.-The overturning and smashing of the passage table.Here the girl was present, but it is inconceivable that she should have ventured on such an act of violence as the destruction of a table in a place where she was overlooked from both ends of the passage. We doubt, moreover, whether, by the exertion of her utmost strength, she could have caused so much noise and destruction. The effect of this last smash was, indeed, to render one of our party exceedingly nervous, and to caus him to declare to Mr. Travis that he would not sleep in house a single night for £1,000.

"We do not assert that it would be utterly impossible skilled conjuror to produce by mechanical means all the e we have described. Were ours the only evidence bearing case, we do not know that we should greatly blame our re for remaining sceptical. It is only when the accumu evidence of Mr. Travis and his household, and of scores of respectable witnesses, is viewed together, that the impos

of accounting for all the phenomena by the hoax theory becomes apparent. We will give, as briefly as we can, an account of what has been seen and heard by others, and we may add that the versions of the different witnesses are perfectly consistent with each other.

"The disturbances commenced in Easter week, and have continued at irregular intervals ever since. Sometimes nothing is heard for several days, and in one instance, we believe, Mr. Travis had a fortnight's peace. But any long interval of quiet seems to be always dearly bought, for the agents that produce the rows appear to return like' giants refreshed,' and to make up, by greater activity than ever, for their loss of time. During the first week or two, Mr. Travis heard none of the knockings himself. They were heard in the daytime, during his absence from home; and when his housekeeper and servant complained to him, on his return in the evening, he laughed at them, believing them to be the victims of some hoax or delusion. At last, he heard the noises himself, and was soon satisfied that there was neither delusion nor hoax in the case.

"The noises are not confined to any particular part of the house, but appear to proceed, at different times, from every corner of every room, upstairs and down. It is not always easy to tell where they do proceed from, for they appear to possess the peculiarities of a ventriloquist's voice. If the hearer runs to the spot from which he fancies the sound proceeds, he not unfrequently finds, unless it has ceased in the meantime, that he appears to have changed places with it. Another peculiarity about the sounds is, that the dogs take little or no notice of them. Mr. Travis has dogs which, he says, rouse the whole family with their barking if they hear the slightest footstep in or near the house by night. But they have seldom indicated that they even so much as hear the very loudest of the knockings, whether by night or by day.

"The knockings vary as much in loudness as in locality. At one time, they are like a regular gentle knocking, travelling round and round the room; at another time, they can be compared only to the beating of the floors with mallets or to a volley of musketry. On some occasions, the noises have been terrific. The people of the village have heard them as they sat in their own homes, listening to the unearthly row for hours together. The number of excited persons who have thus assembled has sometimes been so great that the presence of the police has been rendered necessary. One day, Mr. Travis cleared the house and locked the doors, stationing a policeman at the back, and watching the front himself. To use Mr. Travis's own words, fifty men with mallets could not have caused the awful row which

was heard while the house was thus watched, for the loudest knockings appeared to proceed from every part of the house almost simultaneously.

and

"But, as was proved during our visit, the manifestations are not confined to noises. The metal cover of the furnace in the kitchen has been several times thrown off and dashed violently against the floor. A number of bits which were hanging over the mahogany table whose end we witnessed were once thrown off their nails and scattered about the passage; the table itself was, in Mr. Travis's presence, violently overturned, just as it was during our visit. At three o'clock one morning, Mr. Travis was awoke by knockings of the ordinary kind upon the wall of his bedroom. They gradually increased in force, and terminated with a tremendous blow which dashed open the door. Except in the case of the tables, no damage appears to have been done amid the most violent of the manifestations. After a period of unusually high jinks, a little fine white dust such as might be supposed to have fallen from whitewashed wall or ceiling, has been noticed in some of the rooms; and, in one case, a number of flat irons were so nearly shaken off a shelf in the kitchen that it was thought desirable to remove them.

"Many persons will, no doubt, wonder that anybody can be found to live amid such infernal revelry. The truth is-one soon gets accustomed even to such disturbances as these. Mr. Travis and his family are evidently conscious that they run no risk of serious bodily injury, and they have come to look upon the phenomena as simple nuisances. The females confess, indeed, that they feel somewhat nervous when, after a few days cessation. the noises begin again suddenly; but they plead guilty to no other emotion. The men employed on the farm appear to be on very easy terms with the unknown agencies, and, on the recommencement of the noises after an interval of silence, they are heard to remark―There's the old 'un again!' or words to that effect. Their appetites were evidently unaffected by the destruction of the table on Friday night. Their anxiety appears to be confined to any possible bad effects that may be produced on the cider. Mr. Travis says that one of them told him he didn't care if they' (the spirits, or whoever else the agents may be,) would only leave the casks alone, and not pull out the

corks.

เ

"So much for the facts. By this time, our readers are, no doubt, anxious to hear on what theory we account for them, and will, perhaps, be disappointed to hear that we have formed no theory at all. Such however is the case. We should like some scientific man to observe the phenomena for himself, and then

Un

tell us, if he can, how they are to be accounted for. fortunately, we have few really scientific men. We have plenty of so-called philosophers, who construct their theories first, and then endeavour to make the facts fit into them, instead of carefully ascertaining the facts first, and deducing a theory from them afterwards. Of course, a great philosopher cannot be expected to investigate a trumpery ghost story' or a silly haunted-house tale.' He knows that it is impossible for a table to move without hands, and it would, therefore, be only a waste of his valuable time to inquire whether a table has ever done so or not. This, we fear, is the view which too many of our allknowing savans will take of the Muchelney business. But is such a view truly philosophical? Do we know everything

yet? Are there no natural laws or forces yet to be discovered?-no exceptions, or apparent exceptions, to the operation of known laws to be determined? And, unless our knowledge of Nature and her marvellous doings is perfect, by what right do we set bounds to the possible, and pooh-pooh everything which appears to our weak vision to transgress those limits? Is it not equally true of the physical creation as it is of the moral world that

"Tis but a part we see, and not the whole?'

"In view of the marvellous discoveries of late years, a cautious man will be very chary about using the word 'impossible. A great French astronomer once said that no true philosopher would ever use it except with reference to the exact sciences. We may safely assert that it is impossible that one and one can ever make three, or that the three angles of a triangle can ever make more or less than two right angles; but, once clear of mathematics, we can never be safe in using the word 'impossible.' We borrow an illustration.

66 Christopher Columbus has just returned to Europe from the long and perilous voyage which has revealed a New World to the wondering nations of the Eastern Hemisphere. As he lands from the crazy cock-boat which he dignifies by the name of 'ship,' and looks back upon the weary waste of waters whose billows have had him for a plaything during so many long months, a seer, looking forward across three centuries and a half of progress, steps up to him, and tells him that, in a far-off future, ships, unaided by sails and in defiance of winds and tides, will regularly cross the great ocean on which he has been so long afloat in nine or ten days, and with all the certainty and punctuality with which a short land journey may be performed on a good road. Still more marvellous! the prophet assures him that, at a rather later period, one man shall stand on the western shore of Europe and another on the castern shore of the New