第31章 CHAPTER IX(1)

MYRTLE HAZARD'S STATEMENT.

"A Vision seen by me, Myrtle Hazard, aged fifteen, on the night of June 15, 1859. Written out at the request of a friend from my recollections.

"The place where I saw these sights is called, as I have been told since, Witches' Hollow. I had never been there before, and did not know that it was called so, or anything about it.

"The first strange thing that I noticed was on coming near a kind of hill or mound that rose out of the low meadows. I saw a burning cross lying on the slope of that mound. It burned with a pale greenish light, and did not waste, though I watched it for a long time, as the boat I was in moved slowly with the current and I had stopped rowing.

"I know that my eyes were open, and I was awake while I was looking at this cross. I think my eyes were open when I saw these other appearances, but I felt just as if I were dreaming while awake.

"I heard a faint rustling sound, and on looking up I saw many figures moving around me, and I seemed to see myself among them as if I were outside of myself.

"The figures did not walk, but slid or glided with an even movement, as if without any effort. They made many gestures, and seemed to speak, but I cannot tell whether I heard what they said, or knew its meaning in some other way.

"I knew the faces of some of these figures. They were the same Ihave seen in portraits, as long as I can remember, at the old house where I was brought up, called The Poplars. I saw my father and my mother as they look in the two small pictures; also my grandmother, and her father and mother and grandfather, and one other person, who lived a great while ago. All of these have been long dead, and the longer they had been dead the less like substance they looked and the more like shadows, so that the oldest was like one's breath of a frosty morning, but shaped like the living figure.

"There was no motion of their breasts, and their lips seemed to be moving as if they were saying, Breath! Breath! Breath! I thought they wanted to breathe the air of this world again in my shape, which I seemed to see as it were empty of myself and of these other selves, like a sponge that has water pressed out of it.

"Presently it seemed to me that I returned to myself, and then those others became part of me by being taken up, one by one, and so lost in my own life.

"My father and mother came up, hand in hand, looking more real than any of the rest. Their figures vanished, and they seemed to have become a part of me; for I felt all at once the longing to live over the life they had led, on the sea and in strange countries.

"Another figure was just like the one we called the Major, who was a very strong, hearty-looking man, and who is said to have drank hard sometimes, though there is nothing about it on his tombstone, which Iused to read in the graveyard. It seemed to me that there was something about his life that I did not want to make a part of mine, but that there was some right he had in me through my being of his blood, and so his health and his strength went all through me, and Iwas always to have what was left of his life in that shadow-like shape, forming a portion of mine.

"So in the same way with the shape answering to the portrait of that famous beauty who was the wife of my great-grandfather, and used to be called the Pride of the County.