walked silently in, and were enchanted with the slow and solemn responses which, wafted through the long drawn aisles, sounded like a requiem to the repose of departed spirits. A silkeu curtain drawn across a gallery into

the spot appropriated to the nuns; entranced a while we stood listening to their heavenly chorusses, but the recollection that we were to sail the next morning, and the thoughts of home which even then came across our minds,

ter the Princess Henrietta, wife of the Duke of Orleans, had in his political connexion with the French court. Her death was extremely sudden, and has generally been supposed to have been caused by unfair means, nor did her husband escape suspicion; the manner in which it was accomplished, however, is not generally known. A valet de chambre in her service, just previous to the moment of his death, confessed that a person about the court came into the dining-room, opened a beaufet, and having taken out the goblet always used by the Princess, rubbed it with some paper. The valet asked him what he was doing at the beaufet? and why he touched the Princess's goblet? The other immediately answered, "I am thirsty, I looked for something to drink, and the goblet being dusty, I have wiped it with the paper."

After dinner the devoted Henrietta called for her usual draught of chicory water; but had no sooner swallowed it than she cried out "1 am poisoned."-Many of those who were present had drank of this chicory water, but vot out of the same goblet; they suffered no inconvenience from it, but the Princess grew rapidly worse and being carried to bed, lingered out the niglit in most horrible torments, and expired before the break of day. The inanner and circumstances of her death seem to have made some impression upon the proffigate yet superstitious followers of the court, and a report was soon current and universally believed at St. Cloud, that the spirit of the Princess appeared every night in an arbour of the garden, where she had often been accus. tomed to spend much of her time when alive One evening a servant of the court passing by the arbour, saw something all in white, and which suddenly encreased in size; terrified at the apparition he fled, and having told the cause of his alarm, fell sick and died. A few days after, an officer of the guards fully persuaded that something, though perhaps not a

having rambled at the witching hour of night, towards the haunted arbour, soon got a full view of the ghost. His courage however was equal to his curiosity, advancing towards the phantom he threatened it with a sound cudgelling, if it did not say who and what in was. "Ah! my good Sir," exclaimed the terrified ghost, "pray do not hurt me, I am only poor Philippinette!"

This poor Philippinette was an old woman of a neighbouring village, more than seventy years old, without a tooth in her head, and frightful enough from her glaring eyes, hook nose, and distended mouth, to have passed at any time for an inhabitant of the infernal regions; being seized, and brought up to the palace, she was ordered to prison, but released at the instance of a Princess of the blood; who having sent for the beldame, asked her what could have prompted her to this representation of a spirit, at such untimely hours, when she ought to have been in her bed. “Ah! Madame," exclaimed the hag, with great simplicity, "at my age one sleeps so little! oue must have something to amuse them. Nothing ever amused me so much in youth as to play the ghost; and I was certain that those who might not dread my white habit, would be sufficiently terrified when they saw my face. Those whom I frightened made so many grimaces, that I was like to die with laughing; this sport was my only amusement, and chear ed me in all my labour of carrying burthens through the day."

If all other ghost stories were investigated as closely it would generally be found that they originate from some cause of the same kind; not all perhaps proceeding from the tricks of the fair sex; though some may think it nas tural enough that those who play the devil with the men in their youth, should amuse themselves with playing the ghost, in their more ad. vanced years.

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