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situated in a warm comfortable climate, mails always a month late; here I am secure for my holiday. This morning I took a turn through Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, just to see that everything was going on all right, come here to finish my day quietly and peace fully, in the virtuous frame of mind that a Spirit feels in who has done his duty, and I find, what! That you—a being than whom a generation of apes could not produce a greater fool—have dared to compose a Christmas Story; that you have committed two pages of it to paper, and it is even now lying there in your bedroom. Can you deny it?”
    I could only bow my head in guilty assent.
    “But vengeance can still be mine—yes, Vengeance! Vengeance!! Vengeance!!!” Here his voice rose to such a shriek that I expected to see the stockman and cook come rushing in to see what was up; but no help came to me, and he raged on.
    “I will read to you, commencing with your own wretched two pages, all the Christmas literature that has been published in the world this season! ” Uttering this awful sentence he leaned back in the chair, and glared furiously at me.”
    “Mercy, mercy,” I said faintly.
    “No mercy, I know it not; I reckon it will just comfortably occupy us until the end of next year to get through it all.”
    “Spirit!” I cried, “I have sinned, but I repent; I will be a new man, Christmas shall be to me a season of mourning and desolation; spare me.”
    Its only answer was to open its book and commence reading.
    As though its first word was a blow, I fell back spell-bound and motionless, and there I lay whilst the Genius began to read my now detested production of two pages. First he read it in an ordinary colloquial tone, then he gabbled it over, next he sung it, then he tried to chant it. Then he read it in a facetious manner, stopping to laugh every now and then; then he read it in a dismal manner, pretending to cry; then he tried to make blank verse of it, and I tried to stop my ears, but all in vain; over and over again he read the horrid sentences I knew so well, until at last he seemed out of breath, and stopped.
    “How do you like it,” he said, “will you ever do it again?”
    “Never, never,” I groaned. He chuckled, and turning again to his book, the pages of which produced anything he liked without his having to turn over the leaves, he inflicted the following story upon me:—
    THE LADY ERMETTA; OR, THE SLEEPING SECRET— PROLOGUE
    Calm in the serene solemnity of their solitude; grand in the outstretched vastness of their extent, and golden in the Pactolean wealth of their beauty, lie the sands of Plimlivon. But what huge, gloomy object is that, the rugged outlines of which mar the tranquil beauty of their level expanse? Like the fossilised form of some gigantic inhabitant of a world long forgotten, or like a Brobdignagian bandbox labelled, “This side up, with care,” stands a mighty isolated rock, and casts upon the otherwise unflecked extent of stainless sand around it, a shadow, weird, gloomy, and mysterious. Why does that rock— that grim, portentous sentinel, challenging the gladsome sunlight, with its ominous “ Qui vive ,” stand there and throw its gruesome shade over sand-grain and pebble that would else be revelling in the glorious radiance of day? Say, why does the shadow of some awful secret crime fall across the otherwise unblotted course of a fair, fresh life, and turn the rich colors of the flowers of life into the sombre hues and tints of death? I know not, gentle reader, but that rock stands there because I intend to use it in the third and last chapter.
    Chapter I. THE SECRET
    “My daughter,” said the Marquis of Marborough.
    “Yes, my father,” replied the Lady Ermetta, who was of a most dutiful disposition, and when she did not say “No” said “Yes” with undeviating regularity.
    “The hour has now arrived when I feel it incumbent on me to reveal to you the secret —the secret upon which hinges