This went on, at intervals, for a year, when the ghost found a voice,
and told them to tell the cure to come there; and when he came he said
he wanted three masses said for him, and alms given to the poor. The
author has the following sensible observations on the modes in which
ghost stories originate:--

"We call to our assistance the artifices of the charlatans,
who do so many things which pass for supernatural in the eyes
of the ignorant. Philosophers, by means of certain glasses,
and what are called magic lanterns; by optical secrets,
sympathetic powders: by their phosphorus, and, lately, by
means of the electric machine, show us an infinite number of
things which the simpletons take for magic, because they know
not how they are produced. Eyes that are diseased do not see
things as others see them, or else behold them differently.
A drunken man will see objects double; to one who has the
jaundice they will appear yellow: in the obscurity people
fancy they see a spectre, where there is but the trunk of a
tree.

"A mountebank will appear to eat a sword; mother will vomit
coals, or pebbles. One will drink wine, and send it out again
at his forehead; another will cut off his companion's head,
and put it on again. You will think you see a chicken dragging
a beam. The mountebank will swallow fire, and vomit it forth;
he will draw blood from fruit; he will send from his mouth
strings of iron nails; he will put a sword on his stomach, and
press it strongly, and instead of running into him, it will
bend back to the hilt. Another will run a sword through his
body without wounding himself. You will sometimes see a child