peace for the past month."

"Is that all? The mountain in labor has brought forth a mouse. My
dear Sir Jasper, how can you be so simply credulous?"

"I knew you would laugh," said Sir Jasper, moodily; "I said so. But
laugh if you can. I believe!"

"Was the prediction very terrible, then?" asked his wife, with a smile.
"Pray tell me all about it."

"It was terrible," her husband replied, sternly. "The living horror it
has cast over me might have told you that. Listen, Olivia! On that
night of our baby boy's birth, after I left you and came here, I stood
by this window and saw a spectral face gleaming through the glass. It
was the face of a man--a belated wayfarer--who adjured me, in the
Savior's name, to let him in."

"Well, you let him in, I suppose?"

"I let him in--a strange-looking object, Olivia, like no creature I
ever saw before, with flowing beard and hair silver-white--"

"False, no doubt."

"He wore a long, disguising cloak and a skull-cap," went on Sir Jasper,
"and his face was blanched to a dull dead white. He would have looked
like a resuscitated corpse, only for a pair of burning black eyes."

"Quite a startling apparition! Melodramatic in the extreme! And this