think it an honour to be associated with them had been announced
as contributors to this Annual, before application was made to me
to assist in it; and I accordingly placed with much pleasure at
the Editor's disposal a few fragments, originally designed to
have been worked into the Chronicles of the Canongate, besides a
manuscript drama, the long-neglected performance of my youthful
days--"The House of Aspen."

The Keepsake for 1828 included, however, only three of these
little prose tales, of which the first in order was that entitled
"My Aunt Margaret's Mirror." By way of INTRODUCTION to this,
when now included in a general collection of my lucubrations, I
have only to say that it is a mere transcript, or at least with
very little embellishment, of a story that I remembered being
struck with in my childhood, when told at the fireside by a lady
of eminent virtues and no inconsiderable share of talent, one of
the ancient and honourable house of Swinton. She was a kind of
relation of my own, and met her death in a manner so shocking--
being killed, in a fit of insanity, by a female attendant who had
been attached to her person for half a lifetime--that I cannot
now recall her memory, child as I was when the catastrophe
occurred, without a painful reawakening of perhaps the first
images of horror that the scenes of real life stamped on my mind.

This good spinster had in her composition a strong vein of the
superstitious, and was pleased, among other fancies, to read
alone in her chamber by a taper fixed in a candlestick which she
had had formed out of a human skull. One night this strange
piece of furniture acquired suddenly the power of locomotion,
and, after performing some odd circles on her chimney-piece,