"You are not afraid, then, to open the flood- Patook river. gates for colonists ?"

The trade of two-thirds of Honduras is sup"No, no; let them come; there is room plied by the annual fair of San Miguel, in San enough. We have land, cattle, horses, mules, Salvador. Goods sold at this fair are taken food, spices, indigo, vanilla, gold, and silver; round Cape Horn by French, German, and Enall ours, and worth money. You will buy them.glish merchants, chiefly the latter, to the Bay We shall accumulate wealth. We are not afraid of your people, whatever some foreign rogues may tell you. You are honest-republicanyou do not rob, steal, terrify, and cheat, like the English."

pamphlet, but the next day we resumed it, after | of their inhabitants-a work which can not here another excursion, during which I obtained sev-be introduced; but as a substitute, our artist eral angles for the foundation of my map. has given in his best manner the beauties of a scenery for the first time represented and described by an American.

"Señor," said he, recurring with evident pleasure to the topic of the previous day, "if our brave Olanchanos had weapons like yours, they would be independent of all nations; but now let us hear the rest of Señor Bernardis, as follows:

"The gold of the Guayape, Jalan, and Mangerlile rivers is well known in Olancho; as those of the Sulaco, Yuguale, Caminito, and Pacaya are in Yoro. Some of these streams are of the richest order of rivers, and compare well with that of Copaipo and Guasco in Chili.' . . . . . . The Supreme Government should use every means in its power to entice immigration for the turning to account of this vast resource of the soil."

BIRCHKNOLL.

A NEW GHOST STORY OF OLD VIRGINIA.
H-eh-em-em!"

"E"

If you have ever had the honor of an acquaintance with a nice old, motherly, shrewd, superstitious, affectionate, troublesome, indispensable, useless, sable daughter of Ham, you can pronounce that interjection. If you have not had intercourse with any such person, you can not imitate the sound, and you need not try. It would be as useless for me to attempt to teach you, as it is to attempt "French without a master," or to essay to convey the Gaulic sounds in the characters of the English alphabet.

"Eh-eh-em-em !"

There is a deal of meaning conveyed in this apparently meaningless sound-quite as much as in Lord Burleigh's shake of the head. There is more, indeed, for his Lordship's pantomime needs daylight or lamplight, but Aunt Susannah said or humphed that wise exclamation to me in the evening, when you could no more see her sable pow than you could discern the exact form of midnight.

As the remainder of this remarkable document is merely a description of the mineral and agricultural resources of Honduras, I will no longer follow the patriotic Padre in his statistical readings. At a later period I made a personal survey of the great river Guayape. During my sojourn in Olancho it was a formidable stream, flowing majestically toward the sea, fed by numerous mountain affluents-the Jalan, Guayapita, Concordia, España, Moran, Garcia, Rio de Olancho, Masatepé, Rio Real, Rio de Catacamas, and the Lesser Tinto. Below Jutecalpa the Guayape (now called Patook)-increased by the Guayambre from the S.S.W., and then successively by the Gineo, Rio de Tabaco on the south, Coyamel, Wampeo-all large branches with numerous smaller tributaries becomes an immense stream, capable of bearing the steamers of the Upper Ohio and Mississippi upon its bosom. During the rainy or summer months, the body of the water rises to twice its ordinary depth, and spreads into vast reaches, "sloughs," and fresh-water lagoons. When I visited the Chifflones I found four feet of water on the rapids, and could discover no obstacle to steamboat navigation-as it is now practiced on our Western rivers-from the ocean to the immediate vicinity of the placers. And here, with regret, I am compelled to bid adieu to the reader.* The region I have described to him, although not more than four days' distance from New Orleans by ordinary steam navigation, has been hitherto unknown even to geographers. Its rivers and mountains, like those of the mysterious O. Brazil, so ludicrously noticed by Swift in the Tale of a Tub, have been created by desperate map-makers to fill unsightly blanks. Now, on the contrary, I have spread before me a map of the noble river When I expressed the doubt and the wish Patook and all its branches, with every farm-above mentioned, Aunty humphed. She then house and village in Olancho, and the number went on to tell me that I need not be so skeptical, that she could oppose experience to my young ignorance, and demonstrate the possibility of ghosts by proofs of their actual appear

I have been obliged, for want of space, to omit all mention of the valuable copper-mines of Lepaguaré, on the lands of the Zelayas, and which are now included in their grants to their American associates. These, and the

silver, rock-gold, and cinnabar deposits of Tegucigalpa

and Olancho, require a full description, and will repay the attention of mineralogists and miners.

Aunt Susannah had been regaling me with a ghost story. I had told her that I did not believe a word of it. I had told her, moreover, that if the spirits of the dead could return to earth, I should be glad to see my brother's wife-two years dead-whose little child found in old Susannah's breast as affectionate a heart as ever beat in any bosom, black or white. Susannah is my dear little Charley's nurse. She was his father's; and she was looking forward to a long line of duty in a new generation, when my dear sister sickened and died. She was my nurse. She was my mother's, and she pretends that she was her mother's too. I don't know. These old negro aunties never grow any older, and nobody can remember when they seemed younger. I can recollect the time when, if Aunt Susannah had told me that Pharaoh's daughter gave her Moses to nurse, when she took him out of the Nile, I should have believed her. [There's an idea for Mr. Barnum. They have no baptismal registers in Egypt-which is awkward—but Mr. B. may as well play upon our credulity with the hieroglyphic and demotic inscriptions as to leave them entirely to more scientific pretenders.]

ance.

marks-such is rather a paraphrase. If I rcSuch was the purport of Susannah's remember the exact words, they were:

Need'n tell dis chile dere's no gosisses. I know dere is!"

"Eh-ch-em-em! I hear you talkin'! | fact is, as Aunt Susannah presents it, that the only legitimate vehicle of ghostly lore is oral tradition. It proves nothing to print it, for you can print nay as well as yea. But what has been every where believed, and by every body, is surely true. Who don't believe in ghosts? Don't you? I wish, then, you could hear Aunt Susannah upon the subject. One word of hers would settle you-yes, less than a word: "Eheh-em-em!" And when did not people believe in them? If antiquity is the test and warrant of truth, the farther back you go into the dim past, the more ghosts you find. Spiritual manifestations are only the old story in a new dress-Aunt Susannah to the contrary notwithstanding.

I was silenced for a moment, but not convinced. I feel my growing years. I am almost twenty. I am fresh from boarding-school, and have thirty intimate friends with whom I correspond. Perhaps I should say twenty-ninebut that would be anticipating my story. And one of those friends, my dear Angeline, was with us on a visit at the very time. Aunt Susannah coldly included her under the contempt with which she regards all "desc 'ere Yankees," and I was piqued, and determined to assert my womanhood. It would not do for a girl of eighteen, with a guest in the house, to be silenced before Aunt Susannah. I must convince her that I am a woman, or she will nurse me forever. I told her something in exchange for her marvels. I gave her the newest wonders of modern spiritualism-how the dead talk with the living, and not only talk, but write, through the spiritual telegraph. I did not tell her how much of my information came from Angeline, for then she would have classed it all with wooden hams, silver side-saddles, and surreptitious meetings. Of course, invention was not spared, and what the books, and newspapers, and Angelina did not furnish, was supplied from a tolerably fertile imagination. "How dey look?" asked Aunt Susannah. I informed her that no one saw the spirits. "How dey speak?"

Little Charley cried, and an end was put to our colloquy. "B'lieve de gosisses is here now," said Aunt Susannah, "if you could only see 'em. Dey won't let the chile sleep. Dey make hosses kick in the stable, and shy and stumble in de road. Hosses see gosisses, or else what dey 'fraid of in de dark? Eh-em! You is mighty piert, Mess Carline; but you fine out one dese days, I tell you!"

I wonder if every body is superstitious. I think sometimes that I am. At any rate the conversation with old Aunty did not at all prepare me to sit alone and in darkness, while the autumn winds suddenly hissing put the doors and shutters in motion; and I sought the family in the sitting-room. There must have been something contagious in the air, or the spirits must have been at work, influencing all parts of the house at once, for the family topic to

I told her that no one heard their voices, but that these spiritual essences borrowed the tongues of living people, who were called me-night was spiritualism. All were inclined to diums, or used their fingers to write, or rapped under the tables, or in the walls; giving her, in short, the most approved relations of spiritualistic phenomena. "Don' believe it. Dey isn't true spirits. S'pose dey can come, can't dey show theirselves? S'pose dey can walk, can't dey speak? Don' believe it. But don' tell me dere isn't gosisses-real gosisses, 'cause I know dere is!"

It seemed as if Susannah were resolved to revenge herself for my unbelief in her ghostly narratives, by refusing obstinately to credit the new spiritual manifestations. She would not believe a word of the spiritualist theory, whether that of Andrew Jackson Davis, or the emendations of judges and ci devant parsons. Whenever I repeated them, she met me with the invariable interjection of doubt. As to any printed accounts of marvel, she had a sovereign contempt for all "made up lies," which came in the heterodox shape of books and newspapers. Nothing in the way of a ghost story is to be believed which comes in such a suspicious form. "Dere is things," Susannah said, "dat ain't to be printed. Why dere was gosisses fo' ever dere was a printer. S'pose dey goern to be put in books? Put 'em in de Red Sea fust."

The reasoning is plausible, if not logical. The connection between the premises and the conclusion is not made exactly clear; but the VOL. XII.-No. 69.-Y

speak of it lightly, leaving what they said to be treated as subsequent revelations might prompt. Angeline was the oracle. She had the newest wonders and the most of them. But you could never tell by what she said whether she meant to be serious or was mocking you with romance. She had a capital De Foe-like method of narrative-the perfect art of most elaborate simplicity. When you looked to see what she meant, she was more a puzzle than ever. I was not to be outdone. As I had puzzled Susannah in the kitchen with the parlor lore, I turned the kitchen artillery against the parlor. We all reached such a comfortable state-except father, who went to sleep-that the slam of a door made us jump from our chairs.

I saw that my brother was specially uncomfortable, and made an effort to change the subject. Poor fellow! He never has been half himself since he brought his young wife home to die! But the effort to change the subject of conversation only succeeded so far that it produced silence. Father waked up, and withdrew. Mother followed; and then the rest, except Edward, who stood at the window gazing out into the night. I went to him, and placed my hand upon his arm. He started, then said, "Oh, is it you, Caroline?" "You were thinking of her."