The guardian angel :: :: University of Virginia Library

“The place where I saw these sights is called, as I
have been told since, Witches' Hollow. I had never been
there before, and did not know that it was called so, or
anything about it.

“The first strange thing that I noticed was on coming
near a kind of hill or mound that rose out of the low
meadows. I saw a burning cross lying on the slope of
that mound. It burned with a pale greenish light, and did
not waste, though I watched it for a long time, as the boat
I was in moved slowly with the current and I had stopped
rowing.

“I know that my eyes were open, and I was awake
while I was looking at this cross. I think my eyes were
open when I saw these other appearances, but I felt just
as if I were dreaming while awake.

“I heard a faint rustling sound, and on looking up I
saw many figures moving around me, and I seemed to see
myself among them as if I were outside of myself.

“The figures did not walk, but slid or glided with an
even movement, as if without any effort. They made
many gestures, and seemed to speak, but I cannot tell
whether I heard what they said, or knew its meaning in
some other way.

“I knew the faces of some of these figures. They
were the same I have seen in portraits, as long as I can remember,

at the old house where I was brought up, called
The Poplars. I saw my father and my mother as they look
in the two small pictures; also my grandmother, and her
father and mother and grandfather, and one other person,
who lived a great while ago. All of these have been long
dead, and the longer they had been dead the less like substance
they looked and the more like shadows, so that the
oldest was like one's breath of a frosty morning, but
shaped like the living figure.

“There was no motion of their breasts, and their lips
seemed to be moving as if they were saying, Breath!
Breath! Breath! I thought they wanted to breathe the
air of this world again in my shape, which I seemed to see
as it were empty of myself and of these other selves, like
a sponge that has water pressed out of it.

“Presently it seemed to me that I returned to myself,
and then those others became part of me by being taken
up, one by one, and so lost in my own life.

“My father and mother came up, hand in hand, looking
more real than any of the rest. Their figures vanished,
and they seemed to have become a part of me; for I felt
all at once the longing to live over the life they had led, on
the sea and in strange countries.

“Another figure was just like the one we called the
Major, who was a very strong, hearty-looking man, and
who is said to have drank hard sometimes, though there
is nothing about it on his tombstone, which I used to read
in the graveyard. It seemed to me that there was something
about his life that I did not want to make a part of
mine, but that there was some right he had in me through
my being of his blood, and so his health and his strength
went all through me, and I was always to have what

was left of his life in that shadow-like shape, forming a
portion of mine.

“So in the same way with the shape answering to the
portrait of that famous beauty who was the wife of my
great-grandfather, and used to be called the Pride of the
County.

“And so too with another figure which had the face of
that portrait marked on the back, Ruth Bradford, who
married one of my ancestors, and was before the court, as
I have heard, in the time of the witchcraft trials.

“There was with the rest a dark, wild-looking woman,
with a head-dress of feathers. She kept as it were in
shadow, but I saw something of my own features in her
face.

“It was on my mind very strongly that the shape of
that woman of our blood who was burned long ago by the
Papists came very close to me, and was in some way made
one with mine, and that I feel her presence with me since,
as if she lived again in me; but not always, — only at
times, — and then I feel borne up as if I could do anything
in the world. I had a feeling as if she were my
guardian and protector.

“It seems to me that these, and more, whom I have not
mentioned, do really live over some part of their past lives
in my life. I do not understand it all, and perhaps it can
be accounted for in some way I have not thought of. I
write it down as nearly as I can give it from memory, by
request, and if it is printed at this time had rather have
all the real names withheld.

“Myrtle Hazard.”

NOTE BY THE FRIEND.

“This statement must be accounted for in some way, or

pass into the category of the supernatural. Probably it
was one of those intuitions, with objective projection, which
sometimes come to imaginative young persons, especially
girls, in certain exalted nervous conditions. The study of
the portraits, with the knowledge of some parts of the history
of the persons they represented, and the consciousness
of instincts inherited in all probability from these same
ancestors, formed the basis of Myrtle's `Vision.' The
lives of our progenitors are, as we know, reproduced in
different proportions in ourselves. Whether they as individuals
have any consciousness of it, is another matter. It
is possible that they do get a second as it were fractional
life in us. It might seem that many of those whose blood
flows in our veins struggle for the mastery, and by and by
one or more get the predominance, so that we grow to be
like father, or mother, or remoter ancestor, or two or more
are blended in us, not to the exclusion, however, it must
be understood, of a special personality of our own, about
which these others are grouped. Independently of any
possible scientific value, this `Vision' serves to illustrate
the above-mentioned fact of common experience, which is
not sufficiently weighed by most moralists.

“How much it may be granted to certain young persons
to see, not in virtue of their intellectual gifts, but through
those direct channels which worldly wisdom may possibly
close to the luminous influx, each reader must determine
for himself by his own standards of faith and evidence.

“One statement of the narrative admits of a simple
natural explanation, which does not allow the lovers of the
marvellous to class it with the quasi miraculous appearance
seen by Colonel Gardiner, and given in full by Dr.
Doddridge in his Life of that remarkable Christian soldier.

Decaying wood is often phosphorescent, as many readers
must have seen for themselves. The country people are
familiar with the sight of it in wild timber-land, and have
given it the name of `Fox-fire.' Two trunks of trees in
this state, lying across each other, will account for the fact
observed, and vindicate the truth of the young girl's story
without requiring us to suppose any exceptional occurrence
outside of natural laws.”