168 APPENDIX. 



the night she had been tossed or rather heaved up as if 

 by the swelling of waves under the cot-bed, not a very 

 disagreeable sensation I should think, but frightful for 

 her, understand : that, that woman must have weighed 

 225 or 250, so you may imagine what a strong ghost 

 or demL it must have been to lift her, from that time 

 she never came any more in the house but in day time, 

 but she never neglected to divulge the incident of 

 having been tossed by spooks and everybody believed 

 the story as she did herself, and every one wondered 

 how it was that neither of us four in the Louse did 

 not hear any thing, but I heard from my young man, 

 who saw all the folks round us, that we were French 

 folks who did not care for the spooks or the devil and 

 perhaps we had some fellow-feelings sympathy for 

 them, or else they would not have spared us any more 

 than our mammoth Venus. That monumental nurse 

 and her family at that time had to move back in the 

 country near the Shaker Village of Watervliet, whither 

 we had to send our child, her mother not believing in 

 the possibility of nursing a child without the breast of 

 a woman. I object strongly, in one sense, not that, 

 the breast was not the most natural in principle, but 

 that the constitution of such a nature, a mass of in- 

 flated flesh was uncongenial to the nutrition of a weak, 

 a delicate child materially speaking, and then probably 

 worse mentally speaking, nursed up by *mind haunted 



