VAMPIRES.

Waikato Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 2325, 4 June 1887, Page 2

VAMPIRES.

|Amon'p weird and unnatural horrors of romance and legend the vampire has al- ■' ways held the foremost place. The casual wraith, the family ghost, the spectre in clanking chains, and even the witch's "familiar," are nowhere in comparison to the graveyard ghoul, said to sustain its loathsome existence by sucking the blood of living persons. The victim, attaaked in the dead of night, would sicken mysteriously and die of emaciation, and then would in its turn prey upon other unfortunates ; for superstition says that he who dies by a vampire shall likewise become a vampire, and know no peace in the tomb. Tradition goes on to tell how a visit to the grave of a vampire \v( uld show the corpse warm, flexible, and apparently nourished, though it might have lain dead several years, and how, when pierced, it would emit streams of blood, utter groans, and exhibit other signs of vitality. It must then, be dealt with after the official process—have a stake run through its heart, and be beheaded ; after which the plasrue would cease so far as that particular vampire was concerned. English ghost annals are not rich in vampires. Our soil and climate, and perhaps, the AngloSaxon temperament, arc not favourable to tho development of this uncannymonster, which appears to flourish best among Slavonian nations, and figures prominently in the morbid domestic records of Greeks, Wallachians, and Servians. According to popular superstition, and, in some cases, officially attested reports, the vampire was not so long ago a frequent visitor in certain districts of Poland, Hungary, and Bavaru. If we are to accept a paragraph which recently appeared in various newspapers, relating the decapitation after death of a person suspected of vampirish tendencies, the scourge of the ruurdnlih, as the Slavs called it, is to this day dreaded ana guarded ngainst liomance invests the vampire with sickening human attributes, which place it far above the category of stock supernational horrors. It is described as showing marked partiality in its choice of a victim, being attracted to some one person in especial, lavishing upon him or her unwholesale endearments, delaying with an epicure's instinct the gratification of its appetite over the unconscious doomed one with something of a lover's eestacy

Apart from supra-mundane speculations it is certain that vampires do exist under the conditions of everyday social intercourse. There are vampires who suck the brains of their fellow-men and women. There are vampires who, if they do not actually suck the l'fe-blood, drain away by slow degrees the nerve force of their victims. Who cannot in the circle of his friends and relations point to such an one? There is the ordinary social bore, whose presence inflicts a profound and unaccountable sense of exhaustion. There is the domestic vampire, who seems to derive sustenance from the emotional expenditure of those sensitive beings unfortunate enough to have come directly under the baneful influence. There are husbands, wives, brothers, and sisters who feed upon each other's very hearts, recruiting their own emotional vigour at the expense of another's suffering, with a horrible egotism which is nothing short of vampirism. It is a factadmitted by physicians that young children are injured in health by sleeping with older persons, the aged and feeble adding to their reserve of vital force by contact with the young and vigorous. Once open the door to this suggestion, and many n, death from slow decline might be traced by the fanciful to some living votmlttluk seated at the family hearth, and none the less pestilential because innocent of evil intent. Mesmeric adepts have a theory that every human body gives out magnetic emanations which change according to the conditions of the body, and are subject to the laws which govern electricity, two positives or two negatives repelling each other, and vice versa. Sympathies and antipathies might thus be readily accounted for, and it is, perhaps, as satisfactory an explanation as an}' other of "I do not like thee, Dr. Fell." But according to these philosophers, human magnetism has certain subtle, absorbent, psychic properties, which, if understood and duly directed, would render it the most potent of forces. Such a theory, if admitted, would revolutionise the whole social system. When a young couple showed symptoms of attachment, the first consideration which would suggest itself would be whether their magnetic emanations were mutually beneficial or the reverse. Marriages would be regulated on strictly psychological prinoiplca, and it is possible that there might be less work in the Divorce Court in consequence. Servants would be magnetically tested before they were engeged. Schools, looked upon under the new lights as hot beds of Vampirism, would cease to exist. Psychic professors would act as stewards in ballrooms, and only permit those to dance together whose inagnestism harmonised. Guests at dinner parties would be selected in refereuce to the healthy blending of magnetic currents. Quarrelling would become an impossibility. Nervous exhaustion would be an unknown malady , the petty jars and wear and tear of life would be done away with, and, in short, the new discovery would herald a millennial age.

Tub Adulteration ok American Cheese.—The members of the Now York Produce Exchange Cheese Trade seem determined to do their best to put a stop to the manufacture of adulterated lower grade chesse whioli nfc present prevails so extensively in the Western States of America. At ;t meeting held in New Vork on the 23rd ult., resolutions condemnatory of the practice were carried with but one dissentient. The preamble to the resolutions stated that large quantities of cheese were being exported to Great Britain made from milk from which the cream had been entirely extracted by the separation process, and it was mentinned by one of the speakers that the adulterants used in its place were lard, neutral or oleo oil, cottonseed oil, and low grade butter. The injury done to the American cheese trade by these spurious goods was alleged to be shown by the fact that in 1881 fourteen milliin dollars worth of cheese was exported from America, while in 1886 the exports fell to six and a half millions,