s so afraid lest I should have a similar visitation, that she was
strongly tempted to ask Dr. W----'s advice as to the propriety of
mentioning her experience to me. She refrained from doing so, however,
and some time later, as she was sitting in the dusk in the same room,
the man-servant came in to light the gas and made her start, observing
which, he said, "Why, lors, Miss Ellen, you jump as if you had seen a
ghost." In spite of her late experience, Ellen very gravely replied,
"Nonsense, William, how can you talk such stuff! You don't believe in
such things as ghosts, do you?" "Well," he said, "I don't know just so
sure what to say to that, seeing it's very well known there was a ghost
in this house." "Pshaw!" said Ellen. "Whose ghost?" "Well, poor Mrs.
R----'s ghost, it's very well known, walks about this house, and no
great wonder either, seeing how miserably she lived and died here." To
Ellen's persistent expressions of contemptuous incredulity, he went on,
"Well, Miss Ellen, all I can say is, several girls" (_i.e._
maid-servants) "have left this house on account of it"; and there the
conversation ended. Some days after this, Ellen coming into the
drawing-room to speak to me, stopped abruptly at the door, and stood
there, having suddenly recognized in a portrait immediately opposite to
it, and which was that of the dead mistress of the house, the face of
the person she had seen come out of my bedroom. I think this a very tidy
ghost story; and I am bound to add, as a proper commentary on it, that I
have never inhabited a house which affected me with a sense of such
intolerable melancholy gloominess as this; without any assignable reason
whatever, either in its situation or any of its conditions. My maid, to
the present day, persists in every detail (and without the slightest
variation) of this experience of hers, absolutely rejecting my
explanation of it; that she had heard, without paying any particular
attention to it, some talk among the other servants about the ghost in
the house, which had remained unconsciously to her in her memory, and
reproduced itself in this morbid nervous effect of her imagination.

46. To H---- [EXTRACT]

YORK FARM, Sunday, December 6th, 1874.

My dearest H----,

It is not possible for me to feel the slightest interest in the sort of
literary feat which I consider writing upon "who wrote Shakespeare?" to
be. I was very intimate with Harness, Milman, Dyce, Collier--all
Shakespearian