t of their extravagance to peep out from behind the
solemn dialect in which they are dressed. The brief tale of _Thrawn
Janet_, and Black Andy's story of Tod Lapraik in _Catriona_, are
grotesque imaginations of the school of _Tam o' Shanter_ rather than of
the school of Shakespeare, who deals in no comedy ghosts. They are
turnip-lanterns swayed by a laughing urchin, proud of the fears he can
awaken. Even _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ and the story
of _The Bottle Imp_ are manufactured bogeys, that work on the nerves and
not on the heart, whatever may be said by those who insist on seeing
allegory in what is only dream-fantasy. The supernatural must be rooted
deeper than these in life and experience if it is to reach an imposing
stature: the true ghost is the shadow of a man. And Stevenson shows a
sense of this in two of his very finest stories, the exquisite idyll of
_Will o' the Mill_ and the grim history of _Markheim_. Each of these
stories is the work of a poet, by no means of a goblin-fancier. The
personification of Death is as old as poetry; it is wrought with moving
gentleness in that last scene in the arbour of Will's inn. The wafted
scent of the heliotropes, which had never been planted in the garden
since Marjory's death, the light in the room that had been hers, prelude
the arrival at the gate of the stranger's carriage, with the black pine
tops standing above it like plumes. And Will o' the Mill makes the
acquaintance of his physician and friend, and goes at last upon his
travels. In the other story, Markheim meets with his own double in the
house of the dealer in curiosities, whom he has murdered. It is not such
a double as Rossetti prayed for to the god of Sleep:

'Ah! might I, by thy good grace,
Groping in the windy stair
(Darkness and the breath of space
Like loud waters everywhere),
Meeting mine own image there
Face to face,
Send it from that place to her!'

but a clear-eyed critic of the murderer, not unfriendly, who lays bare
before him his motives and history. At the close of that wonderful
conversation, one of the most brilliant of its author's achievements,
Markheim gives himself into the hands of the police. These two stories,
when compared with the others, serve to show how Stevenson's imagination
quickened and strengthened when it played full upon life. For his best
romantic effects, like all great romance, are illuminative of life,