know I just dote on ghost stories," pleaded
Baby Van Rensselaer.

"Once upon a time," began Uncle Larry--"in fact, a very few years
ago--there lived in the thriving town of New York a young American
called Duncan--Eliphalet Duncan. Like his name, he was half Yankee and
half Scotch, and naturally he was a lawyer, and had come to New York to
make his way. His father was a Scotchman, who had come over and settled
in Boston, and married a Salem girl. When Eliphalet Duncan was about
twenty he lost both of his parents. His father left him with enough
money to give him a start, and a strong feeling of pride in his Scotch
birth; you see there was a title in the family in Scotland, and
although Eliphalet's father was the younger son of a younger son, yet
he always remembered, and always bade his only son to remember, that
his ancestry was noble. His mother left him her full share of Yankee
grit, and a little house in Salem which has belonged to her family for
more than two hundred years. She was a Hitchcock, and the Hitchcocks had
been settled in Salem since the year 1. It was a great-great-grandfather
of Mr. Eliphalet Hitchcock who was foremost in the time of the Salem
witchcraft craze. And this little old house which she left to my friend
Eliphalet Duncan was haunted."

"By the ghost of one of the witches, of course," interrupted Dear
Jones.

"Now how could it be the ghost of a witch, since the witches were all
burned at the stake? You never heard of anybody who was burned having a
ghost, did you?"

"That's an argument in favour of cremation, at any rate," replied
Jones, evading the direct question.

"It is, if you don't like ghosts; I do," said Baby Van Rensselaer.

"And so do I," added Uncle Larry. "I love a ghost as dearly as an
Englishman loves a lord."

"Go on with your story," said the Duchess, majestically overruling all
extraneous discussion.

"This little old house at Salem was haunted," resumed Uncle Larry. "And
by a very distinguished ghost--or at least by a ghost with very
remarkable attributes."

"What was he like?" asked Baby Van Rensselaer, with a premonitory
shiver of anticipatory delight.

"It had a lot of peculiarities. In the first place, it never appeared
to the master of the house. Mostly it confined its visitations to
unwelcome guests. In the course of the last hundred years it had
frightened away four successive mothers-in-law, while never intruding
on the head of the household."

"I gue