scrupulous in the bestowal
of titles--"saw no more of the ghosts after he was married."

"He never saw them at all, at any time, either before or since. But they
came very near breaking off the match, and thus breaking two young
hearts."

"You don't mean to say that they knew any just cause or impediment why
they should not forever after hold their peace?" asked Dear Jones.

"How could a ghost, or even two ghosts, keep a girl from marrying the
man she loved?" This was Baby Van Rensselaer's question.

"It seems curious, doesn't it?" and Uncle Larry tried to warm himself by
two or three sharp pulls at his fiery little cigar. "And the
circumstances are quite as curious as the fact itself. You see, Miss
Sutton wouldn't be married for a year after her mother's death, so she
and Duncan had lots of time to tell each other all they knew. Eliphalet
got to know a good deal about the girls she went to school with; and
Kitty soon learned all about his family. He didn't tell her about the
title for a long time, as he wasn't one to brag. But he described to
her the little old house at Salem. And one evening towards the end of
the summer, the wedding-day having been appointed for early in
September, she told him that she didn't want a bridal tour at all; she
just wanted to go down to the little old house at Salem to spend her
honeymoon in peace and quiet, with nothing to do and nobody to bother
them. Well, Eliphalet jumped at the suggestion: it suited him down to
the ground. All of a sudden he remembered the spooks, and it knocked him
all of a heap. He had told her about the Duncan banshee, and the idea of
having an ancestral ghost in personal attendance on her husband tickled
her immensely. But he had never said anything about the ghost which
haunted the little old house at Salem. He knew she would be frightened
out of her wits if the house ghost revealed itself to her, and he saw at
once that it would be impossible to go to Salem on their wedding trip.
So he told her all about it, and how whenever he went to Salem the two
ghosts interfered, and gave dark seances and manifested and materialized
and made the place absolutely impossible. Kitty listened in silence, and
Eliphalet thought she had changed her mind. But she hadn't done anything
of the kind."

"Just like a man--to think she was going to," remarked Baby Van
Rensselaer.

"She just told him she could not bear ghosts herself, but she would not
marry a man who was afraid o