nce--nay, pounds, in my pocket, madam, if I did not know you."

"That is a bit of specious nonsense," returned the ghost, throwing a
quart of indignation into the face of the master of Harrowby. "It may
rank high as repartee, but as a comment upon my statement that you do
not know what you are talking about, it savors of irrelevant
impertinence. You do not know that I am compelled to haunt this place
year after year by inexorable fate. It is no pleasure to me to enter
this house, and ruin and mildew everything I touch. I never aspired to
be a shower-bath, but it is my doom. Do you know who I am?"

"No, I don't," returned the master of Harrowby. "I should say you were
the Lady of the Lake, or Little Sallie Waters."

"You are a witty man for your years," said the ghost.

"Well, my humor is drier than yours ever will be," returned the master.

"No doubt. I'm never dry. I am the Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall, and
dryness is a quality entirely beyond my wildest hope. I have been the
incumbent of this highly unpleasant office for two hundred years
to-night."

"How the deuce did you ever come to get elected?" asked the master.

"Through a suicide," replied the specter. "I am the ghost of that fair
maiden whose picture hangs over the mantelpiece in the drawing-room. I
should have been your great-great-great-great-great-aunt if I had lived,
Henry Hartwick Oglethorpe, for I was the own sister of your
great-great-great-great-grandfather."

"But what induced you to get this house into such a predicament?"

"I was not to blame, sir," returned the lady. "It was my father's fault.
He it was who built Harrowby Hall, and the haunted chamber was to have
been mine. My father had it furnished in pink and yellow, knowing well
that blue and gray formed the only combination of color I could
tolerate. He did it merely to spite me, and, with what I deem a proper
spirit, I declined to live in the room; whereupon my father said I could
live there or on the lawn, he didn't care which. That night I ran from
the house and jumped over the cliff into the sea."

"That was rash," said the master of Harrowby.

"So I've heard," returned the ghost. "If I had known what the
consequences were to be I should not have jumped; but I really never
realized what I was doing until after I was drowned. I had been drowned
a week when a sea-nymph came to me and informed me that I was to be one
of her followers forever afterwards, adding that it should be my