hing but facts it won't be
worth living; yet in a few years the race will have no imagination left.
It is being educated out. Look at the children. When I was young the
bogey man was as real to me as pa and nearly as much to be feared of,
but just yesterday I was lectured for merely mentioning him to my neffy.
So with ghosts. We was taught to believe in ghosts the same as we was in
Adam or Noar. Nowadays nobody believes in them. It is unscientific, and
if you are superstitious you are considered ignorant and laughed at.
Ghosts are the product of the imagination, but if I imagine I see one he
is as real to me as if he actually exists, isn't he? Therefore he does
exist. That's logic. You fellows have become scientific and admits only
what you see and feel, and don't depend on your imagination for
anything. Such being the case, I myself admit that the sperrits no
longer ha'nt the burying-ground or play around your houses. I admit it
because the same condition exact existed in Harmony when I was there,
and because of what was told me by Robert J. Dinkle about two years
after he died, and because of what occurred between me and him and the
Rev. Mr. Spiegelnail.

Harmony was a highly intellectual town. About the last man there with
any imagination or interesting ideas, excepting me, of course, was
Robert J. Dinkle. Yet he had an awful reputation, and when he died it
was generally stated privately that the last landmark of ignorance and
superstition had been providentially removed. You know he had always
been seeing things, but we set it down to his fondness for hard cider or
his natural prepensity for joshing. With him gone there was no one left
to report the doings of the sperrit-world. In fact, so widespread was
the light of reason, as the Rev. Mr. Spiegelnail called it, that the
burying-ground became a popular place for moonlight strolls. Even I
walked through it frequent on my way home from Miss Wheedle's, with
whom I was keeping company, and it never occurred to me to go any faster
there, or to look back over my shoulder, for I didn't believe in such
foolishness. But to the most intellectual there comes times of doubt
about things they know nothing of nor understand. Such a time come to
me, when the wind was more mournfuller than usual in the trees, and the
clouds scudded along overhead, casting peculiar shadders. My imagination
got the best of my intellect. I hurried. I looked back over my shoulder.
I shivered, kind of.