They just would not pay the least attention."

The poor old ghost almost broke down and cried. Never in life had I
known him so much affected, and it went right to my heart to see him
wiping his eyes with his handkercher and snuffling.

"Mebbe you don't make enough noise when you ha'nt," says I most
sympathetic.

"I do all the regular acts," says he, a bit het up by my remark. "We
always were kind of limited. I float around and groan, and talk foolish,
and sometimes I pull off bedclothes or reveal the hiding-place of buried
treasure. But what good does it do in a town so intellectual as
Harmony?"

I have seen many folks who were down on their luck, but never one who so
appealed to me as the late Robert J. Dinkle. It was the way he spoke,
the way he looked, his general patheticness, his very helplessness, and
deservingness. In life I had known him well, and as he was now I liked
him better. So I did want to do something for him. We sat studying for a
long time, him smoking very violent, blowing clouds of fog outen his
pipe, me thinking up some way to help him. And idees allus comes to them
who sets and waits.

"The trouble is partly as you say, Robert," I allowed after a bit, "and
again partly because you can't make enough noise to awaken the
slumbering imagination of intellectual Harmony. With a little natural
help from me though, you might stir things up in this town."

You never saw a gladder smile or a more gratefuller look than that poor
sperrit gave me.

"Ah," he says, "with your help I could do wonders. Now who'll we begin
on?"

"The Rev. Mr. Spiegelnail," says I, "has about all the imagination left
in Harmony--of course excepting me."

Robert's face fell visible. "I have tried him repeated and often," he
says, kind of argumentative-like. "All the sign he made was to complain
that his wife talked in her sleep."

I wasn't going to argue--not me. I was all for action, and lost no time
in starting. Robert J., he followed me like a dog, up through town to
our house, where I went in, leaving him outside so as not to disturb
mother. There I got me a hammer and nails with the heavy lead sinker
offen my fishnet, and it wasn't long before the finest tick-tack you
ever saw was working against the Spiegelnails' parlor window, with me in
a lilac-bush operating the string that kept the weight a-swinging.
Before the house was an open spot where the moon shone full and clear,
where Robert J. walked up and down, abou