ecter that repeated to him all
the silly and trite things he had said during the day, a ghost,
moreover, that towered and swelled at every hackneyed phrase, till
finally he filled the room and burst after the young man proposed to his
admired one, and made subsequent remarks. Ghosts not only have
appallingly long memories, but they possess a mean advantage over the
living in that they have once been mortal, while the men and women they
haunt haven't yet been ghosts. Suppose each one of us were to be haunted
by his own inane utterances? True, we're told that we'll have to give
account Some Day for every idle word, but recording angels seem more
sympathetic than a sneering ghost at one's elbow. Ghosts can satirize
more fittingly than anyone else the absurdities of certain psychic
claims, as witness the delightful seriousness of the story _Back from
that Bourne_, which appeared as a front page news story in the New York
_Sun_ years ago. I should think that some of the futile, laggard
messenger-boy ghosts that one reads about nowadays would blush with
shame before the wholesome raillery of the porgy fisherman.

The modern humorous ghost satirizes everything from the old-fashioned
specter (he's very fond of taking pot-shots at him) to the latest
psychic manifestations. He laughs at ghosts that aren't experts in
efficiency haunting, and he has a lot of fun out of mortals for being
scared of specters. He loves to shake the lugubrious terrors of the past
before you, exposing their hollow futility, and he contrives to create
new fears for you magically while you are laughing at him.

The new ghost hates conventionality and uses the old thrills only to
show what dead batteries they come from. His really electrical effects
are his own inventions. He needs no dungeon keeps and monkish cells to
play about in--not he! He demands no rag nor bone nor clank of chain of
his old equipment to start on his career. He can start up a moving
picture show of his own, as in Ruth McEnery Stuart's _The Haunted
Photograph_, and demonstrate a new kind of apparition. The ghost story
of to-day gives you spinal sensations with a difference, as in the
immortal _Transferred Ghost_, by Frank R. Stockton, where the suitor on
the moonlit porch, attempting to tell his fair one that he dotes on her,
sees the ghost of her ferocious uncle (who isn't dead!) kicking his
heels against the railing, and hears his admonition that he'd better
hurry up, as the live un