ers among the country families there. To my surprise, I
discovered that the possession of a family specter was considered as a
permanent improvement to the property, and my offers of service in
ridding houses of ghostly tenants awakened the liveliest resentment. As
a layer of ghosts I was much lower in the social scale than a layer of
carpets.

Disappointed and discouraged, I returned home to make a further study of
the opportunities of my invention. I had, it seemed, exhausted the
possibilities of the use of unwelcome phantoms. Could I not, I thought,
derive a revenue from the traffic in desirable specters? I decided to
renew my investigations.

The nebulous spirits preserved in my laboratory, which I had graded and
classified, were, you will remember, in a state of suspended animation.
They were, virtually, embalmed apparitions, their inevitable decay
delayed, rather than prevented. The assorted ghosts that I had now
preserved in hermetically sealed tins were thus in a state of unstable
equilibrium. The tins once opened and the vapor allowed to dissipate,
the original astral body would in time be reconstructed and the
warmed-over specter would continue its previous career. But this
process, when naturally performed, took years. The interval was quite
too long for the phantom to be handled in any commercial way. My problem
was, therefore, to produce from my tinned Essence of Ghost a specter
that was capable of immediately going into business and that could haunt
a house while you wait.

It was not until radium was discovered that I approached the solution of
my great problem, and even then months of indefatigable labor were
necessary before the process was perfected. It has now been well
demonstrated that the emanations of radiant energy sent forth by this
surprising element defy our former scientific conceptions of the
constitution of matter. It was for me to prove that the vibratory
activity of radium (whose amplitudes and intensity are undoubtedly
four-dimensional) effects a sort of allotropic modification in the
particles of that imponderable ether which seems to lie halfway between
matter and pure spirit. This is as far as I need to go in my
explanation, for a full discussion involves the use of quaternions and
the method of least squares. It will be sufficient for the layman to
know that my preserved phantoms, rendered radio-active, would, upon
contact with the air, resume their spectral shape.

The possible