chanical advantage as a brain of cellular tissue"--here
he suddenly took the form of a white lady with a black sack over her
head, and disappeared in the wainscot.

"Excuse me," he said a moment afterwards, quite in his ordinary voice, "I
had a touch of it, I fancy. I lost the thread of my argument, and am
dimly conscious of having expressed myself in some unusual and more or
less incoherent fashion. I hope it was nothing at all vulgar or
distressing?"

"Nothing out of the way in haunted houses, I assure you," I replied,
"merely a white lady with a black sack over her head."

"Oh, _that_ was it," he answered with a sigh; "I often am afflicted in
that way. Don't mind me if I turn into a luminous boy, or a very old man
in chains, or a lady in a green gown and high-heeled shoes, or a headless
horseman, or a Mauth hound, or anything of that sort. They are all quite
imperfect expressions of our nature,--symptoms, in short, of the malady I
mentioned."

"Then the appalling manifestations to which you allude are not the
apparitions of the essential ghost? It is not in those forms that he
appears among his friends?"

"Certainly not," said the spectre; "and it would be very promotive of
good feeling between men and disembodied spirits if this were more
generally known. I myself--"

Here he was interrupted by an attack of spirit rappings. A brisk series
of sharp faint taps, of a kind I never heard before, resounded from all
the furniture of the room. {265} While the disturbance continued, the
spectre drummed nervously with his fingers on his knee. The sounds ended
as suddenly as they had begun, and he expressed his regrets. "It is a
thing I am subject to," he remarked; "nervous, I believe, but, to persons
unaccustomed to it, alarming."

"It _is_ rather alarming," I admitted.

"A mere fit of sneezing," he went on; "but you are now able to judge,
from the events of to-night, how extremely hard it is for us, with the
best intentions, to communicate coherently with the embodied world. Why,
there is the Puddifant ghost--in Lord Puddifant's family, you know: _he_
has been trying for generations to inform his descendants that the
drainage of the castle is execrable. Yet he can never come nearer what
he means than taking the form of a shadowy hearse-and-four, and driving
round and round Castle Puddifant at midnight. And old Lady Wadham's
ghost, what a sufferer that woman is! She merely desires to remark that
the fa