ortrait at all; but
Aunt Henrietta swears it is, and of the ghost, too--as he was before he
died, of course. And very interesting details both my aunts are ready to
furnish concerning the two originals. It is extraordinary what an amount
of information is always forthcoming about things of which nobody can
know anything--as about the next world, for instance. The, last time I
went to church the preacher gave as minute an account of what our
post-mortem experiences were to be as if he had gone through it all
himself several times."

"Well, does the ghost usually appear in a ruff or in armour?"

"It depends entirely upon who sees it--a ghost always does. Last night,
for instance, I lay you odds it wore neither ruff nor armour, because
Mrs. Mallet is not likely to have heard of either the one or the other.
Not that she saw the ghost--not she. What she saw was a bogie, not a
ghost."

"Why, what is the difference?"

"Immense! As big as that which separates the objective from the
subjective. Any one can see a bogie. It is a real thing belonging to the
external world. It may be a bright light, a white sheet, or a black
shadow--always at night, you know, or at least in the dusk, when you are
apt to be a little mixed in your observations. The best example of a
bogie was Sir Walter Scott's. It looked--in the twilight
remember--exactly like Lord Byron, who had not long departed this life
at the time Sir Walter saw it. Nine men out of ten would have gone off
and sworn they had seen a ghost; why, religions have been founded on
just such stuff: but Sir Walter, as sane a man as ever lived--though he
did write poetry--kept his head clear and went up closer to his ghost,
which proved on examination to be a waterproof."

"A waterproof?"

"Or a railway rug--I forget which: the moral is the same."

"Well, what is a ghost?"

"A ghost is nothing--an airy nothing manufactured by your own disordered
senses of your own over-excited brain."

"I beg to observe that I never saw a ghost in my life."

"I am glad to hear it. It does you credit. If ever any one had an excuse
for seeing a ghost it would be a man whose spine was jarred. But I meant
nothing personal by the pronoun--only to give greater force to my
remarks. The first person singular will do instead. The ghost belongs to
the same lot, as the faces that make mouths at me when I have
brain-fever, the reptiles that crawl about when I have an attack of the
D.T., or--to take a more