y love to do these things.

What is saddest about ghosts is that they may not know their child. They
expect him to be just as he was when they left him, and they are easily
bewildered, and search for him from room to room, and hate the unknown
boy he has become. Poor, passionate souls, they may even do him an
injury. These are the ghosts that go wailing about old houses, and
foolish wild stories are invented to explain what is all so pathetic and
simple. I know of a man who, after wandering far, returned to his early
home to pass the evening of his days in it, and sometimes from his chair
by the fire he saw the door open softly and a woman's face appear.
She always looked at him very vindictively, and then vanished. Strange
things happened in this house. Windows were opened in the night. The
curtains of his bed were set fire to. A step on the stair was loosened.
The covering of an old well in a corridor where he walked was cunningly
removed. And when he fell ill the wrong potion was put in the glass by
his bedside, and he died. How could the pretty young mother know that
this grizzled interloper was the child of whom she was in search?

All our notions about ghosts are wrong. It is nothing so petty as lost
wills or deeds of violence that brings them back, and we are not nearly
so afraid of them as they are of us.

One by one the lights of the street went out, but still a lamp burned
steadily in the little window across the way. I know not how it
happened, whether I had crossed first to him or he to me, but, after
being for a long time as the echo of each other's steps, we were
together now. I can have had no desire to deceive him, but some reason
was needed to account for my vigil, and I may have said something that
he misconstrued, for above my words he was always listening for other
sounds. But however it came about he had conceived the idea that I was
an outcast for a reason similar to his own, and I let his mistake pass,
it seemed to matter so little and to draw us together so naturally.
We talked together of many things, such as worldly ambition. For long
ambition has been like an ancient memory to me, some glorious day
recalled from my springtime, so much a thing of the past that I must
make a railway journey to revisit it as to look upon the pleasant fields
in which that scene was laid. But he had been ambitious yesterday.

I mentioned worldly ambition. "Good God!" he said with a shudder.

There was a clock h