n the rambling,
circumstantial style, suitable to the fireside and the long
leisure of a winter's evening. Dickens tells a very different
nurse's story in one of the chapters of _An Uncommercial
Traveller_. The tone of Mrs. Gaskell's nurse is kindly and
protective; that of Dickens' nurse severe, admonitory and
emphatic. She, who told the grim legend of Captain Murderer,
meant, clearly, to scare as well as to entertain her hearer. She
leads up to the climax of her story, the deadly revenge of the
dark twin's poisoned pie, with admirable art. The nurse's name
was Mercy, but, as Dickens remarks, she showed none to him.
Though Dickens shrank timorously in childhood from her frightful
stories, he himself, like the fat boy in _Pickwick_, sometimes
"wants to make our flesh creep." It seems, indeed, an odd trait
of the humorist that he can at will wholly discard his gaiety,
and, like the Pied Piper, pipe to another measure. W.W. Jacobs,
besides his humorous sailor yarns, has given us _The Monkey's
Paw_; and Barry Pain's gruesome stories, _Told in the Dark_, are
as forcible as any of his humours to be read in the daylight.
Dickens, in his excursions into the supernatural, does not,
however, always cast off his mood of jocularity. His treatment of
Marley's ghost lacks dignity and decorum. Clanking its chains in
a remote cellar of the silent, empty house, it has the power to
disturb us, but we lose our respect for the shade when we gaze
upon it eye to eye. Applied to the spirit world, there is much
truth in the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. The
account of the thirteenth juryman, in _Dr. Marigold's
Prescriptions_, is much more alarming. The story of the
signalman, No. 1 Branch line, in _Mugby Junction_, is indefinably
horrible. The signalman's anguish of mind, his exact description
of the Appearance, his sense of overhanging calamity, are all
strangely disquieting. The coincidence of the manner of his
death, with which the story closes, is wisely left to make its
own inevitable impression.

Some of the stories in _Blackwood_ are the more striking because
they depend for their effect on natural, not supernatural,
horror. We may feel we are immune from the visits of ghosts, but
the accident in _The Man in the Bell_ (1821) is one which might
happen to anyone. The maddening clangour of sound, the frightful
images that crowd into the reeling brain of the man suspended in
the belfry, are described with an unflinching re