which make not only night but day terrible to the studious infants
of Japan and China.

Chinese ghosts are probably much the same as Japanese ghosts. The
Japanese have borrowed most things, including apparitions and
awesome sprites and grisly fiends, from the Chinese, and then have
improved on the original model. Now we have a very full, complete,
and horror-striking account of Chinese harnts (as the country people
in Tennessee call them) from Mr. Herbert Giles, who has translated
scores of Chinese ghost stories in his 'Strange Tales from a Chinese
Studio' (De la Rue, 1880). Mr. Giles's volumes prove that China is
the place for Messrs. Gurney and Myers, the secretaries of the
Psychical Society.

Ghosts do not live a hole-and-corner life in China, but boldly come
out and take their part in the pleasures and business of life. It
has always been a question with me whether ghosts, in a haunted
house, appear when there is no audience. What does the spectre in
the tapestried chamber do when the house is NOT full, and no guest
is put in the room to bury strangers in, the haunted room? Does the
ghost sulk and complain that there is "no house," and refuse to
rehearse his little performance, in a conscientious and
disinterestedly artistic spirit, when deprived of the artist's true
pleasure, the awakening of sympathetic emotion in the mind of the
spectator? We give too little thought and sympathy to ghosts, who
in our old castles and country houses often find no one to appear to
from year's end to year's-end. Only now and then is a guest placed
in the "haunted room." Then I like to fancy the glee of the lady in
green or the radiant boy, or the headless man, or the old gentleman
in snuff-coloured clothes, as he, or she, recognises the presence of