a spectator, and prepares to give his or her best effects in the
familiar style.

Now in China and Japan certainly a ghost does not wait till people
enter the haunted room: a ghost, like a person of fashion, "goes
everywhere." Moreover, he has this artistic excellence, that very
often you don't know him from an embodied person. He counterfeits
mortality so cleverly that he (the ghost) has been known to
personate a candidate for honours, and pass an examination for him.
A pleasing example of this kind, illustrating the limitations of
ghosts, is told in Mr. Giles's book. A gentleman of Huai Shang
named Chou-t'ien-i had arrived at the age of fifty, but his family
consisted of but one son, a fine boy, "strangely averse from study,"
as if there were anything strange in THAT. One day the son
disappeared mysteriously, as people do from West Ham. In a year he
came back, said he had been detained in a Taoist monastery, and, to
all men's amazement, took to his books. Next year he obtained is
B.A. degree, a First Class. All the neighbourhood was overjoyed,
for Huai Shang was like Pembroke College (Oxford), where, according
to the poet, "First Class men are few and far between." It was who
should have the honour of giving his daughter as bride to this
intellectual marvel. A very nice girl was selected, but most
unexpectedly the B.A. would not marry. This nearly broke his
father's heart. The old gentleman knew, according to Chinese
belief, that if he had no grandchild there would be no one in the
next generation to feed his own ghost and pay it all the little
needful attentions. "Picture then the father naming and insisting
on the day;" till K'o-ch'ang, B.A., got up and ran away. His mother
tried to detain him, when his clothes "came off in her hand," and
the bachelor vanished! Next day appeared the real flesh and blood