rate hotels. Now this is precisely the Chinese view of the fates
and fortunes of ghosts. Quisque suos patimur manes.

In China, to be brief, and to quote a ghost (who ought to know what
he was speaking about), "supernaturals are to be found everywhere."
This is the fact that makes life so puzzling and terrible to a child
of a believing and trustful character. These Oriental bogies do not
appear in the dark alone, or only in haunted houses, or at cross-
roads, or in gloomy woods. They are everywhere: every man has his
own ghost, every place has its peculiar haunting fiend, every
natural phenomenon has its informing spirit; every quality, as
hunger, greed, envy, malice, has an embodied visible shape prowling
about seeking what it may devour. Where our science, for example,
sees (or rather smells) sewer gas, the Japanese behold a slimy,
meagre, insatiate wraith, crawling to devour the lives of men.
Where we see a storm of snow, their livelier fancy beholds a comic
snow-ghost, a queer, grinning old man under a vast umbrella.

The illustrations in this paper are only a few specimens chosen out
of many volumes of Japanese bogies. We have not ventured to copy
the very most awful spectres, nor dared to be as horrid as we can.
These native drawings, too, are generally coloured regardless of
expense, and the colouring is often horribly lurid and satisfactory.
This embellishment, fortunately perhaps, we cannot reproduce.
Meanwhile, if any child looks into this essay, let him (or her) not
be alarmed by the pictures he beholds. Japanese ghosts do not live
in this country; there are none of them even at the Japanese
Legation. Just as bears, lions, and rattlesnakes are not to be
seriously dreaded in our woods and commons, so the Japanese ghost
cannot breathe (any more than a slave can) in the air of England or