dead of the last three generations, leaving ghosts older than the
century to look after their own supplies of meat and drink. The
negligence testifies to a notion that very old ghosts are of little
account, for good or evil. On the other hand, as regards the
longevity of spectres, we must not shut our eyes to the example of
the bogie in ancient armour which appears in Glamis Castle, or to
the Jesuit of Queen Elizabeth's date that haunts the library (and a
very nice place to haunt: I ask no better, as a ghost in the
Pavilion at Lord's might cause a scandal) of an English nobleman.
With these instantiae contradictoriae, as Bacon calls them, present
to our minds, we must not (in the present condition of psychical
research) dogmatise too hastily about the span of life allotted to
the simulacrum vulgare. Very probably his chances of a prolonged
existence are in inverse ratio to the square of the distance of time
which severs him from our modern days. No one has ever even
pretended to see the ghost of an ancient Roman buried in these
islands, still less of a Pict or Scot, or a Palaeolithic man,
welcome as such an apparition would be to many of us. Thus the
evidence does certainly look as if there were a kind of statute of
limitations among ghosts, which, from many points of view, is not an
arrangement at which we should repine.

The Japanese artist expresses his own sense of the casual and
fluctuating nature of ghosts by drawing his spectre in shaky lines,
as if the model had given the artist the horrors. This simulacrum
rises out of the earth like an exhalation, and groups itself into
shape above the spade with which all that is corporeal of its late
owner has been interred. Please remark the uncomforted and dismal
expression of the simulacrum. We must remember that the ghost or
"Ka" is not the "soul," which has other destinies in the future