world, good or evil, but is only a shadowy resemblance, condemned,
as in the Egyptian creed, to dwell in the tomb and hover near it.
The Chinese and Japanese have their own definite theory of the next
world, and we must by no means confuse the eternal fortunes of the
permanent, conscious, and responsible self, already inhabiting other
worlds than ours, with the eccentric vagaries of the semi-material
tomb-haunting larva, which so often develops a noisy and bear-
fighting disposition quite unlike the character of its proprietor in
life.

The next bogie, so limp and washed-out as he seems, with his white,
drooping, dripping arms and hands, reminds us of that horrid French
species of apparition, "la lavandiere de la nuit," who washes dead
men's linen in the moonlit pools and rivers. Whether this
simulacrum be meant for the spirit of the well (for everything has
its spirit in Japan), or whether it be the ghost of some mortal
drowned in the well, I cannot say with absolute certainty; but the
opinion of the learned tends to the former conclusion. Naturally a
Japanese child, when sent in the dusk to draw water, will do so with
fear and trembling, for this limp, floppy apparition might scare the
boldest. Another bogie, a terrible creation of fancy, I take to be
a vampire, about which the curious can read in Dom Calmet, who will
tell them how whole villages in Hungary have been depopulated by
vampires; or he may study in Fauriel's 'Chansons de la Grece
Moderne' the vampires of modern Hellas.

Another plan, and perhaps even more satisfactory to a timid or
superstitious mind, is to read in a lonely house at midnight a story
named 'Carmilla,' printed in Mr. Sheridan Le Fanu's 'In a Glass
Darkly.' That work will give you the peculiar sentiment of