corresponding perhaps to her want of charm while in the flesh.
Altogether one quite agrees, having duly perused the collection of
evidence on the subject, with the wisdom of these modern ghost-experts,
when they affirm that you can always tell a genuine ghost-story by the
circumstance of its being about a nobody, its having no point or
picturesqueness, and being, generally speaking, flat, stale, and
unprofitable.

A genuine ghost-story! But then they are not genuine ghost-stories,
those tales that tingle through our additional sense, the sense of the
supernatural, and fill places, nay whole epochs, with their strange
perfume of witchgarden flowers.

No, alas! neither the story of the murdered King of Denmark (murdered
people, I am told, usually stay quiet, as a scientific fact), nor of
that weird woman who saw King James the Poet three times with his
shroud wrapped ever higher; nor the tale of the finger of the bronze
Venus closing over the wedding-ring, whether told by Morris in verse
patterned like some tapestry, or by Merimee in terror of cynical
reality, or droned by the original mediaeval professional story-teller,
none of these are genuine ghost-stories. They exist, these ghosts, only
in our minds, in the minds of those dead folk; they have never stumbled
and fumbled about, with Jemima Jackson's maiden aunt, among the
armchairs and rep sofas of reality.

They are things of the imagination, born there, bred there, sprung from
the strange confused heaps, half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie in
our fancy, heaps of half-faded recollections, of fragmentary vivid
impressions, litter of multi-colored tatters, and faded herbs and
flowers, whence arises that odor (we all know it), musty and damp, but