“Your last two stories are too highflown for my simple tastes.  I want a good coherent description of the ghost himself, not the particular emotions he excited.  I had expected better things from Austyn.  Upon my word, as far as we have gone, old Aunt Eleanour’s is the best.  I think Austyn, with his mediaeval turn of mind and his quite mediaeval habit of living upon air, might have managed to raise something with horns and hoofs.  It is a curious thing that in the dark ages the devil was always appearing to somebody.  He doesn’t make himself so cheap now.  He has evidently more to do; but there is a fashion in ghosts as in other things, and that reminds me our ghost, from all we hear of it, is decidedly rococo.  If you study the reports of societies that hunt the supernatural, you will find that the latest thing in ghosts is very quiet and commonplace.  Rattling chains and blue lights, and even fancy dress, have quite gone out.  And the people who see the ghosts are not even startled at first sight; they think it is a visitor, or a man come to wind the clocks.  In fact, the chic thing for a ghost in these days is to be mistaken for a living person.”

“What puzzles me is that a sceptic like you can so easily swallow the astonishing coincidence of these different people all having imagined the ghost in the same house.”

“Why, the coincidence is not a bit more astonishing than several people in the same place having the same fever.  Nothing in the world is so infectious as ghost-seeing.  The oftener a ghost is seen, the oftener it will be seen.  In this sort of thing particularly, one fool makes many.  No, don’t wait for me.  Heaven only knows when I shall be released.”

The door of Monk’s cottage was open, but no one was to be seen within, and no one answered to my knock, so, anxious to see him again, I groped my way up the dark ladder-like stairs to the room above.  The first thing I saw was the bed where Monk himself was lying.  They had drawn the sheet across his face:  I saw what had happened.  His wife was standing near, looking not so much grieved as stunned and tired.  “Would you like to see him, sir?” she asked, stretching out her withered hand to draw the sheet aside.  I was glad afterwards I had not refused, as, but for fear of being ungracious, I would have done.

Since then I have seen death—­“in state” as it is called—­invested with more than royal pomp, but I have never felt his presence so majestic as in that poor little garret.  I know his seal may be painful, grotesque even:  here it was wholly benign and beautiful.  All discolorations had disappeared in an even pallor as of old ivory; all furrows of age and pain were smoothed away, and the rude peasant face was transfigured, glorified, by that smile of ineffable and triumphant repose.