is, in fact, a crucial difficulty about ghosts.  They are material enough to make a noise as they walk, but not material enough to brush away a thread!  This ghost, whose visible form was so much en evidence, could, or did, make no noise at all, beyond light pushes at doors, and very light footsteps.  In the curacy already described, noises were made enough to waken a parish, but no form was ever seen.  Briefly, for this ghost there is a cloud of witnesses, all solemnly signing their depositions.  These two examples are at the opposite poles between which ghostly manifestations vary, in haunted houses.

A brief precis of ‘cases’ may show how these elements of noise, on one side, and apparitions, on the other, are commonly blended.  In a detached villa, just outside ‘the town of C.,’ Mrs. W. remarks a figure of a tall dark-haired man peeping round the corner of a folding door.  She does not mention the circumstance.  Two months later she sees the same sorrowful face in the drawing-room.  This time she tells her husband.  Later in the same month, when playing cricket with her children, she sees the face ’peeping round from the kitchen door’.  Rather later she heard a deep voice say in a sorrowful tone, ‘I can’t find it’; something slaps her on the back.  Her step-daughter who had not heard of the phantasm, sees the same pale dark-moustached face, ‘peeping round the folding doors’.  She is then told Mrs W.’s story.  Her little brother, later, sees the figure simultaneously with herself.  She also hears the voice say, ‘I can’t find it,’ at the same moment as Mrs. W. hears it.  A year later, she sees the figure at the porch, in a tall hat!  Neither lady had enjoyed any other hallucination.  Nothing is known of the melancholy spectre, probably the ghost of a literary person, searching, always searching, for a manuscript poem by some total stranger who had worried him into his grave, and not left him at peace even there.  This is a very solemn and touching story, and appeals tenderly and sadly to all persons of letters who suffer from the unasked for manuscripts of the general public.

2.  Some ladies and servants in a house in Hyde Park Place, see at intervals a phantom housemaid:  she is also seen by a Mr. Bird.  There is no story about a housemaid, and there are no noises.  This is not an interesting tale.

3.  A Hindoo native woman is seen to enter a locked bath-room, where she is not found on inquiry.  A woman had been murdered there some years before.  The percipient, General Sir Arthur Becher, had seen other uncanny visions.  A little boy, wakened out of sleep, said he saw an ayah.  Perhaps he did.