Ghosts I Have Met | Page 8

the nerve tissue of the timid who come to smile and who
depart unstrung, then should I deserve the severest condemnation; but
these things I do not do. I have a mission in life which I hold as sacred
as my good friend Mr. Howells holds his. Such phases of life as I see I
put down faithfully, and if the Fates in their wisdom have chosen to
make of me the Balzac of the Supernatural, the Shakespeare of the
Midnight Visitation, while elevating Mr. Howells to the high office of
the Fielding of Massachusetts and its adjacent States, the Smollett of
Boston, and the Sterne of Altruria, I can only regret that the powers
have dealt more graciously with him than with me, and walk my little
way as gracefully as I know how. The slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune I am prepared to suffer in all meekness of spirit; I accept them
because it seems to me to be nobler in the mind so to do rather than by
opposing to end them. And so to my story. I have prefaced it at such
length for but one reason, and that is that I am aware that there will be
those who will doubt the veracity of my tale, and I am anxious at the

outset to impress upon all the unquestioned fact that what I am about to
tell is the plain, unvarnished truth, and, as I have already said, it
happened last Christmas Eve.
I regret to have to say so, for it sounds so much like the description
given to other Christmas Eves by writers with a less conscientious
regard for the truth than I possess, but the facts must be told, and I must
therefore state that it was a wild and stormy night. The winds howled
and moaned and made all sorts of curious noises, soughing through the
bare limbs of the trees, whistling through the chimneys, and, with
reckless disregard of my children's need of rest, slamming doors until
my house seemed to be the centre of a bombardment of no mean order.
It is also necessary to state that the snow, which had been falling all
day, had clothed the lawns and house-tops in a dazzling drapery of
white, and, not content with having done this to the satisfaction of all,
was still falling, and, happily enough, as silently as usual. Were I the
"wild romancer" that I have been called, I might have had the snow fall
with a thunderous roar, but I cannot go to any such length. I love my
fellow-beings, but there is a limit to my philanthropy, and I shall not
have my snow fall noisily just to make a critic happy. I might do it to
save his life, for I should hate to have a man die for the want of what I
could give him with a stroke of my pen, and without any special effort,
but until that emergency arises I shall not yield a jot in the manner of
the falling of my snow.
Occasionally a belated home-comer would pass my house, the sleigh
-bells strung about the ample proportions of his steed jingling loud
above the roaring of the winds. My family had retired, and I sat alone
in the glow of the blazing log--a very satisfactory gas affair--on the
hearth. The flashing jet flames cast the usual grotesque shadows about
the room, and my mind had thereby been reduced to that sensitive state
which had hitherto betokened the coming of a visitor from other
realms--a fact which I greatly regretted, for I was in no mood to be
haunted. My first impulse, when I recognized the on-coming of that
mental state which is evidenced by the goosing of one's flesh, if I may
be allowed the expression, was to turn out the fire and go to bed. I have
always found this the easiest method of ridding myself of unwelcome

ghosts, and, conversely, I have observed that others who have been
haunted unpleasantly have suffered in proportion to their failure to take
what has always seemed to me to be the most natural course in the
world--to hide their heads beneath the bed-covering. Brutus, when
Caesar's ghost appeared beside his couch, before the battle of Philippi,
sat up and stared upon the horrid apparition, and suffered
correspondingly, when it would have been much easier and more
natural to put his head under his pillow, and so shut out the unpleasant
spectacle. That is the course I have invariably pursued, and it has never
failed me. The most luminous ghost man ever saw is utterly powerless
to shine through a comfortably stuffed pillow, or the usual
Christmas-time quota of woollen blankets. But upon this occasion I
preferred to await developments. The