of
some kind or other, but it is impossible to determine what the nature
of it was, or who was the sufferer by it. I do not like to do it, but I
feel compelled to request that the next time anything happens to one of
Mr. Bloke's friends, he will append such explanatory notes to his
account of it as will enable me to find out what sort of an accident it
was and to whom it happened. I had rather all his friends should die
than that I should be driven to the verge of lunacy again in trying to
cipher out the meaning of another such production as the above.

V

A GHOST[1]

Lafcadio Hearn

[1] Reprinted by permission of Boni & Liveright.

I

Perhaps the man who never wanders away from the place of his birth may
pass all his life without knowing ghosts; but the nomad is more than
likely to make their acquaintance. I refer to the civilized nomad,
whose wanderings are not prompted by hope of gain, nor determined by
pleasure, but simply compelled by certain necessities of his
being,--the man whose inner secret nature is totally at variance with
the stable conditions of a society to which he belongs only by
accident. However intellectually trained, he must always remain the
slave of singular impulses which have no rational source, and which
will often amaze him no less by their mastering power than by their
continuous savage opposition to his every material interest.... These
may, perhaps, be traced back to some ancestral habit,--be explained by
self-evident hereditary tendencies. Or perhaps they may not,--in which
event the victim can only surmise himself the _Imago_ of some
pre-existent larval aspiration--the full development of desires long
dormant in a chain of more limited lives....

Assuredly the nomadic impulses differ in every member of the
class,--take infinite variety from individual sensitiveness to
environment: the line of least resistance for one being that of
greatest resistance for another;--no two courses of true nomadism can
ever be wholly the same. Diversified of necessity both impulse and
direction, even as human nature is diversified. Never since
consciousness of time began were two beings born who possessed exactly
the same quality of voice, the same precise degree of nervous
impressibility, or,--in brief, the same combination of those viewless
force-storing molecules which shape and poise themselves in sentient
substance. Vain, therefore, all striving to particularize the curious
psy