which shows originality
and humor, yet is too diffuse for printing here. In that we have a
conventional young bachelor, engaged to a charming girl, who is
entangled in social complications and made to suffer mental torment
because, without his consent, he has been chosen as the nurse and
guardian of a ghost baby that cradles after him wherever he goes. This
is a rich story almost spoiled by being poorly told. I sigh to think of
the laughs that Frank R. Stockton or John Kendrick Bangs or Gelett
Burgess could have got out of the situation. There are other comic
British spooks, as in Baring-Gould's _A Happy Release_, where a widow
and a widower in love are haunted by the jealous ghosts of their
respective spouses, till the phantom couple take a liking to each other
and decide to let the living bury their dead. This is suggestive of
Brander Matthews's earlier and cleverer story of a spectral courtship,
in _The Rival Ghosts_. Medieval and later literature gave us many
instances of a love affair or marriage between one spirit and one
mortal, but it remained for the modern American to celebrate the
nuptials of two ghosts. Think of being married when you know that you
and the other party are going to live ever after--whether happily or no!
Truly, the present terrors are more fearsome than the old!

The stories by Eden Phillpotts and Richard Middleton in this collection
show the diversity of the English humor as associated with apparitions,
and are entertaining in themselves. The _Canterville Ghost_, by Oscar
Wilde, is one of his best short stories and is in his happiest vein of
laughing satire. This travesty on the conventional traditions of the
wraith is preposterously delightful, one of the cleverest ghost stories
in our language. Zangwill has written engagingly of spooks, with a
laughable story about Samuel Johnson. And there are others. But the fact
remains that in spite of conceded and admirable examples, the humorous
ghost story is for the most part American in creation and spirit.
Washington Irving might be said to have started that fashion in
skeletons and shades, for he has given us various comic haunters, some
real and some make-believe. Frank R. Stockton gave his to funny spooks
with a riotous and laughing pen. The spirit in his _Transferred Ghost_
is impudently deathless, and has called up a train of subsequent
haunters. John Kendrick Bangs has made the darker regions seem
comfortable and homelike for us, and has cr