try to frighten good folks with foolish playing the ghost?
However, I know, Cyprian, that you don't content yourself with studying
spirits and all sorts of strange, visionary matters; you would often
fain be a spook or ghost yourself. But where have you appeared from so
suddenly? How did you find out that we were here?"

"I came back to-day from my journey," Cyprian said. "I went at once to
see Theodore, Lothair, and Ottmar, but found none of them at home. In
the fullness of my annoyance I ran out here into the open; and chance
so willed it that, as I was returning to the town, I struck into the
walk which leads past this summer-house. Then I seemed to hear a
well-known voice; I peeped in at the window, and saw my worthy Serapion
Brethren, and heard Ottmar reading 'The Uncanny Guest.'"

"What," interrupted Ottmar, "you know my tale?"

"You forget," said Cyprian, "that it was from me that you got the
ingredients of the tale. It was I who told you of the 'Devil's Voice,'
the aerial music of Ceylon, who even gave you the idea of the sudden
appearing of the 'Uncanny Guest'; and I am curious to hear how you have
worked out this 'Thema' of mine. You see that it was a matter of course
that just when Ottmar had made the drawing-room door fly open I had
necessarily to do the like, and appear to you myself."

"Not as an uncanny guest, though," said Theodore, "but as a true and
faithful Serapion Brother, who, although he frightened me not a little,
as I must perforce admit, is a thousand times welcome to me all the
same."

"And," said Lothair, "if he insists on being a spirit, he must, at all
events, not be an unquiet spirit, but sit down and drink tea, without
making too much clattering with his cup, and listen to Ottmar, as to
whose tale I am all the more curious, that this time it is a working up
of a thema given to him by another."

Theodore, who was still easily excited after his recent illness, had
been affected by Cyprian's proceedings rather more than was desirable.
He was deadly pale, and it was evident that he had to put some
constraint on himself to appear at his ease.

Cyprian saw this, and was not a little concerned at what he had done.
"The truth is," he said, "that I had not thought about our friend's
having only recently recovered, and hardly that, from a severe illness.
I was acting contrarily to my own fundamental principle, which totally
prohibits the perpetration of jokes of this description, because it