st take up the cudgels for my friend.
Of course you will say that I am to some extent mixed up in the
matter--that Ottmar has taken a good many of the germs of the story
from me, and on this occasion has been cooking in my kitchen, so that
you won't be disposed to allow me to be a judge in the case. Yet,
unless you mean to condemn everything without the slightest remorse,
like so many Rhadamanthuses--you must admit, yourselves, that there is
much in Ottmar's story which must be allowed to pass as genuinely
Serapiontic; the beginning, for instance."

"Quite right," said Theodore; "the party round the tea-table may pass
as from the life, as well as many other points during the course of the
tale. But, to speak candidly, we have had a very large assortment of
spectral characters such as the stranger Count, and it will soon be a
difficult matter to go on giving them novelty and originality. He is
too much like Alban in 'The Magnetizer.' You know the tale I mean, and
indeed that story and Ottmar's have both the same _motif_. Wherefore I
wish I might beg our Ottmar and you, Cyprian, to leave monsters of that
sort out of the game in future. For Ottmar this will be possible, but
for you, Cyprian, I am not so sure that it will. So that we shall have
to allow _you_ to serve us up a 'Spook' of the kind now and then, I
suppose, only stipulating that it shall be truly Serapiontic, _i.e._
come out of the very inmost depths of your imagination. Moreover 'The
Magnetizer' _seems_ rhapsodical, but the 'Uncanny Guest' is rhapsodical
in very truth."

"I must take up the cudgels for my friend in this respect too," said
Cyprian, "and tell you that, in the very neighbourhood of this place
where we are at this moment, there actually happened an event, not very
long ago, by no means unlike the incidents of this story. Into a quiet
happy group of friends, just when supernatural matters were forming the
subject of conversation, there suddenly came a stranger, who struck
every one as being uncanny and terrifying, notwithstanding his apparent
everydayness, and seeming belonging to the common level. By his arrival
this stranger not only spoiled the enjoyment of the evening in
question, but subsequently destroyed the peace and happiness of the
family for a long period. Even at this day deadly shudders seize a
happy wife when she thinks of the crafty wickedness with which this
person tried to entangle her in his nets. I told this at the time to
Ottm