handkerchief. From 1882 to 1884, Miss Morton saw the spectre six
times, but did not name it to her family. Her sister saw the
appearance in 1882, a maid saw it in 1883, and two boys beheld it in
the same year. Miss Morton used to follow the appearance downstairs
and speak to it, but it merely gave a slight gasp, and seemed unable
to converse. By way of testing the spectre, Miss Morton stretched
threads at night from the railing of the stair to the wall, but the
ghost descended without disturbing them. Yet her footsteps sounded
on the stairs. This is, in fact, a crucial difficulty about ghosts.
They are material enough to make a noise as they walk, but _not_
material enough to brush away a thread! This ghost, whose visible
form was so much en evidence, could, or did, make no noise at all,
beyond light pushes at doors, and very light footsteps. In the
curacy already described, noises were made enough to waken a parish,
but no form was ever seen. Briefly, for this ghost there is a cloud
of witnesses, all solemnly signing their depositions. These two
examples are at the opposite poles between which ghostly
manifestations vary, in haunted houses.

A brief precis of 'cases' may show how these elements of noise, on
one side, and apparitions, on the other, are commonly blended. In a
detached villa, just outside 'the town of C.,' Mrs. W. remarks a
figure of a tall dark-haired man peeping round the corner of a
folding door. She does not mention the circumstance. Two months
later she sees the same sorrowful face in the drawing-room. This
time she tells her husband. Later in the same month, when playing
cricket with her children, she sees the face 'peeping round from the
kitchen door'. Rather later she heard a deep voice say in a
sorrowful tone, 'I can't find it'; something slaps her on the back.
Her step-daughter who had not heard of the phantasm, sees the same
pale dark-moustached face, 'peeping round the folding doors'. She
is then told Mrs W.'s story. Her little brother, later, sees the
figure simultaneously with herself. She also hears the voice say,
'I can't find it,' at the same moment as Mrs. W. hears it. A year
later, she sees the figure at the porch, _in a tall hat_! Neither
lady had enjoyed any other hallucination. Nothing is known of the
melancholy spectre, probably the ghost of a literary person,
searching, always searching, for a manuscript poem by some total
stranger who had worried him into