Chapter 5 - Page 2

more suitable
for a Ghost, supposing it wished to welter!"

"You have a real good terrifying Ghost in that book?" I hinted.

"How could you guess?" she exclaimed with the most engaging frankness,
and placed the volume in my hands. I opened it eagerly, with a not
unpleasant thrill like what a good ghost-story gives one) at the
'uncanny' coincidence of my having so unexpectedly divined the subject
of her studies.

It was a book of Domestic Cookery, open at the article Bread Sauce.'

I returned the book, looking, I suppose, a little blank, as the lady
laughed merrily at my discomfiture. "It's far more exciting than some
of the modern ghosts, I assure you! Now there was a Ghost last
month--I don't mean a real Ghost in in Supernature--but in a
Magazine. It was a perfectly flavourless Ghost. It wouldn't have
frightened a mouse! It wasn't a Ghost that one would even offer a chair
to!"

"Three score years and ten, baldness, and spectacles, have their
advantages after all!", I said to myself. "Instead of a bashful youth
and maiden, gasping out monosyllables at awful intervals, here we have
an old man and a child, quite at their ease, talking as if they had
known each other for years! Then you think," I continued aloud,
"that we ought sometimes to ask a Ghost to sit down? But have we any
authority for it? In Shakespeare, for instance--there are plenty of
ghosts there--does Shakespeare ever give the stage-direction 'hands
chair to Ghost'?"

The lady looked puzzled and thoughtful for a moment: then she almost
clapped her hands. "Yes, yes, he does!" she cried.
"He makes Hamlet say 'Rest, rest, perturbed Spirit!"'

"And that, I suppose, means an easy-chair?"

"An American rocking-chair, I think--"

"Fayfield Junction, my Lady, change for Elveston!" the guard announced,
flinging open the door of the carriage: and we soon found ourselves,
with all our portable property around us, on the platform.

The accommodation, provided for passengers waiting at this Junction,
was distinctly inadequate--a single wooden bench, apparently intended
for three sitters only: and even this was already partially occupied by
a very old man, in a smock frock, who sat, with rounded shoulders and
drooping head, and with hands clasped on the top of his stick so as to
make a sort of pillow for that wrinkled face with its look of patient
weariness.

"Come, you be off!" the Station-master roughly accosted the poor old
man. "You be off, and make way for your betters! This way, my Lady!"
he added in a perfectly different tone. "If your Ladyship will take a