A MODERN GOBLIN.

A DREARY, cheerless Christmas Eve. The dead hour of day, when the pale twilight falls over the earth, still and colorless as a shroud. Down the long vistas of deserted streets but here and there the feeble rays of some struggling light gleams through the gray twilight, pale as the glitter of a jewel on the brow of death. Across the dull waste of sky the ghostly clouds fly before a piercing wind, which whirls and tears their edges into fluttering fringes. The gloaming fades slowly and almost imperceptibly into night. Away back from the town, out on the bleak hillsides, the leafless trees toss their bare arms, gaunt shapes against the pallor of the sky, the swaying branches answering their mocking shadows, dancing like specters on the frozen ground; while the withered leaves rustle like very shudders.

The hour, neither light nor darkness, neither day nor night, that, with its weird, indescribable magic, draws you from the cheery grate to press your face against the cold window, and dream out into the gray light, peopled with specters and visions—often grotesque, but never merry—that come trooping from every shadow. Comes a rosy little face, framed in tangled tresses—ah, long, long unfolding years must roll back to take you to the time when the laughing eyes looked into yours; to-night you remember—dear child—the dimpled hands were crossed on the pulseless breast, when you were a boy; and the cheerless winter landscape, the dreary hills of snow, and the leafless forests stretch away, mile after weary mile, between your home and where the Christmas winds sigh plaintive monodies over her little grave. There comes a thoughtful, earnest face, manly and noble; a playmate of your boyhood, a college classmate and friend; the man who stood for your ideal of all that is brave and true, and virtuous and generous. As you look at it, you remember, to-night, that when you saw the real face, so little time ago, it was worn and old and haggard, and stamped with the leprous mark of vice. You shudder at the recollection; but the pleading look of the vision goes to your heart as it fades away; and other faces, long forgotten, crowd before you. One, furrowed with marks of patient suffering and care, with silver bands in the brown hair drawn so smoothly away from the brow, mother-love glistening in the tender eyes, mother-love in the quivering, heart-reaching eloquence of the tremulous lips, mother-love in the caressing gesture of the gentle hands—what wonder that it lingers long, and fades only when you crush the burning tears that blind your eyes and veil the vision from your sight? And comes one sweeter, dearer than all—your heart throbs more quickly as you see a shadow rise in the deepening twilight—a face glowing with blushes and wreathed in smiles; a face that shone into your life like sunshine, in its bright springtime days; a face that has remained constant while everything else has changed—your old heart grows tender and young with dear recollections, and you thank God that although years have set their mark upon this dear vision, it is still yours, loving, faithful, and powerful to bless and charm in every mood and at all times. It is gone; and looming through the deepening shadows another form of familiar presence rises before you. The silvery tones of memory-bells chime like a Christmas choral through the bleak wind shaking so angrily the noisy shutters. It is the milkman, and he jangles all your sweet dreams out of tune, sending the ghosts your retrospect has raised back to the shadowy past. And as your visions disappear, you dismally watch the female vassals of the neighborhood sallying forth in answer to the tinkling summons, bearing all possible manner of squatty tinware and corpulent yellow bowls, in which to receive lawful but attenuated measures of that peculiar aqueous fluid of cerulean hue with which, under the ghastly appellation of “cream,” our best society dilutes its table beverages. And when this amusement ceases to be longer interesting, you leave the draughty window and seek the more congenial companionship of the black, close-shut gas-burner, which out of respect to your conceit and the conventionalities of the Christmas time, we have designated a “cheery fire-place,” with an incipient cold in your otherwise empty head.

For the shadows have beckoned and reached to each other, and joined their giant hands, and danced until the light is frightened away. In heavier volumes rolls the black smoke from every chimney, indicating that the estimable and respectable business men of the city, having left their clerks with orders to save gas and not waste the coal, and to close the store only when the last lingering, possible chance of securing one more belated customer has faded into hopelessness, are now at home, enjoying the unspeakable luxury of heaping the stove with coal their wives have carried in, and driving the other members of the family to madness by monopolizing the privilege of poking the fire. Gas lights twinkle in the streets, for the faithful almanac in the gas company’s office has been mislaid, and they do not know there will be a moon quite late in the morning. A ruddy glow of firelight and lamplight streams out into the gathering darkness when a door is opened, men are hurrying home, their faces averted, and their bodies bowed against the howling wind, or else scudding briskly before it. The city was hurrying home to enjoy its Christmas Eve in the bosom of its several families, and to scold the children and pack them off to bed, if they romped and made too much noise. Everybody knows what city it was, so there is no use wasting time describing it. It was just the same old city, only they had strengthened the little brick house down below the corner where the blacksmith lived, with a coat of whitewash. Just the same old city.

And everybody knows the hill on the street, where it turns to wind up the bluff and go to the rich folks’ houses on top of the long hill that stretches around behind the town like a great horse shoe, and looks down on all the business, and bustle, and noise, and hurry, and work, and fatigue that have made the city so rich and powerful. And just at the time we were speaking about a gentleman was making devious headway up this hill, just as the street leaves the business of the city and goes scrambling up to the quiet and rest on top of the hill. A discouraged looking gentleman, who seemed to have begun his Christmas at the wrong end, and so got nearly through with it before it had really commenced. The gentleman’s Napoleonic head was covered, part of the time, with a glossy silk tile, which art had shaped into the fashionable, uncomfortable cylinder which adorns the caputs of our Best Young Men, but accident, oft recurring, and too many vigorous slappings on and pattings down by the officious but ill-directed zeal of many friends, and too frequent steppings on by the owner as the last means of checking its mad career in a race with the wind, had graced this glossy cylinder with many alternate elevations and depressions, giving it that corrugated effect so attractive, natural, and useful in the washboard and concertina, but very repugnant and ungraceful in the silk hat. The gentleman’s eccentric style of buttoning his overcoat, three holes over the same button, lent an air of abstraction to his general appearance, while his knitted brow told of intense mental conflict and exertion. He made little forays from the sidewalk to the middle of the street, returning to his pathway by devious and angular ways, as though striving to baffle some unseen pursuer. From time to time he made vicious, impulsive, startled clutches at the streaming ends of his necktie, fluttering in the blast, which he regarded with a vague uncertain terror, and, when he had seized them, he laughed in hollow, hysterical accents. The smell of coffee was heard in the distance as he passed, and ever and anon, as the restless earth raised itself in precipitous terraces before him, he lifted his feet high in air and with lofty steps essayed to scale the treacherous mirage. He paused in his circuitous progress to shake hands with the last friendly lamp-post on that thoroughfare, expressing his confidence in that faithful municipal lighthouse as a “goo’role feller,” who was, under any and every possible combination of circumstances, “all ri’.” At times he felt for his hat with both hands, and having secured a firm grip upon its uncertain brim, he removed it from his head with great caution, and swinging it violently in the air, proceeded with great enthusiasm and heartiness to “hurrah for” somebody, but invariably forgot who, when he came to the name, and contented himself with assuring himself that that was “al’ri’,” after which with gravity he felt for his head, found it, and with much deliberation got the hat up on top of it, generally sideways or upside down, and with great physical effort, crushed and pulled it on. At length, having parted company after affectionate and prolonged adieus, with the last friendly lamp-post, the young gentleman loudly announced that he was a “total wr—hic!—creck” and proceeded furthermore to declare that he would not and could not by any means be induced to seek the shelter of his mother’s roof again until smiling morn should hail and deck the hills with gold, and the rosy-fingered hours should herald the coming of the god of day. And singing this true statement in a rich baritone, a kind of a wheelbarrow tone, in fact, possessing more volume and hoarse wheeziness than we would admire in Nilsson’s chest tones, he made a vigorous but ineffectual effort to fall up the hill, and angrily ejaculating, “Ju know who yer pushin’?” he shot over the curbstone with frenzied gestures that seemed to proceed at least from ten pairs of legs, and disappeared in the gloom of the gutter, where he lay, and whence his stertorous breathing startled the nervous passers-by.

Had the fallen man kept on the uneven tenor of his way a little farther he would have encountered a mysterious being that would have transformed his snores into sounds of deeper intonation. The street, where it turned and led up the hill, was not a cheerful one. On the west side the bluff rises abruptly as a wall, and on the opposite side it sinks away into a dark, gloomy ravine, that has an uncanny look at the best of times, and the sidewalk is provided with a wooden railing, to keep careless or belated passengers from plunging down the hillside. A little stream winds along the ravine, endeavoring, in a despairing kind of way, to find its way to the river, which it never does. It starts, but from the time the city was first settled there has been no record that the little stream ever got clear through; nobody knows what becomes of it, where it goes to; but certain it is, that all trace of it is lost before it gets half-way to any where. But we have naught to do with this forlorn little country brook that comes purling through pleasant meadows, and bubbling over white pebbles, and wrangling around great bowlders, to get bewildered and lost in the entangling mazes of the drains and gutters and sewers and culverts of the city.

Seated on the railing of the sidewalk was an apparition of far less cheerful mien than the gentleman who, when we left him, had just wrapped the curbstone about him and laid down to snore the Christmas hours away. This figure wore a snow-white mantle, much too airy and summery for the season and very decidedly out of style, which fell from his angular shoulders in graceful folds, a portion of its light tissue being folded over his osseous head after the most conventional style of his class. As he swung his legs carelessly to and fro, they struck the lower boards of the railing with a strange rattling sound like muffled castanets, and his manner of whistling “Down Among the Dead Men,” under his breath in that weird, ghostly place, with the bluff rising black and abrupt before him, and the ravine lying deep in impenetrable shadow behind him, had that awful touch of the supernatural in it that would make one’s blood run cold to contemplate. A ghostlier ghost never chose a ghostlier time or place for his ghastly recreations.

He ceased his hollow whistling and stilled his nervous legs as he heard approaching footsteps on the sidewalk, and dropped from his easy perch on the railing as a young man and a lovely maiden came toward him, toiling up the slope down which the December zephyr roared and swept into a fury that would make an Ulster overcoat feel sick. The young man’s arm was wound tenderly about his companion’s shrinking seal-skin cloak, while he hoarsely whispered words into her ears, which were rosy with the exhilarating influence of twenty-eight degrees below zero. The ghost stepped in front of them.

“Excuse my hoarseness,” he said, with a winning smile that extended over the entire width of his finely-chiseled face, “but I had the very disagreeable misfortune to have my throat cut in this exceedingly romantic spot about a half a century since, and my voice has since been affected to such an ex——”

The very wind paused in its noisy bluster to listen to the wild shrieks that were piercing the darkness like acoustic arrows, and the rapid patter of two pairs of Arctic over-shoes that were pounding the bosom of the frosty earth far down the hill, away from the shadow of the bluff, away from the dreadful blackness of the ravine, in the direction of the gleaming street lamps of the city.

The ghost leaned upon the railing and sighed as he said:

“This was not the style of responding to an apology when I dwelt among men. Perhaps my voice, which I have not used before for fifty years, has that in its mouldy accents which is disagreeable, startling, and possibly repulsive, to mortal ears. I will modulate my intonation.”

He paused to observe the figure of a portly man, looming vaguely through the night, as, with many asthmatic puffs, the well-fed citizen essayed to beat up the hill against the wind.

“He looks,” said the specter, musingly, “very much like an honest old settler I used to know, who sold whisky to and stole furs from the Indians, the year after I first came to what is now this city.”

The panting citizen came alongside and was passing by, when the ghost dropped his bony hand noiselessly in the hollow of his arm.

“A thousand pardons, my dear sir,” he began, “but I observe a most extraordinary resemblance in——”

“Oh-H-H-H-h, Lord!”

And again the ghost was alone. As the echoes of the excited and grossly misapplied remark of the citizen died away in the mocking echoes of the dreary solitudes, the ghost walked across the street and carefully examined the face of the bluff, in which direction the portly mortal had made his unceremonious and abrupt exit.

“No,” the specter remarked, after a critical inspection, “it is very evident that he did not plunge through the hill; he certainly ran over its summit. The celerity with which he accomplished this undertaking at his time of life, and in his condition of superfluous flesh too, smacks almost as much of the marvelous to me as I did to him. I would be willing to bet my boots, now,” he added, with a ghastly wink at his bare feet, “that the portly old party can not come here to-morrow noon and get over that hill inside of twenty-five minutes.”

“Passenger travel on this street,” he continued, resuming his station on the sidewalk, “is livelier than it was in my time. As I remember, the two gentlemen who performed the surgical operation on my windpipe, which has so disagreeably affected my voice, had to wait here for me five hours in the cheerless gloom before my other business engagements permitted me to come along and make an involuntary and unwilling third in their interesting little surprise party. And I sat on a stump near this very spot, and watched my lifeless remains nearly two days before the coroner found them and gave them the customary inquest with a fearful and wonderful verdict, followed by Christian burial. Yes, yes, the village has been prosperous since then, and now—but soft, a young man—a lover, too, or I’m no ghost. I will befriend him and he will love me.”

A goodly young man he was indeed, as ghost or girl would wish to see. Torture racked his soul when, at every step, his dainty boots, a size and a half too small, touched the ground. And even the snowy expanse of linen cuffs, weighted with moss-agate sleeve buttons, failed to conceal the fact that his flame-colored kids would not button. Though the piercing wind chilled him to the very marrow, his overcoat was opened and thrown back from his throat to display the blue necktie that graced his paper collar. The elaborate and painful costume betrayed his errand. You might wring bergamot out of the air when he passed along, and there was jockey club on his handkerchief, and his breath smelled a little of sozodont, some of trix, and a great deal of something else. The ghost looked after him, as he passed by, with as much friendly admiring interest as he could throw into his rather open countenance, and then gathering his robe about him followed swiftly and silently at the limping heels of the nice young man, who toiled painfully but very patiently and exquisitely properly up the hill until he reached the summit of the grade, and pausing before a mansion of pretentious appearance, proceeded to investigate the ever changing mysteries of a front gate.

Properly constructed, the front gate is more fearfully and wonderfully made than the architect who designs or the carpenter who builds it. No other created or manufactured thing in the whole wide universe can equal or rival it for original perversity and malignant obstinacy. A patient man, whose soul is melting within him from chronic and exaggerated meekness, will fall from grace and relieve his tortured soul in a burst of giant powder profanity after fifteen minutes’ struggle with a front gate, and then he will shower a tempest of abuse upon the unknown man who contrived such a diabolical and outrageous gate, and he will cease to struggle with it and will climb over the fence and disintegrate his raiment on the pickets, and abrade his cuticle all the way down his back as he slides off, and then his soul will be tossed into a very sirocco of passion and mortification when he sees the dog of the mansion come trotting along and open the gate with a simple push of his nose. Or a woman, full of a woman’s love and yearning tenderness, will take hold of a gate and tug at it, and pull and haul and jerk until she nearly drags the solid posts up by the roots, and when all the blood in her system is boiling in the top of her head, and her eyes are starting from their sockets, and she dissolves in tears of utter, abject wretchedness and rage because she is debarred by virtue of her sex from the ecstatic privilege of swearing at the gate and the pirate who made it, a grinning boy will open the barrier by merely pulling it the other way. Men with real, living ideas, and lofty aspirations, and soaring ambitions, and grand, illimitable thoughts, swelling and groaning and throbbing in heart and brain, have stood before an orthodox front gate and manipulated its fastenings, moving that piece this way and this one that, and all of them the other, until the pot-metal securities have assumed the vexed and perplexing varieties and dimensions of a Chinese puzzle with the delirium tremens or a Centennial election table. And then, when at last with a despairing groan he lets go of it, and raises his hands to heaven to call down its righteous judgment upon the unregenerate mocker who made that gate, it slowly swings open by its own weight, and the distressed Christian discovers to his unspeakable amazement that he has had it open twenty times within the last fifteen minutes. And all these troubles are magnified after night. Hook and staple connect the swinging gate and the immovable post where hook and staple there were none before. The most trifling and ordinary bolt has a way of acquiring a double action after dark, so that whatever is loosed at one end is immediately fastened up as tight as a candidate at the other. Nails, too, appear, driven in the post immediately above the latch, and finally, when all other ties are sundered, lo, a strap hugs the whole structure in its binding embrace. It is a work of ten minutes to find the buckle, and when found it is a knot, tied when the strap was wet, and now firmer in its clinging folds and more intricate in its appalling entanglements than the famous knot which Gordius of Phrygia tied in his chariot harness, a knot which baffled even the sublimest efforts of the Chicago divorce lawyers. Even the simplest form of a gate latch known to man, composed of a round hole in a post into which a stick is thrust athwart the gate, is a snare, a vanity, a vexation of the spirit and a mortification of the flesh; for no living man ever opened a strange gate of this genus that the stick did not come out with a jerk, rasping the abraded knuckles along the rude edges of the pickets.

With a gate which presented, or rather concealed, and successively developed, like masked batteries, all the modern combinations of baffling elements and inventions, the young man has all this time been expostulating. A good young man, for while he has been laboring with that remorseless gate with all the intensity of purpose and earnestness that fires the blood of youth, he has only relieved his impatient swelling soul by saying from time to time that “he would be dad binged,” once or twice varying the tense, as the future suddenly seemed to break upon him with all the fullness of time, to declare that he was “dad binged,” and several times, as though conscious of some degree of uncertainty attending the whole matter, devoutly hoping that, at some indefinite time in the vague hereafter, he might be “dad binged.” Once he passed suddenly to the imperative and passive, appealing to some unknown quantity to “dad bing the dad binged old gate,” a confusion of mood, tense and voice that was absurd, and even the ghost, which stood in the porch of the mansion watching his movements with that all-absorbed interest which visitors from another world display in terrestrial matters, shook his head gravely, as if doubting the advisability of a needless waste of power in dad binging that which was already declared dad binged. But the ghastly visage relaxed in a grim smile, as with one last tremendous effort, the adolescent raised the barrier from its fastenings, hinges and all, and fell forward to the gravel walk with the fiendish gate clasped in his arms, reaching the ground in a rattling chorus which roused all the dogs this side of the moon.

Disengaging himself from the chaos into which the gate had fallen, the young man reached the porch with a halting step, and as he stood near the door, brushing gravel off his clothes with his tattered kids, the ghost gathered his bustle and train about him, slid deftly through the key hole, and flattened himself against the door on the inside. The tinkle of the bell had scarcely sounded in the hall when a light footstep was heard in echo to its clamor, and a beautiful young girl hastened to the door. She opened it, but the ghost stepped before her and faced the smiling, blushing, bowing young man, threw his gaunt arms around his neck, and in a hollow whisper began,

“Darling! I have watched so long for——”

A terrific yell rang through the corridors like almost any other yell would ring under similar circumstances. A rush of hasty feet along the gravel walk, a stumble, a crash and a dismal howl at the site of the fallen gate; then the dying echoes of fleet, pattering footsteps in the distance, and then silence, dispossessed of her curtained throne for one brief moment, resumed her noiseless reign, and the smiling ghost, after a vain effort to dig himself in the ribs, chuckled with dismal jollity and hid his shadowy form in the recesses of the porch.

The young girl stood spell-bound, gazing out in the direction of her vanished lover, and shaking her lovely head in mute, astonished negations, in response to the hurried and excited inquiries of the family, who came swarming into the hall in all possible stages and degrees of amazement and terror, propounding with great volubility all the conundrums which would naturally suggest themselves in consequence of such an astounding and unheralded and unprovoked outburst of human voice.

“I cannot imagine what did ail him,” she said at length, when her stern father, in mild reproof, had laid his heavy hand upon her rounded shoulder, and oscillated her lithe form to and fro until her back hair was in her hands, and the floor was strewn with hairpins and samples of curls, thick as autumnal leaves and one thing and another strew the brooks in Vallambrosa and vicinity. “I opened the door, and before I could say ‘Good evening,’ he opened his mouth to its fullest extent, and with a look of horror, fled from my presence, leaving no token save an amount of noise altogether incommensurate with his size. I can’t imagine what he could have seen to affect him so. I was afraid at first that I hadn’t rubbed the pearl powder out of my eyebrows, but I had.”

Every member of the convention offered a suggestion or an explanation of the mysterious affair, but they were all overruled by paterfamilias, who, venturing the gruff opinion that the young man was in the habit of placing himself exterior to sundry and various decoctions dispensed at those retail drug stores which are, by law, closed on Sundays, and had merely incurred that peculiar form of mental distemper in which the patient keeps a private menagerie on exhibition in his boots, drove his wondering family back to the parlor.

But youth is buoyant. Its sorrows are transient and its tears are April rain, flecked with the sunshine even while they fall; its fears are short lived as its sorrows, and die away when the thought or scene that gave them birth is gone. So he who flew from the hideous shadow that had veiled the fairy figure of his love from his fond gaze, blushed in the darkness at his nervous fancy, and re-arranging his wardrobe, retraced his steps with more of that native grace and innate dignity peculiar to the young man of the nineteenth century, than he had displayed while making his presence seldom. Again he passed the wreck of the demolished gate, and once more he rang the bell, and listened for the echoing footfall, while the attentive specter came and stood demurely at his elbow.

“You horrid boy,” murmured a sweet voice through the keyhole, “I have a great mind not to let you in. What made you act so perfectly ridiculous?”

“Dearest,” the young man said, “it was a foolish, horrible fancy; I will never frighten you again.”

“It was perfectly dreadful,” she replied, “horribly, dreadfully awful. How could you be so perfectly horridly dreadful? But you may come in this time.”

And with coquettish deliberation she opened the door, to see the ghost, bending his smiling gaze upon her colorless face and staring eyes.

“Thank you,” he said, in hollow tones, “since you insist upon it, I will come——”

“Oo-oo-ee-E-E-E-E!”

And thump! She dropped to the floor with a velocity and abruptness that even astonished her ghost. Dumb with amazement, her lover stood gazing at her form, lying prone upon the new hall carpet, emitting a series of long-drawn shrieks. He recoiled, as again the members of the family came pouring and buzzing out of their rooms, like hornets from their domicile on a swaying apple tree bough, jarred rudely by the unconscious granger’s towering head. The angry father caught a glimpse of the trembling, half-stupefied, and thoroughly mystified youth, standing near the doorway, appealingly and timorously offering his explanations. The parent, with a few hurried words, disappeared up stairs. Quickly he returned, bearing in his hands a ponderous shot-gun, at the sight of which the young man, without pausing to explain, fled quite as precipitately, and with as little ceremony, as he had sauntered away from the embrace of the ghost.

“Because,” he remarked to the wind, which was vainly trying to keep pace with his flying movements as he cleared the fallen gate with a bound, and waltzed airily down the road, as though tight boots were a vision and an unreal dream, “because the old man appears to be a trifle impatient to-night, and I would not cross him in his sadder moods. He might do that to-night for which to-morrow I might mourn.”

And deftly passing from twelve to fifteen linear feet of solid earth beneath each foot, oft as he raised it from the ground, with swift evasion he transferred himself to healthier climes and more congenial scenes.

The indignant father, meanwhile, had stepped out on the porch, and holding his warlike weapon a-port, peered angrily into the gloom for a glimpse of the flying figure, whose distant, echoing footsteps he could faintly hear.

“Thou art so dear,” he said, “and yet so far.”

To him the silent ghost approached. Standing by his unconscious side, the specter leaned his bony elbow upon the mortal shoulder, resting his hollow cheek upon his attenuated hand. Then, with a graceful motion and an easy gesture, of which a ballet dancer might be proud, he drew aside the lower portion of his drapery, disclosing to view a pair of emaciated shins of which a ballet dancer would most certainly be ashamed. Crossing one of these specimens of anatomical curiosities in front of the other, he rested the bended limb upon the toes, and stood thus for a moment, in that elegant and charming pose so much affected by our best young men at the opera and theater, who place themselves on exhibition for the untaught multitude upon every possible occasion.

For a few brief moments he stood thus, wrapped in admiration of his refined and elegant appearance, then dropping his face and turning it until his breath, if he had any, would have swept the cheek of his unconscious companion, he said:

“Let me entreat you, dear sir, to do nothing rash. Let me implore you to put by your murderous weap——”

Bang! bang! Two loads of death-dealing buckshot perforated the roof of the porch, and the howl of an elderly voice mingled with the crashing, discordant echoes that rose clattering through the darkness. The slam of a door, and the rush and scramble of many feet succeeded, followed by the clanging of locks and bolts; the subdued hubbub of many voices could be heard, detailing in many exaggerated phrases, extravagant narratives, and with a smile of grim amusement playing across his expressive features, like a telegraphic line from one ear to the other, the specter learned, as he listened at the keyhole, that while the master of the house had been standing on the porch, a pale blue light suddenly clove the night, accompanied by a sulphurous smell, in the midst of which appeared, rising out of the ground, a colossal body with five heads, and with hideous gashes yawning in its throats, from which the welling blood flowed down, and splotched and streaked the long white robe with horrible carmine stains. Its many eyes, the patrician said, glared like burning coals, and its hair twined and wreathed itself in fantastic shapes, like living serpents.

The specter assumed a thoughtful look as he listened to these terrible revelations.

“It is barely possible,” he said, “that I am a maligned apparition. From his vivid powers of imagination, and a slight tendency to exaggerated word coloring in narration, one would take this elderly party for one of the gifted prevaricators who deal in political prophecies in the presidential year. I may not be a very handsome ghost, but I do most profoundly believe that this portly Ananias who, I see, is just now leaving the room to learn how his daughter is coming on, has most foully traduced my personal appearance. And while there is no one in this apartment save that comfortable-looking old lady, who has been terrified and mystified into motionless silence, I will quietly step in and settle this vexed question by consulting the pier glass.”

With that graceful, easy manner which is characteristic of a well-bred ghost, he slid through the keyhole, and a moment later, stood singeing his bloodless shins before the blazing grate, while he made a critical inspection of his visage in the mirror. After studying the picture for some moments in silence, he stroked his chin with a complacent air while a smirk of self satisfaction played over his features.

“Any mortal,” he murmured, “who would flee in terror from such a face as that; any man who could detect any thing like an unearthly glare in those hollow eyes; any creature who can find it in his heart to announce the discovery of hair on that head, or find a trace of blood about that figure, from throat to heels, is a lunatic, and should be looked after. Be looked after,” he added, in an absent way, “Looked after. Looked after.”

“And,” he continued, after a few moments’ deliberation, “I should like to be appointed to look after him. He would then have a more faithful conservator than was ever appointed by a county court. I would interest and amuse him, and strive to divert his mind from the troubles which appear to have so disordered his imagination and distorted his vision and faculties of observation. I would keep him in a state of constant mental activity. I would help him around, and I would make myself useful to this family in a variety of ways. For instance, I would make this old gentleman so distrustful of that long walk up the hill after dark that he never would stay down town late at night, and could not be induced to attend lodge, or ‘just step down to the post-office’ after supper. I would imbue his very nature with such an utter abhorrence for dark places that he would never kiss the hired girl behind the cellar door. Never again; ne-ver, ne-ver. I would reform this man, and make this family happy, and this house should resound with manifestations of excitement and exclamations of astonishment, and indications of very dubious merriment, as it were. I see much good in this virtuous and happy project, and I will cultivate the acquaintance of this excellent lady of the mansion, convince her of the necessity of a protector for herself and her family, and carry my plans into operation. I have a conviction that this would be a most comfortable house to haunt.”

He stepped to the side of the matron, and laying his icy fingers against her cheek to arouse her attention, and holding his throat shut with the other hand to prevent his voice escaping prematurely at the aperture which has been previously referred to, said, in a louder voice:

“You will pardon the abruptness of my speech, my dear madam, but I deem it my duty to inform you that it is my firm belief this part of town is haunted. Yes, ma’am, haunted. I shouldn’t be surprised, indeed, if there was a ghost somewhere in this house this very minute. In fact I have every reason for believing——”

Thus far his auditor had preserved such a respectful silence that the speaker believed she was listening with rapt attention, and he fondly hoped that he had at last found a friendly, appreciative gossip who would not interrupt his remarks with ill-timed applause before he was half through. Looking at her face, however, at this moment, the expression of her countenance was such as chilled him with disappointment. She was not splitting the night air with blood-curdling, discordant shrieks, it is true, but it evidently wasn’t her fault. Her eyes had left their sockets and were standing out on her cheek-bones with nothing particular to do except to stare at each other across the top of her nose, each with an expression of blank amazement at seeing the other there. Her mouth was alternately closing with sudden jerks and distending with spasmodic gasps; noiseless, but all the more provoking on that very account. She appeared to be making strenuous efforts to rise, but as every attempt to assume an erect posture brought her closer to the ghost, she sank back helplessly in her chair after every effort, and resumed her dreadful staring and noiseless gasping.

“You had better scream, madame,” said the disgusted ghost. “Pray, do not restrain yourself on my account. It is really painful for me to witness your suffering. If my presence here is distasteful to you, pray have the goodness to intimate the fact in the abrupt and startling manner so much affected by this family. You had better express your emotions, if you have any. If you have through any little passing thrill of excitement, temporarily lost the use of your voice, and find some difficulty in recovering it, perhaps I can assist you.”

With a horrible leer he withdrew the drapery from his neck, and leaning back his head disclosed the gaping incision in his respiratory and swallowing apparatus which had compelled him to go into the ghost business. As he had shrewdly conjectured, that startling display developed the full action of the old lady’s dormant vocal powers, and, for the next five minutes, Bedlam was a quiet, sequestered cloister in comparison with that house. For an instant the author of all the uproar paused to smile at the vociferous woman screaming till the chandelier trembled, and pounding a vigorous tattoo on the floor with her aged heels, and then he left the house, merely stopping as he went to look in on the kitchen, and by one genial wink at the servants establish a first-class English opera chorus in that department of the household.

He then passed out into the chill air, and gliding slowly along the gravel walk, paused to contemplate the ruins of the front gate and speculate on the whereabouts of the handsome youth who had so lately enacted the part of a modern Samson, and had torn down the gates to Gaza little on the loved face which parental tyranny would thereafter conceal from his ardent gaze forever.

“It is ever thus,” moralized the ghost; “at once the mightiest and the weakest being in created life, God’s noblest work is the toy of bodiless phantoms. We tear down and we build up; we purpose and we prevent; we do and we undo; we overcome every real difficulty, and surmount every actual obstacle, and at last, when our object is all but accomplished—lo, a shadow terrifies us, and the courage and labor of an hour, a year, or a lifetime, are swept into ruins. At least, we used to do thus. I have left the firm, but the surviving partners carry on the business of life in pretty much the same old style. The world invents a great deal, but it doesn’t improve very much. It is the same old world, after all. It has the locomotive and the telegraph, true; but the men who invented the locomotive and the telegraph loved, feared, hoped and lived pretty much as Cæsar’s couriers and Dido’s sailors used to. Men declaim against the remotest possibility of the spirits of the dead revisiting the glimpses of the moon, and yet my presence affects in the same unpleasant and turbulent manner alike the most skeptical and the most credulous and superstitious. I believe, speaking of spirits, I will go down town to a certain house I wot of, where parties of my friends, the Spiritualists, hold frequent seances, at which they converse familiarly, though ungrammatically, with the spirits of their own deceased friends, and of the illustrious dead. They will be glad to see me, I know, because I am intimately acquainted with some of the parties whom they occasionally summon back to earth, and they will be glad too, because I can correct some of the erroneous ideas they entertain in regard to the present condition of some of these spirits who are constantly writing back, in such execrable English as would make a cultured, intelligent ghost blush, how happy they are, and how glad they are that they died, and how much they know. I am as contented a ghost as one can find under the republic, and I never was glad that I died, and I never write to any of my relatives, and never visit any of them, except,” he added thoughtfully, “my dear haunt.” And he chuckled grimly over his ghastly little joke.

In another moment he was seated comfortably beneath a table which was surrounded by a party of seekers after truth, who were patiently sitting up for the latest returns from the spirit world. The ghost was much touched by the anxiety displayed by a young man in very long hair and green spectacles to hear from his departed uncle. The spirit mails were snowed in, or intercepted by guerrillas, or held for postage, or suffering from some other cause of detention that Christmas Eve; for it seemed as though the young man never would receive so much as a postal card from his deceased relative. The ghost pitied him, and just as the medium, a beautiful young girl of forty-nine summers, was passing into another trance, he crawled out from under the table and bowed pleasantly to the anxious inquirer.

“I think I can allay any anxiety you may feel on account of your departed avuncular relative,” he said; “I have met him several times, and although the peculiar and pressing nature of his engagements elsewhere prevents his attending in person social assemblies on this side of the ground, he is——”

He ceased speaking at this point, for his voice had long been drowned in the uproar of shrieks, and breaking furniture, and crashing glass, as the seance broke up along with the tables and chairs, and the anxious seekers after truth emerged into the night with window sashes hanging round their necks. Foreseeing that there would be trouble if he did not emigrate in order to permit the wanderers to return and resurrect the overturned stove, the messenger from the realm of shadows departed and once more sought his station on the hill. And again he whistled. “Down Among the Dead Men” through his teeth, while he smiled pensively, and communed with his own pleasant thoughts.

“It’s just as I said,” he mused; “had I been that young man’s uncle, whom he so earnestly desired to see, his terror would have been just as great. They rap and call for us, they implore us to come, and when we come they go. And they go very abruptly. Some of those people to-night got out of that room by edging through fissures that would squeeze the very breath out of the leanest ghost I ever saw. Believer or skeptic, it makes no difference. Saul was not more terrified at Samuel’s ghost, which he was so anxious to see, than was the witch who accidentally raised the apparition. But these broken, interrupted interviews with terrified mortals are growing monotonous. I will stay out all night, because it is Christmas Eve and my night out, but I will spend the remaining silent hours in meditation, and let the wicked old world sleep in peace, unless, mayhap, some belated wayfarer should stray this way, when I will revenge myself upon him for the shabby treatment I have received at mortal hands to-night. I will frighten him so that he will not be through screaming when I come here again next Christmas Eve. I have tried to be agreeable to everybody to-night, and everybody has refused to be sociable, and has repulsed my courteous advances with the most hideous shrieks and uproar. And to the next hapless mortal who shall cross my haunt, I will be terrible.”

He ceased speaking, and knotted his face with a series of horrible contortions and hideous grimaces, which he practiced until he acquired one which appeared to satisfy his fastidious taste. This one he exercised several times in order to fix it firmly in his memory, and then, folding his arms, he leaned against the railing and gloomily waited for a customer, as ill-natured and unhappy a ghost as could be found in all the haunts of men or specters.

His ghostship did not have long to wait for a subject, standing there in the gloomy street, with the cold, glittering stars occasionally peeping timidly through the rifted clouds sailing overhead. Before long a heavy footfall was heard ascending the lower part of the hill, and then, as it came nearer, the dismal one could hear the frosty earth creaking under the passenger’s feet at every step he took. A voice which was marked by that peculiar intonation which we so frequently notice in close proximity to a pick or a hod, uttered, in sentences so profusely vaccinated with trilled r’s that it sounded like a high school commencement, a wrathful objurgation upon the wind, as the winter zephyr well nigh lifted the speaker from his feet.

“Growl about that, will you?” muttered the ghost, with savage gleefulness, “I’ll make you wish the wind had blown you into the moon before you get to the top of the hill. I wish he would walk more slowly,” the specter went on, rubbing his fleshless hands in delighted anticipation; “I should like to have a few moments’ quiet enjoyment in contemplating the possible and probable actions of the worst frightened man in America. I have been accused of frightening people before now, but those vile slanders against my considerate and pacific disposition and my reassuring physiognomy will all be retracted and atoned for after to-night. After this man’s experience no man, no living mortal will dare stand up and say that any one was ever frightened prior to this date. Why, there won’t be as much hair left on this individual’s head, in about three minutes, as would make me a switch. All the doctors in America won’t be able to get his eyes back into their proper places. He will howl and yell and shriek and pray to the day of his death. Scared? It isn’t the word. It’s too weak. Whistle, will you?” he continued, apostrophizing the approaching figure, “I’ll make you wish you had a French horn fifteen feet long, with all the keys open and the mouth-piece cracked, to express your feelings through. Why,” he said, arranging his robe and twisting his face into such a blood-curdling awful contortion that it raised a blister on the frozen ground and the very wind turned and blew up hill for dear life; “why, my unsuspicious republican, you’ll be the worst demoralized community in about fifteen seconds that ever disturbed the holy quiet of midnight.”

Stretching out his gaunt arm in a weird, ghostly gesture, the white drapery falling away from it in conventional folds, the specter stepped out to the middle of the sidewalk to confront the coming man. A man of medium size, the new-comer, with bluff square shoulders, twinkling eyes, a nose that had been made of a remnant so that the unfinished end retreated toward the eyes, a mouth puckered up in a melodious whistle, the head covered with an abundance of closely-cut hair of the shade of St. Louis pressed brick; a ragged coat was buttoned close and the wearer carried under his arm a walking-stick of most benevolent aspect, the bulge on the end of which reminded one of an invitation to join the innumerable caravan. His whistle ceased as the ghost loomed up before him, not suddenly cutting off his tune in the middle of the note, but in a long-drawn diminuendo passage, commonly expressive of inexpressible astonishment.

The ghost slowly and impressively waved his extended arm in the direction of the gloomy ravine. The mortal shuffled uneasily toward the middle of the street in an effort to get round the unpleasant obstruction. The specter noiselessly glided before him and still confronted him with outstretched arm and hideous countenance, and both figures regarded each other in silence. The mortal was the first to open the conversation, who, after muttering under his breath, “The saints betune us and har-rum, an’ phwat is he makin’ thim faces at me for?” remarked in a brisk tone:

“Cool avenin’!”

Motionless as a statue, the ghastly figure glowered upon him in its frozen attitude and terrifying gesture.

“Is it Tim Moriarity, as died the year before I kim’ over, I don’ know?”

No reply and no change of posture on the part of the specter.

“Is it the Feenicks boys ye are thin, as kilt aich other the night ov the ball at the creek three years ago come nixt September an’ jist two months lackin’ six weeks after O’Flaherty’s sisther dhrove the cow off the wagon bridge?”

Still the specter maintained its silence and its position.

“Ye’ve a mighty familiar countenince, onyhow,” continued the mortal, who kept up his cautious maneuvering for the weather gauge, in which he was steadily baffled by the ghost. “It seems to me I’ve seen the face av yez somewhare on a tombstone. Yer not livin’ fur around here, mebbe?”

In hollow tones the ghost replied, “I am dead.”

“Did, is it? Oh, the saints rist yer ristless sowl. An’ phwat are ye doin’ out here? Whaire do ye live—I mane, whaire are ye buried?”

“At the top of this hill,” came in the same hollow tones.

“An’ a mighty agreeable place that same is, to be sure,” replied the mortal, in a conciliatory intonation, “shlapin’ undher the grass, wid the cows and pigs browsin’ and rootin’ around all day long an’ kapen’ ye company nights. Born divil that ye air,” he added, in a lower tone, “I wisht wan or the other of us wur thayre now, fur it’s a onpleasant company ye air, anyhow. Well,” he added, aloud and with great cheerfulness, “good night till ye. Be good to yerself.”

“Stay,” uttered the terrible monotone; “come thou with me.”

“Oh-h, the dev—I beg yer par-r-don. I mane I can’t think of it. Luk at the time it is, an’ see the murdherin’ cowld I have in me head already, along ov being out till midnight. The wife and childher’ll be did intirely wid sittin’ up fur me, an’——”

“Follow me!” said the hollow tones of the ghost.

“Oh-h, tundher an’ turf—I mane—I beg yer par-r-don, don’t shpake of it; it’s a married man I am. I can’t sthay; besides, there’s no use—ivery place in town is shut up, and sorra the wan ov me dhrinks av they wasn’t. I wouldn’t taste a dhrop av I lived in lashins ov it; I’m a whole Father Mathew society by myself.”

“Come! Come!! Come!!!” The sepulchral tones boomed out like a bass drum solo.

“Aw-w-w! Millia murther! Go aisy now! Phwat du ye mane, divilin’ the tin sinses out of me to come, whin ye see I want to go? By the mortial gob,” he added, under his breath, “av I thought I cud find anything in yer head to feel it, avick, I’d make ye raisonable wid a welt ov this splinther av a sthick. Whist! ye bloody-minded villin!” he roared, with suddenly increasing courage, as some wakeful Brahma in a neighboring coop startled the night with a stentorian crow, which was shrilly echoed by a bantam and a dozen or more obscure roosters of no particular strain, like the birds that crow at election times, “Do ye hear that? An’ that? An’ that agin? An’ the wan afther that? Scat! ye bloody-minded Banshee, or we’ll crow the rags aff o’ yer beggarly back!”

The ghost gave a hollow laugh, that sounded like water pouring out of a jug.

“You may crow,” he said, more in his easy conversational style and tone than he had been using, “till you split your throats; this is an anniversary night with me, and I won’t go home till morning.”

His uneasy companion’s face fell at this announcement, and he looked like a man who felt that he had prematurely committed himself. But he rallied again.

“A anniver-sary, is it? Do ye have it often?”

“About once a year.”

“Is that all? An’ just think ov yer makin’ so much fuss about that! Kape on yer hat, or what iver ye call it, or ye’ll have a cowld in the head. Good avenin’, agin.”

The ghost mildly protested against his haste. It was Christmas Eve, he said, a season devoted to sociability and good fellowship——

“An’ a foine idee ye have of bein’ sociable, too,” interrupted his auditor; “Christmas is a nice enough saison, but a frayzin’ hillside at midnight, wid the wind blowin’ a jimmycane an’ the thermomether twinty-sivin degrays ferninst Cairo, isn’t the way I’m thinking to be sociable about it, jist.”

“I am delighted to have met you under such——”

“Faix, thin, thayre’s only wan of us that’s feeling so delighted about it.”

“——Favorable and pleasant circumstances. I should never have forgiven myself had I permitted you to pass by without speaking. I must insist——”

“Begorra, thin, it’s too har-r-d ye wad be on yersilf intirely. It’s me that wad give mesilf absolution fur a week av I had gone around the other way an’ never heard ov ye in me life.”

“——On your further acquaintance.”

“Thrue for you, avick, an’ the furdther it is the betther it wud shuit me. An’ the quicker we star-r-t, don’t ye see, the furdther we can make it before mornin’. I know I’ll think betther ov ye whin I can’t see ye. Good avenin’.”

“Stay,” said the specter, detaining him as he sought to hurry by, “I have that to tell you, and that to show you, to-night, which will make you a rich man, and send me back to my narrow resting place——”

“Oh-h-h! hear ’im talk about it!”

“——Never to leave it again until the last dread trump shall summon me.”

“Don’t mintion it, don’t; don’t shpake ov it at all, at all.”

“My tale is brief and sad.”

“An’ have ye a tail, thin?”

“Listen!”

“Shpake!”

“In early life——”

“Phwat’s that?”

“——I plowed the raging main.”

“An’ was ye a Granger, thin?”

“Nay, I was a pirate!”

“Same thing; kape on; it’s frazin’ I am.”

“I steeped my wicked hands in human gore for many years. When my atrocious crimes had amassed me a princely fortune, I repented me of my evil ways.”

“Musha, thin, it war you for knowin’ whin to repint.”

“I bade adieu to my evil companions, and taking my share——”

“Ah, did ye, though? An’ it was a cautious ould reformer ye was, all the same.”

“——of our ill-gotten spoils, I fled west—far to the inland—pursued by the stings of an avenging conscience and a sheriff’s posse.”

“It was thim as stirred up yer conshince.”

“I reached this city in safety and hid my gold, stained with human lives, in yonder deep ravine. Oft as I needed money, I came here by night and got what I wished.”

“Can ye get any ov it now, do ye think?”

“One winter night—a cold, bleak Christmas Eve—returning from such a visit to my hoard, I was waylaid by two men, who suspected my secret, on this very spot——”

“Good avenin’!”

“Stay yet one moment. They seized me, hurled me to the ground——”

“Here?”

“On this very spot where now we stand. They——”

“Let’s walk furdther down the hill.”

“Listen. They hurled me to the ground, and, as I struggled for my gold, they—slew me!”

“Phwat!”

“They cut my throat from ear to ear!”

“M-i-l-l-i-a m-u-r-d-t-h-e-r! An’ did it hurt?”

“It haggled some, but——”

“An’ did yez niver git over it?”

“I died!”

“Oh-h-h-h! Bones of the martyrs! GOOD avenin’!”

“Stop a moment. I——”

“Ah yes, shtop a minit. It’s yerself is the pleasant man to be shtoppin’ wid, on a hillside at midnight. Go on, thin, for it’s starvin’ wid the cold I am.”

“I died where I fell; and a coroner’s jury, after due deliberation, returned a verdict, on my lifeless remains, that ‘the alleged deceased came to his probable death in a fit of temporary inanition, induced by the administering of narcotic drug or drugs, by some visitation of Providence to the jury unknown.’”

“Wur that all, alanna? I thought ye said they cut the throat ov ye.”

“They did. But the intelligent citizens who composed the coroner’s jury could not see that that had anything to do with it. Since that time, once a year, on every anniversary of my untimely death, I am forced to leave my grave——”

“Oh, mortial man! don’t shpake ov it at all, an’ us out here in the dark an’ could, and niver a dhrop ov anything to rise the cockles ov me heart wid nearer than town. But kape on.”

“——and haunt this hill. My spirit can not rest in peace until the money which I left concealed from human gaze shall be given into hands fit to be entrusted with wealth.”

“An’ is that all, acushla? Go back to yer den, and dhraw yer stool in to the fire, an’ be comfortable. Show me whare to dig jist, and sorrow light upon me av ye’ll ever have any more nade to wake up an’ worry about another cint as long as ye live—I mane, as long as ye don’t live. Whare’s yer bank? Divil be in me but thare’ll be such a run on it in about ten minits they’ll think thare’s an ould-fashioned American panic broke loose in ghostland, for a truth. Can’t shlape because ye can’t give yer money away! Musha, thin, it’s meself can’t shlape often enough because I haven’t ony to give away, or to kape, ayther. Show me yer threasury, avick; I’m yer oysther.”

“Years ago I might have given it away, had men but known my secret. But the spell laid upon me——”

“A spell ov what?”

“——forbade me to reveal my hidden wealth until I should meet a man going home sober, on Christmas Eve, who would not be afraid of me. The condition was a hard one, for although in my annual hauntings I have met many men plodding up this hill too drunk to be frightened, you are the first sober man I have met on Christmas Eve since the city was an Indian trading post.”

“Ah well then, it’s small blame to them, for it’s gettin’ ready to shwear off New Year’s day they are, the whole jing-bang ov thim. Troth, they do that every year.”

“You did not manifest any fear at my sudden appearance. You were not, apparently, afraid of me; you——”

“Afraid, is it?”

“I merely remarked that you were not afraid of me.”

“Is it me?”

“I said, my quick-tempered friend, that——”

“Is it you?”

“Calm yourself, my bellicose mortal, I simply——”

“Listen to ’im! Hear ’im talk about ony body bein ashkared ov an ould bag o’ bones sthandin’ in the dark makin’ faces! Why, ye consaited old skeleton, is it comin’ to Ameriky to be shkared wid you I’d be, whin we had a ghosht ov our own in the Ould Sod for more nor twinty years? A ghosht that wur worth bein’ shkared ov, too.”

“You surprise me,” said the ghost. “Are you quite certain that your own family was favored with the permanent society of a ghost? You will pardon me for intimating that your appearance and dress do not indicate a station in life that calls for such a condition of things. For I am decidedly under the impression that we are permitted to haunt only aristocratic families, who inhabit large rambling houses, with long gloomy corridors and magnificent bay windows and lofty mansard roofs and heavy mortgages; full of dark corners and convenient hiding places for ghosts, and frequently so uncomfortable and dreary, especially on the occasion of a poor relation’s visit, that no one but a ghost can enjoy living in them. I once knew a most respectable ghost, a specter of a most extraordinarily rugged constitution, who haunted one of these houses, and went to sleep in the spare room one night and was so laid up with the rheumatism that he was unable to get out of his grave——”

“The saints betune us! Don’t mintion it!”

“——for nearly six weeks. I took his place at the mansion during his indisposition. A dreary, frosty place enough, fitted up elegantly with a thousand-dollar piano, a costly mechanic’s lien, Brussels carpets, a chattel mortgage or two, French plate windows, a tax title, and a few similar expensive luxuries. I did not wish to be laid up with the rheumatism, so I took preventives instead of cures. From being frosty and chilly, I made that house the warmest place this side of——”

“Don’t say it, alanna! Skip that!”

“——the equator,” pursued the ghost, quietly. “It soon became the most hospitable mansion on the street. It was full of company all the time, and poor relations came and got square meals and slept in the best beds and were made welcome. You can not imagine how I softened that old fellow’s proud heart. And you must excuse me if I say that you do not appear to belong to that favored class which is honored with hereditary ghosts. A ghost, my unsophisticated friend, is an expensive luxury.”

“Thrue for you, it is, thin. The wan we had was the most expinsive thing we wur ever throubled wid. He kim till the house in me father’s time an’ I dunno how long befoar.”

“Did he look like me?”

“Sorra the wan ov him. He’d ate a rigimint ov yez in a minit. Shouldhers like a sailor an’ a head set on ’im like a bull dog’s. He wur a ghosht now that cud talk to ye about bein’ ashkared ov him.”

“Does he ever annoy—that is, entertain you now?”

“Faix, thin he doesn’t. It isn’t here he cud live at all, at all. It wur in the ould counthry he did be vexin’ us an’ teasin’ the life out ov us from mornin’ till night.”

“Why, did he appear in the daytime, then?”

“It wur grace fur his bones that he did. Be the holy poker, alanna, it wur waitin’ fur him in the dark twinty times a month we was. Catch an Irish ghosht comin’ in the dark. He knowed whin to come.”

“Did you ever try to lay the ghost?”

“Wanst. The byes laid him wid a blackthorn stick, an’ sorra the wan of him throubled us agin fur six weeks afther.”

“I don’t understand. Why did he haunt you? What was——”

“Why did he? For the rint, av coorse. It was the thavin’ ould landlord, bloody end to him. Talk about ghosts! The ould boddagh Sassenagh gev us more throuble in wan day than the whole jing-bang ov such thin-legged spooks as yerself cud make us in a week. Thare was wan time the ould swaddler kim down to Muldoonery’s shebeen—ye knew the Muldoonery’s?”

“The name is familiar, but I can not say that I ever had the honor of the family’s acquaintance.”

“The betther for you thin, for ye died wid a whole head——”

“But my neck was spoiled.”

“Oh-h, by this an’ by that, listen to him! Don’t sphake ov it. The Muldoonerys was me father’s own family. Ould Malachi Muldoonery, wan of the Killatalicks, thim as was own cousins to the O’Slaughtery’s of Killgobbin—ah, thim was the high-toned wans fur ye; when it come to ould families, they lifted the pins, jist. They had a ghosht ov thare own, a rale wan, sphooky enough to frighten a horse from his oats, that wore a long night-shirt like yer own, an’ carried his head undher his arm. Oh, Gog’s blakey, but he wur the boss ghosht. He wur beheaded fur headin’ a rebellyun three hundhred years ago. Ah, tare-an-ouns, the tussle me own uncle, who was an O’Slaughtery, had wid this same ghosht wanst. We heard the sphook thramplin’ up an’ down the hall, fur he always wore a shurt of armor undher his white dhress, an’ me uncle got up an’ wint out, an’ peerin’ down the dark hall, sees him.

“‘Arrah!’ sez me uncle.

“‘Sorra the word’ sez the ghosht.

“‘Are ye thaire?’ sez me uncle.

“The ghosht stopped walkin’ and screwed on his head like the head ov a cane.

“‘An’ phwat av I am?’ sez he.

“‘Come out o’ that, thin, ye bladdherhang,’ sez me uncle.

“‘I won’t, thin,’ sez the ghosht.

“‘Ye’d betther,’ sez me uncle.

“‘I hadn’t thin,’ sez the ghosht.

“‘Do ye know what this is, ye omadhawn?’ sez me uncle, balancin’ his blackthorn.

“‘None o’ yer chaff,’ sez the ghosht.

“‘I wont lave a whole bone in yer carkidge,’ says he.

“‘I hwat!’ sez the ghosht.

“‘I wont!’ sez he.

“‘Yer a liar!’ sez he.

“‘Is it me?’ sez he.

“‘Show me yer head!’ sez he.

“‘Whoop!’ sez he.

“‘Hurroo!’ sez he.

“Whack! wint the blackthorn, and wid that the whole house was roused wid a bellerin’ an’ roarin’ that wud shame the bulls ov Bashan. It was me uncle, an’ they found him out dures tied to the gate-posht wid a bed-cord half a mile long and knotted up that way that it tuk thim till after daylight to ontie him, for sorra the knot cud they cut. Oh, heavy heart go wid the ghosht that tied him out in the cowld that a-way. An’ afther they got him untied he died.”

“Immediately?” asked the specter.

“Och, the divil, no; about twenty-sivin years afther. But this isn’t tellin’ me about that famous bank ov yours?”

“True,” said the specter “we are losing time. To you, who have kept sober Christmas Eve, and have scorned to desecrate and profane the sacred memories of the season——”

“Tower ov ivory!” whispered the exile of Killatalick, “av that isn’t purty good for an ould cut-throat ov a pirate!”

“——and have shown the integrity of your moral being——”

“An phwat’s thim, I wondher?”

“——in that you feel no fear of visitants from the spirit world, to you I commit gold won by dishonest means, but which at last reaches honest hands that will devote it to worthy purposes. Come with me, and do as I tell you.”

Crossing himself with an energy and rapidity that indicated a slight lack of confidence in the moral standing of his guide, the descendant of the Muldoonerys of Killgobbin followed his ghostly leader down the hillside into the hollow and along the course of the bewildered and frozen brook, until they paused before an irregular wall of rock, long ago cut down by the action of the water. As they stood before this rude wall, the specter turned to his companion.

“If,” he said solemnly, “you do not feel as though you could maintain the strictest silence, and not utter a word or an exclamation, no matter what wonders you may see, do not follow me farther. The charm which opens the care of my hidden wealth to your eyes, closes it in destruction on any violation of the spell under which I am held. Are you ready? On your life now, do not utter a sound.”

The ghost touched the rock with his bony hand. It yawned like a door, and in the cavern behind the gloomy entrance they crept, crouching, along a narrow passage until the roof arched and they stood erect. An open chest lay at their feet; glittering jewels sparkled like stars in the gloom; precious stones in the mysterious coffer gleamed till their rays pierced the shadowy pall of the cavern with a pale, tremulous light. At a silent motion from the specter, the mortal, trembling with excitement and eagerness, bent down and seized the chest. Once, twice, thrice, he strained every muscle, and tugged until it seemed as though his eyes were bursting from their sockets, but the glittering fortune seemed immovable. He set every nerve for one tremendous effort; he braced his feet firmly and once more grasped the handles of the coffer. It moves! The ransom of an empire is his!

“’S’matter ’ith you fellers? Hic! Watchu doin’? Hey?”

The blinding light, and the deafening crash that followed lasted scarce the duration of the lightning’s flash, and all was darkness and silence. When the gray light of morning quenched the beams of the paling stars, the exile woke to consciousness to find himself lying outside the spell-bound cavern, with the unbroken rock looming cold and pitiless beside him, and his dream of wealth was gone. A faint odor of stale whisky kissed the wintry zephyrs, and a shattered bottle in the near distance lay like a mournful memory of his happy dreams. When the unhappy man’s friends discovered him, they took in all the conditions of the cheerless bivouac, and when in the cozy surroundings of his home he told his marvelous narrative, they were skeptical enough to declare that they believed all the story about the ghost and the cavern and the money chest was only the inspiration of that bottle before it was broken, and that the exile of Killgobbin saw the light and heard the crash when he staggered over the edge of the wall and broke his head. But he still believes that if the young fellow who went into camp on the hillside at the opening of this story had not finished his sleep and broke in upon them in such an untimely manner, he would never again have done a harder day’s work than cutting off coupons from government bonds.

The rest of us know that this is true. And if any young man doubts the truth of this veracious chronicle, he can easily verify its statements by keeping sober next Christmas Eve, and patrolling the quiet streets until he meets the ghost. And if he doesn’t see the specter, he will at least enjoy the singular sensation of going home sober Christmas Eve, a thing of much greater rarity and wonder to most of “the boys” than an interview with a Moneyed Ghost.