_The Shadows on the Wall_, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,--which one prominent librarian considers the best ghost story ever written,--is original in the method of its horrific manifestation. Isn't it more devastating to one's sanity to see the shadow of a revenge ghost cast on the wall,--to know that a vindictive spirit is beside one but invisible--than to see the specter himself? Under such circumstances, the sight of a skeleton or a sheeted phantom would be downright comforting. _The Mass of Shadows_, by Anatole France, is an example of the modern tendency to show phantoms in groups, as contrasted with the solitary habits of ancient specters. Here the spirits of those who had sinned for love could meet and celebrate mass together in one evening of the year. The delicate beauty of many of the modern ghostly stories is apparent in _The Haunted Orchard_, by Richard Le Gallienne, for this prose poem has an appeal of tenderness rather than of terror. And everybody who has had affection for a dog will appreciate the pathos of the little sketch, by Myla J. Closser, _At the Gate_. The dog appears more frequently as a ghost than does any other animal, perhaps because man feels that he is nearer the human,--though the horse is as intelligent and as much beloved. There is an innate pathos about a dog somehow, that makes his appearance in ghostly form more credible and sympathetic, while the ghost of any other animal would tend to have a comic connotation. Other animals in fiction have power of magic--notably the cat--but they don't appear as spirits. But the dog is seen as a pathetic symbol of faithfulness, as a tragic sufferer, or as a terrible revenge ghost. Dogs may come singly or in groups--Edith Wharton has five of different sorts in _Kerfol_--or in packs, as in Eden Phillpotts's _Another Little Heath Hound_. An illuminating instance of the power of fiction over human faith is furnished by the case of Arthur Machen's _The Bowmen_, included here. This story it is which started the whole tissue of legendry concerning supernatural aid given the allied armies during the war. This purely fictitious account of an angel army that saved the day at Mons was so vivid that its readers accepted it as truth and obstinately clung to that idea in the face of Mr. Machen's persistent and bewildered explanations that he had invented the whole thing. Editors wrote leading articles about it, ministers preached sermons on it, and the general public preferred to believe in the Mons angels rather than in Arthur Machen. Mr. Machen has shown himself an artist in the supernatural, one whom his generation has not been discerning enough to appreciate. Some of his material is painfully morbid, but his pen is magic and his inkwell holds many dark secrets.