“ALAS! POOR GHOST” It is quite enough in this materialistic age that I say I am a ghost to make people turn up their noses at me; and when I add that I am a very second-rate spirit with the most mean spectral privileges, it will be readily gathered that my position in phantom circles is more or less a painful one. To be plain, I am not an awe-inspiring apparition in any sense; I am not even passable; I never raised the hair or froze the blood of anybody; adults gaze unmoved at my most fearsome manifestations; children like me. But I am a right ghost for all that. Time and space possess no significance for me, and hundreds of people have mistaken me for luminous paint after dark. Against these advantages, however, must be set the unhappy conditions of smallness and stoutness; for as in life I was of diminutive and plump habit, so do I now remain. I am, in fact, a short, fat ghost--a combination of qualities that promised from the first to be fatal to any spectral procedure on a high plane. Thus, though I have haunted in all the best middle-class families, and once or twice taken a _locum tenens_ among county people; though I have foretold deaths, indicated buried treasure, pointed out secret staircases, corpses and so forth; though I have gone through the regular mill, my spirit has yet failed of acquiring even a reasonable reputation among men. For the past fifty years I have dwelt in Herefordshire with some pleasant, self-made folks who suit me very well. Capon Hall is a very roomy mansion, possessing architectural advantages from my point of view, and situated in a somewhat densely-haunted district. The original owners got themselves destroyed in the time of Charles I., and the property, after many fluctuations of fortune, was ultimately purchased by Mr. John Smithson, a Manchester man. Here he resided, developed into a good old Squire of the right sort, and grew popular. He was a widower, and had two children, Ethel, a girl of eighteen, who lived with him, and William, a son of two or three and twenty, who entered the army and went to India. This youth married, became the father of a daughter, and sent the infant home to Capon Hall. Now, love may often appear where there is no respect, and when an element of real human affection entered into my ghostly life, I found it a comfortable and pleasing thing. This baby Smithson loved me, and her regard was returned. Our attachment must be allowed platonic to a degree perhaps never before imagined, for Winifred has just attained to the age of three years, while I am above three hundred. She is a golden-haired, sunny little soul, making all the music and laughter of her home. I am an old, grey ghost, to whom the western wing of Capon Hall has for fifty years been consecrated.