"That's exactly what you _did_," I said, "when you wakened me. I thought I should have died." "I can't say how distressed I am," answered the spectre. "It is just an instance of what I was trying to explain. We don't know how we are going to manifest ourselves." "Don't apologize," I replied, "for a constitutional peculiarity. To what do you attribute your success to night?" "Partly to your extremely receptive condition, partly to the whisky you took in the smoking-room, but chiefly to the magnetic environment." "Then you do not suffer at all from aphasia just now?" "Not a touch of it at this moment, thank you; but, as a rule, we all _do_ suffer horribly. This accounts for everything that you embodied spirits find remarkable and enigmatic in our conduct. We _mean_ something, straight enough; but our failure is in expression. Just think how often you go wrong yourselves, though _your_ spirits have a brain to play on, like the musician with a piano. Now _we_ have to do as well as we can without any such mechanical advantage as a brain of cellular tissue"--here he suddenly took the form of a white lady with a black sack over her head, and disappeared in the wainscot. "Excuse me," he said a moment afterwards, quite in his ordinary voice, "I had a touch of it, I fancy. I lost the thread of my argument, and am dimly conscious of having expressed myself in some unusual and more or less incoherent fashion. I hope it was nothing at all vulgar or distressing?" "Nothing out of the way in haunted houses, I assure you," I replied, "merely a white lady with a black sack over her head." "Oh, _that_ was it," he answered with a sigh; "I often am afflicted in that way. Don't mind me if I turn into a luminous boy, or a very old man in chains, or a lady in a green gown and high-heeled shoes, or a headless horseman, or a Mauth hound, or anything of that sort. They are all quite imperfect expressions of our nature,--symptoms, in short, of the malady I mentioned." "Then the appalling manifestations to which you allude are not the apparitions of the essential ghost? It is not in those forms that he appears among his friends?" "Certainly not," said the spectre; "and it would be very promotive of good feeling between men and disembodied spirits if this were more generally known. I myself--" Here he was interrupted by an attack of spirit rappings. A brisk series of sharp faint taps, of a kind I never heard before, resounded from all the furniture of the room. {265} While the disturbance continued, the spectre drummed nervously with his fingers on his knee. The sounds ended as suddenly as they had begun, and he expressed his regrets. "It is a thing I am subject to," he remarked; "nervous, I believe, but, to persons unaccustomed to it, alarming." "It _is_ rather alarming," I admitted.