“It is a great wrong,” said a ghost who up to now had not joined in the conversation. “I will tell you a little of my experience, and that will show how little we weigh in the balance with dollars. In early days I lived in what was then the nucleus of Oakland, Cal. I had a little sister, and she died and was buried in the first cemetery laid out in that place. It was beautifully located on the banks of the estuary leading to Merrit’s Lake, and under the great and evergreen old oaks, and there we left her to sleep. Scarcely a year had passed when a rich man came and the only place in all that county to please him was that little graveyard. He managed to get it for a residence, and all our dead had to be moved. Another place was chosen at the head of the lake, and they were all put there. I had married, and when my sister was removed my first-born was laid there too. About ten years later that place had grown too valuable to be given to the dead, and our dead were carried off to the foot hills, and now I am told that the time is not far distant when they will be taken on to the eternal Sierras. Now, my mother and father and other members of my family all lie there, but there is no one left to see that they are moved in a proper manner. I wish with all my heart we had all been cremated. We should all have been just haunts and not been obliged to drag old bones around, and run the risk of getting them scattered from Dan to Beersheba.” “I don’t mind my bones at all,” said the gloomy ghost who was now quite chipper, and he braced up and threw out his chest and smoothed his chin and looked grand—as grand as the nature of the circumstances would permit. “I used to be called a fine figure of a man.” The young man hastened to say that anybody with half an eye could see that he was still, for no one else took the slightest notice of him, and the young reporter was anxious to maintain the friendliest relations with all the ghosts. Then the ghost whose peace of mind he had been instrumental in saving, walked along with a stately stride in front of the young lady whose small foot had caused him so much anguish of mind. She had finished her dance by this time and had been sitting still. By some occult wave of sympathy she sent a sentiment of gratefulness to him, and in next to no time they were talking like old friends, but the painful subject of the exchange of bones was carefully ignored. The ghost who had spoken in favor of cremation sat down beside the young man and seemed to wish to enter into conversation, and as the good-natured ghost had gone off again and was talking at a lively rate with some men who all had a sort of air about them which signaled them as seafaring men, he thought it best to let the ghost talk. To that end he listened intently. He continued his complaint: