Richard Middleton's story of a little ghost-boy[219] is poignantly pathetic. The little chap comes back to play with his grieving sister, making his presence known by his gay feet dancing through the bracken, and his joyous imitations of an automobile's chug-chug. Mary MacMillan speaks of the spirits of little children that are "out earlier at night than the older ghosts, you know, because they have to go to bed earlier, being so young." Two very recent child ghosts are Wee Brown Elsbeth whom Frances Hodgson Burnett shows to us, the wraith of a little girl pitifully slain centuries ago by her father to save her from torture, who comes back to play with a living playmate; and the terrible revenge-ghost of the child slain by her stepfather, who comes back to cause his death, whom Ellen Glasgow describes. [219] _The Passing of Edward._ The spirits of children that never were enter into the late stories, as in _The Children_, by Josephine Daskam Bacon, a story of confused paranoia and supernaturalism. A woman grieves over the children she never had till they assume personality and being for her. They become so real that they are finally seen by other children who wish to play with them. This reminds us of Thomas Bailey Aldrich's imagined child, Miss Mehitabel's son. Algernon Blackwood[220] shows us a multitude of baby spirits, with reaching arms, pattering steps, and lisping voices, spirits of the unborn that haunt childless women. The room which they enter seems sacred with the potentialities of motherhood, so that a man sleeping there sees his own dead mother return to him among the babes. These ghosts of little children that never were and never may be are like the spirits of the yet to be born children in Maeterlinck's dream-drama,[221] where, in the Land of the Future, the child-souls wait for the angel to summon them to life. In these stories associating children with the ghostly there is always a tender pathos, a sad beauty that is appealing. [220] In _Clairvoyance_. [221] _The Blue Bird._ The spectral insect or animal is another innovation in recent fiction, though there have been occasional cases before, as Vergil's _Culex_, the story of the ghost of a gnat killed thoughtlessly coming back to tell its murderer of its sufferings in the insect hades. Robert W. Chambers shows us several ghostly insects, a death's head moth that is a presager of disaster, and a butterfly that brings a murderer to justice, while Frederick Swanson in a story[222] makes a spectral insect a minister of fate. The most curdling example, however, of the entomological supernaturalism, is Richard Marsh's novel, _The Beetle_, a modernized version of the ancient superstitions of Egypt, whereby a priestess of Isis continues her mysterious, horrid life alternately as a human being and as a beetle. This lively scarab has mesmeric, magic power over mortals and by its sensational shape-shifting furnishes complicating terror to the plot.