The Gothic romance made much use of portents of the supernatural, which later fiction does as well, but differently and with greater skill. The modern stories for the most part abandon the conventional portents, the dear old clock forever striking twelve or one--there was no Gothic castle so impoverished as to lack such ghostly horologue!--the abbey bell that tolls at touch of spirit hands or wizard winds, the statuesque nose-bleed, the fire that burns blue at approach of a specter, and so forth. The later story is more selective in its aids to ghostly effect, and adapts the means desired to each particular case, so that it hits the mark. For instance, the sardonic laughter that sounds as the burglars are cracking the gate of heaven to get in, and imagining what they will find, is prophetic of the emptiness, the nothingness, that meets their astounded gaze when they are within. Ambrose Bierce in some of his stories describes the repulsiveness of the fleshly corpse, reanimated by the spirit, perhaps not the spirit belonging to it, with a loathly effect more awful than any purely psychic phantom could produce, which reminds us somewhat of the corpse come to life in Thomas Lovell Beddoes's _Death's Jest Book_. The horrors of invisibility in modern fiction avail to give a ghastly chill to the soul that visible apparitions rarely impart. Likewise the effect of mystery, of the incalculable element, in giving an impression of supernaturalism is a recognized method of technique in many stories, as the minister's black veil in Hawthorne's symbolic story. The unspeakable revolting suggestion in Edith Wharton's _The Eyes_, where a man is haunted by two hideous eyes that "have the physical effect of a bad smell, whose look left a smear like a snail," is built up with uncommon art. We do not realize how much is due to insanity and how much to the supernatural, when, after telling the story of his obsession, his fears that as a climax he will become like those Eyes, the man suddenly sees his reflection in the mirror and meets their dreadful gaze. "He and the image confronted each other with a glare of slowly gathering hate!" Mention might be made of an incident in a recently published literary drama, where a man seeks over the world for the unknown woman with whom he has fallen in love, and on his calling aloud in question as to who she is, "the grave, with nettle-bearded lips replied, 'It is I, Death!'" These are only suggestions of numberless instances that might be given of a modern technique of supernaturalism that surpasses anything in Gothic fiction.