The fiction of Erckmann-Chatrian appears to have suggested various English stories. _The Owl's Ear_ obviously inspired another,[47] both being records of supernatural acoustics the latter dealing with spiritual sounds. _The Invisible Eye_, a fearsome story of hypnotism, has an evident parental claim on Algernon Blackwood's story,[48] though the latter is psychically more gruesome. _The Waters of Death_, an account of a loathsome, enchanted crab, suggests H. G. Wells's story of the plant vampire.[49] [47] _The Spider's Eye_, by Lucretia P. Hale. [48] _With Intent to Steal._ [49] _The Flowering of the Strange Orchid._ Likewise Anatole France's _Putois_, the narrative of the man who came to have an actual existence because someone spoke of him as an imaginary person, is associated with the drolleries of supernaturalism, such as are used by Thomas Bailey Aldrich in the story of an imagined person, _Miss Mehitabel's Son_, and by Frank R. Stockton.[50] Anatole France has several delicately wrought idylls of the supernatural, as _The Mass of Shadows_, where the ghosts of those who have sinned for love may meet once a year to be reunited with their loved ones, and in the church, with clasped hands, celebrate the spectral mass, or such tender miracles as _The Juggler of Notre Dame_, where the juggler throws his balls before the altar as an act of worship and is rewarded by a sight of the Virgin, or _Scholasticus_, a symbolic story much like one written years earlier by Thomas Bailey Aldrich,[51] where a plant miraculously springs from the heart of a dead woman. _Amycus and Celestine_, the story of the faun and the hermit, of whom he tells us that "the hermit is a faun borne down by the years" is suggestive of the wonderful little stories of Lord Dunsany. Lord Dunsany, while startlingly original in most respects, seems a bit influenced by Anatole France. His _When the Gods Slept_ seems reminiscent of _The Isle of the Penguins_. In France's satire the gods change penguins into men whose souls will be lost, because the priest has baptized them by mistake, while in Dunsany's story the baboons pray to the Yogis, who promise to make them men in return for their devotion. And the baboons arose from worshipping, smoother about the face and a little shorter in the arms, and went away and hid themselves in clothing and herded with men. And men could not discern what they were for their bodies were bodies of men though their souls were still the souls of beasts and the worship went to the Yogis, spirits of ill. [50] In _The Transferred Ghost_ and _The Spectral Mortgage_. [51] _Père Antoine's Date Palm._