Whether ghosts be mistaken, subjective or objective, their appearance has always elicited considerable interest on the part of humanity. Their substance of materialization, their bearing, dress, and general demeanor are matters of definite concern to those who expect shortly to become ghosts themselves. In some instances the modern ghost sticks pretty closely to the animistic idea of spirit material, which was that the shade was a sort of vapory projection of the body, intangible, impalpable, yet easily recognized with reference to previous personality. Chaucer describes some one as being "nat pale as a forpyned goost," which illustrates the conception in his day, and the Gothic specimen was usually a pallid specter, though Walpole furnished one robust haunter of gigantic muscle. Yet for the most part the Gothic ghosts were misty wraiths, through which the sword could plunge without resistance. They were fragile and helpless as an eighteenth-century heroine when it came to a real emergency, and were useful chiefly for frightening the guilty and consoling the innocent. In some stories of the present we have a similar materialization. The spirit woman in Kipling's _Phantom Rickshaw_ is so ethereal that the horse and its rider plunge through her without resistance, and Dickens's Mr. Marley is of such vapory substance that Scrooge can see clear through him to count the coat-tail buttons at his back. In a recent story, _The Substitute_,[87] the spirit is said to evade her friend like a mist. [87] By Georgia Wood Pangborn. The Gothic ghost frequently walked forth as a skeleton, clad in nothing but his bones and a lurid scowl. Skeletons still perambulate among us, as in _The Messenger_, where the stripped-off mask shows a hideous skull. The skeleton burst from out the rotting robes and collapsed on the ground before us. From between the staring ribs and the grinning teeth spurted a torrent of black blood, showering the shrinking grasses, and then the thing shuddered and fell over into the black ooze of the bog. The ghost of Zuleika[88] is described as "a skeleton woman robed in the ragged remains of a black mantle. Near this crumbling earth body there lay the spirit of Zuleika attached to it by a fine thread of magnetic ether. Like the earthly body it was wrapped in a robe of black of which it seemed the counterpart." Elliott O'Donnell has a story of a mummy that in a soldier's tent at night sobs, breathes, moves, sits up, and with ghastly fingers unfolds its cere-cloth wrappings, appearing to him as the counterpart of his long-dead mother, looking at him with the eyes he had worshiped in his boyhood. I fell on my knees before her and kissed--what? Not the feet of my mother but those of the long-buried dead! Sick with repulsion and fear I looked up and there bending over me and peering into my eyes was the face, the fleshless, mouldering face of the foul corpse! [88] In _Ahrinziman_, by Anita Silvani.