There are some unhappy spirits in recent fiction, but not such a large proportion as in the past. And there is usually some basis for their joylessness; they don't have general melancholia with no grounds for it. The ghost of the dead wife in _Readjustment_[117] is miserable because she has never understood her husband, either in life or in death, and she comes back seeking an explanation. Another spectral woman[118] is wretched because she has the double crime of murder and suicide on her soul. Poor Marley grieves because he is doomed to see the opportunities that life has offered him to serve others and that he has neglected, being forced to see with the clear vision of the other world the evil results of his own neglect, which is enough to make any one wretched. A guilty conscience is like the burning heart that each spirit in the Hall of Eblis bore in his breast. In _The Roll-call of the Reef_,[119] the troop of drowned soldiers, infantry, and horsemen, come rising out of the surf to answer to their names. Each man is asked by name, "How is it with you?" and answers with the deadly sin that has damned him. In Wilkie Collins's gruesome tale[120] there is one spirit that is unhappy because his body lies unburied, a recurrence of a theme frequent in classical stories and Gothic romance, but rare in later fiction. For the most part the later ghosts are something more than merely unhappy spirits. They are more positive, more active, more individualistic, too philosophical to waste time in useless grieving. [117] By M. H. Austin. [118] In _The Closed Cabinet_. [119] By A. T. Quiller-Couch. [120] _The Queen of Hearts._ Nor are there many simply happy spirits, perhaps because the joyous souls are likely to seek their paradise and forget about the earth. Yet there are instances, such as the light-hearted spirits of children in various stories, that with the resilience of childhood shake off gloom and are gay; Rosamond,[121] that comes back to tell her friend how happy the other life is, the peacefully content mother,[122] and others. [121] In _Here and There_. [122] In _They That Mourn_.