Richard Middleton in his _Ghost Ship_ shows some very informal humorous ghosts. The girls and boys rise from their graves to flirt over their tombstones on moonlight nights, and the children play with the village specters as companions, their favorite being the man that sits on the wellcurbing with his severed head held in his hands. The cottagers rebuke the spooks overhead when they grow too noisy, and a general good-fellowship prevails. Into this setting the ghost ship sails one night, anchoring itself in the middle of a turnip patch, and the riotous captain demoralizes the men of the village, ghosts and all, with his rum and his jokes. After a stay of some time, one night in a storm the villagers look out. Over our heads, sailing very comfortably through the windy stars, was the ship that had passed the summer in landlord's field. Her portholes and her windows were ablaze with lights and there was a noise of singing and fiddling on her decks.... They do say that since then the turnips on landlord's field have tasted of rum. Olive Harper tells[125] of a reporter who is invited by a cordial spook--who has been a New York social leader--to a spectral banquet and ball underneath Old Trinity. She satirizes human foibles and weaknesses, showing ghosts that gossip and gormandize, simper and swear as they did in life. They learn to play poker, dance, and kill time as they used to do. Frank R. Stockton has written several delicious drolleries of supernaturalism, as _The Transferred Ghost_, where the spook of a living man, the irascible uncle of the charming Madeline, terrifies the young suitor who lacks courage to propose. The audacious and ever-present ghost swings his feet from the porch railing, invisible to the girl as inaudible by her, and breaks in on the conversation in a most disconcerting way. The young man at last cries out in desperation, "What are you waiting for? I have nothing to say to you?" whereat the girl, who has been undoubtedly waiting to hear the proposal the embarrassed youth was trying to make, thinks he is speaking to her and departs in high dudgeon. On a later occasion the specter comes to announce to him that he has got his transfer and may be somebody else's ghost instead of that of the man who was expected to die and didn't, when the lover cries out, "I wish to Heaven you were mine!" And Madeline, melting in a sigh, whispers, "I am yours!" The sequel to this is also comic.[126] [125] In _The Sociable Ghost_. [126] _The Spectral Mortgage._