I was arranging for a considerable flight--something faddier and more dangerous than I had hitherto attempted--and to a friend as indolent as Lithway I could only prepare to bid a long farewell. He positively refused to accompany me even on the earlier and less difficult stages of my journey. “I’ll stick to my home,” he declared. It was a queer home to want to stick to, I thought privately, especially as the ghost was obviously local. He had never seen an apparition except at Braythe--nor had I, nor had Wender. I worried about leaving him there, for the one danger I apprehended was the danger of overwrought nerves; but Lithway refused to budge, and you can’t coerce a sane and able-bodied man with a private fortune. I did carry my own precautions to the point of looking up the history of the house. The man from whom Lithway had bought it, while it was still unfinished, had intended it for his own occupancy; but a lucrative post in a foreign country had determined him to leave America. The very architect was a churchwarden, the husband of one wife and the father of eight children. I even hunted up the contractor: not one accident had occurred while the house was building, and he had employed throughout, most amicably, union labor on its own terms. It was silly of me, if you like, but I had really been shaken by the unpleasant powers of the place. After my researches it seemed clear that in objecting to it any further I shouldn’t have a leg to stand on. In any case, Lithway would probably rather live in a charnel-house than move. I had to wash my hands of it all. The last weeks of my visit were perfectly uneventful, both for Lithway and me--as if the house, too, were on its guard. I came to believe that there was nothing in it, and if either of us had been given to drinking, I should have called the eleven-o’clock visitation a new form of hang-over. I was a little inclined, in defiance of medical authorities, to consider it an original and interesting form of indigestion. By degrees I imposed upon myself to that extent. I did not impose on myself, however, to the extent of wanting to hear Wender talk about it; and I still blush to think how shallow were the excuses that I mustered for not meeting him at any of the times that he proposed. This is a bad narrative, for the reason that it must be so fragmentary. It is riddled with lapses of time. Ghosts may get in their fine work in an hour, but they have always been preparing their _coup_ for years. Every ghost, compared with us, is Methuselah. We have to fight in a vulnerable and dissolving body; but they aren’t pressed for time. They’ve only to lie low until the psychologic moment. Oh, I’d undertake to accomplish almost anything if you’d give me the ghost’s chance. If he can’t get what he wants out of this generation, he can get it out of the next. Grand thing, to be a ghost!