It may be an objection, founded upon some basis of common sense, that I have introduced what I call a veritable ghost into my work. I cannot help that. In fact I never would have written my book if I had not had that interview with what now, in all the sincerity that is left to a man in these abominable days, I believe and assert was a ghost; a real ghost,—no dramatic shade made up of an off-duty carpenter with an actor to speak his part,—a ghost arranged for the nonce with a screen between us, of vapory muslin; but a solemn, a meaning, a power to move, but not a power to absolutely affright, ghost. In fact I see no reason to be frightened by them. Grant that they exist,—you never have heard of one that did harm to anybody. They have, it is to be supposed, thrown off the passions of the flesh, with the flesh,—the passion of anger, the passion of mischief, and all the low and base adjunctives that adhere to us in our state of usual visibility. They are not monsters, but symbols, or aerial realities of our former friends. Even the ghost of Robespierre, of Nero, or Jeffrey, would be harmless, bad as they were when encompassed in their fibrous shells of flesh. Ghosts, as a general rule of logic, cannot be as bad as those of earth with whom they have their interviews. And it is not to be supposed that they always have a sublime or important mission to accomplish. If the rule holds good that Providence allows them to flit hitherward, the ghost of a washerwoman has as much right to appear to her successor of the soap-suds, as the ghost of Cæsar to his slayer before the battle that settled the destiny of half a world. And the washerwoman’s ghost could not do that, or would not even think of doing that, and yet she might have her homely mission, as important to her friends, as ghosts of a higher rank. But they all have their mission, the ghosts of demi-gods as well as the ghosts of plebeians. They easily establish, what otherwise could not be practically proved, the vexed question of the immortality of the soul. A testimony of a dead man would be as valuable to me, with regard to that matter, as the wire-drawn assertions of a man paid a large salary to keep good, and say that we turn into ghosts after all,—for they all say that.