Ibsenian shadows of heredity, but real live ghosts, handsomely appointed, with chains and groans and wavy wardrobes. They lived in moated granges and ivy-wreathed castles, and paced snowy terraces or dark, desolate corridors. There was no talk then of psychic manifestations, or auras, or telepathy, or spiritual aether. Ghosts were solid realities in those days of the double number. "To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late," as Macaulay sings, and it is no less impossible to escape spirit-rapping and all the fascinating _menu_ of the Psychical Society. The epidemic, which is contagious to the last degree, seizes its victims when they are off guard, under pretense of amusing an idle hour, and ends by robbing them of sleep and health; some it drives into lunatic asylums and some into newspaper correspondence. That thought-reading is not necessarily delusion or collusion is now generally recognised; a _protégée_ of Mr. F. W. Myers convinced me of the possibility of simple feats, though not of her explanation of them. She credited them to spirits, and wicked spirits to boot. In vain, I pointed out that spirits who occupied themselves so docilely about matters so trivial must be harmless creatures with no more guile than the village idiot: she would concede no grain of goodness in their composition. Table-turning I had never seen. Ghosts I had never met, though I had met plenty of persons who had their acquaintance. Like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu--or is it Madame de Stäel[*]?--I did not believe in them, but I was afraid of them. Premonitions I had often had, but they had scarcely ever come true. But now I am prepared to believe anything and everything, and to come up to the Penitent Form--if there be one--of the Psychical Society and to declare myself saved. I am already preparing a waxen image of a notorious critic, to stick pins thereinto. Not that I did not always believe the Spook Society was doing necessary work in supplementing the crude treatises of our psychologists, who are the most fatuous and self-complacent scientists going. [* Transcriber's note: So in original. One would rather expect the accent tréma on the 'e', not on the 'a'.] My conversion to a deeper interest in the obscurer psychic phenomena befell through encountering a theatrical touring company in a dull provincial town. The barber told me about it--a dapper young Englishman of twenty-five, with an unimpeachable necktie. BARBER. "They're playing 'Macbeth' to-night, sir." AUTHOR. (growling). "Indeed?" B. "Yes, sir; I'm told it's pretty thick." A. "What's pretty thick?" B. "'Macbeth.'" A. "What do you mean by 'thick'?" B. "Full of gore, sir. I don't like those sort o' pieces. I like opera--'Utopia' and that sort o' thing. You can see plenty o' thick things in real life. I don't want to go to the theatre to get the creeps and horrors. But I've seen 'Othello' and 'Virginius.'" A. "Ha! Do you know who wrote 'Othello'?" B. "No, that I don't."