Remember the ghost that the captain sat down
upon in the arm-chair, and then followed into
bed—eh! Halloa! what! not a word to fling
at a dog—what, quite chopfallen! Sir, I shall
put you in my next lecture."

"Don't, don't!" said both ghosts, in a
whining voice; "we'll go quietly away if you
promise not to."

"Miserable impostors, begone! I know all
your petty tricks—the voice that called Doctor
Johnson—the young ensign who died of
over-smoking at Kitchemegar, and that same night
went and terrified his poor sister, for no
reason in the world, at No. 999, Gower-street.
Bah!"

"But, my dear sir, a moment's patience; let
me put one argument before you. Look at the
haunted houses in Great Britain, the rooms
where no one can be induced, 'by even the
boundless wealth of the antipodes,' to sleep;
look at the clashing of our chains, the white
shrouds, the groans, the—"

As the Polish skeleton here got out of
breath, his lungs being evidently out of order,
the Professor slipped in and continued his
honest tirade.

"Stuff about your haunted houses—noises, all
rats and draughts—unnatural deaths, bad sewers
—the chains, rusty weathercocks—and all the
rest, the tricks of deceiving servants, smugglers,
or thieves."

Here the ghost from Poland shrugged his
shoulders and looked piteously at the ghost
from Guy's; then both shrugged their shoulders
noisily.

"But the wet ensign who comes and tells his
sister he is drowned at Cutchemabobbery, in the
Madras Presidency?"

"Ah! what, about the wet ensign?" said the
ghost from Guy's, backing up his friend's query
in a posing and rather hurt sort of way.

"Curse the wet ensign! A frivolous sister,
nervous with incessant late hours, too much eau
de Cologne, and the perusal of a sensation novel,
has apprehensions about her brother in India,
eventually goes to sleep over the piano, and
dreams she sees him dripping."

"But she didn't dream," said Poland.

"No, she didn't dream," said Guy's, resorting
again to his eye-glass.

"But I say she did," said the Professor.

"She didn't."

"She did."

"She didn't."

"But I attend her great-aunt, and I ought to
know," said the Professor.

The skeleton from Guy's here clenched his fist,
but the ghost from Poland groaned.

"It's no use," said the latter.

"Not a bit," said the former.

"On my word of honour, my dear sir," said
the ghost from Poland, trying once more, and
laying his hand on the vacuity where his
heart ought to have been, "it was not a
dream."

"It was not a dream, on my conscience,"
said Guy's.

"Now look you here, gentlemen," said the
doctor, getting red in the face, and seriously
angry, "I have borne this, I think, long enough.
I have proved to you both, that you don't
exist; why don't you go civilly like
gen'lemen?" (The doctor rather slurred the
pronunciation of this word.) "You are impostors,
scarecrows, mere bubbles; air, vapour, thought.
Begone, or, I give you fair notice, if you are not
off in five minutes by that clock, I will ring the
bell, fire off a double-barrel gun, spring a rattle,
throw open the front door, and alarm the
street!"

This threat seemed to have a great effect on
the two skeletons. Guy's sat down and warmed
his shin-bones again in a desponding manner,
but on Poland touching his shoulder, they both
got up and began to whisper together in a
violent and agitated way. They were evidently
going.

          *          *            *            *              *

The doctor fell suddenly into a deep sleep.
He did not awake until Betsy Jane, the housemaid,
came in to " do" the room at seven A.M.
That fair vestal found the gas burning, and the
doctor fast asleep in his arm-chair.

In alluding to the event afterwards, Dr.
Gaster's friends always called that vision and
sleep the result of "over-study;" but his enemies
(and what great man is not troubled
with such vermin?) called it "too much of Mrs.
Fitz-Jones's champagne."

ABOARD AN EMIGRANT SHIP.

SOME families are born emigrants; they
inherit the propensity to rove as they inherit an
ancestral brow, or an hereditary nose. The old
proverb, "A rolling stone gathers no moss," has
no terrors for them. They see neither use nor
beauty in a stone whose surface is moss and
mouldiness. If the vagrant tendency be merged
for one generation in a few quiet domesticated
women wedded to steady stationary irremovable
husbands, it bursts forth again in their sons, who
can no more settle down to a fixed occupation of
their paternal homes than a horde of gipsies
could take root in the cold dead solemn
respectability of a cathedral town. I know a quiet
man, who has lived his whole life, of upwards of
thirty years, in the same little town in one of the
midland counties, working silently at the same
employment: in whose heart the Great Eastern
has excited a romantic attachment, superior to
the slow affection he professes for the once young
woman to whom he has been engaged for fifteen
years. When the Great Eastern is in port, he pays
a substitute to take his work, and goes off to visit
her, though his wages are those of a country
letter-carrier. His distress at her manifold
misfortunes is pathetic. He inquires of any news of
the great ship with the solicitude of an ardent
affection. And he is happy when she herself
is declared faultless, and the blame of her
misadventures is cast upon defective
management.

Emigration is instinctive in my own family.