successive gusts of wind of a stormy autumn day, and the coincidences were astonishing. Short sentences of a very significant character at times appeared to respond to the arbitrary standard. In any case the conclusion that a noise the cause of which is not yet understood must be supernatural is a process of reasoning ab ignorantia.
That ghosts do not come to those most interested in them, and seldom or never to any who long for them, has been a matter of note from the earliest times. Wordsworth's words, often quoted, state the conclusion drawn from this in language natural and almost convincing:
'T is falsely said
That there was ever intercourse
Betwixt the living and the dead,
For surely then I should have sight
Of him I wait for day and night
With love and longings infinite.
The ceremonies practised by the Christian Church in the middle ages in the successful exorcising of ghosts are not less striking than the sort of evidence on which the ghosts were accepted. Two or three clergymen are necessary and the ceremony must be performed in Latin, "the language which strikes the most audacious ghost with terror." According to history and tradition the ghost may be laid for any term less than a hundred years, "in any place or body, filled or empty." But what a ghost hates most is the Red Sea. It is related on the most indisputable authority that the ghosts have earnestly besought exorcists not to confine them in that place; nor is any instance given of their escaping before the time!
When we consider the injustice frequently inflicted upon orphans whose estates are squandered by trus-
