away his last shilling, was reviewing his misspent life when the door of his room slowly opened, the fire at the same moment emitting a vapour which at first half filled the apartment. Presently, this mist clearing away, there stood before him the stern soldierly sprite of his late companion in arms, which, with its bony fingers, pointed significantly at that rusty scabbard. "In my time," said the shade of the departed in sepulchral tones, "that sword would not have rusted thus: had your life been fuller of honours than of tricks you would have better served your country and your King."
"The white lady."
With a hollow groan, the debauchee fell, an inert mass, to the ground—he was dead!
Steeped as you and I are by this time in ghostly horrors, we cannot, I take it, do better than seek out a denizen of the other world who has succeeded in preserving her good looks, for to this advantage in a marked degree "The White Lady," better known as Prechta von Rosenberg, may lay undisputed claim. Prechta, born in 1520, was married when in her teens to Baron von Lichtenstein, who so utterly crushed her young life by his continued cruelty and excesses, that she died while yet in the very heyday of her youth and beauty, and has ever since haunted the estates of the illustrious Bohemian family to which she belongs—sometimes at one castle, sometimes at another—while again she has been known to follow some of its members further afield, having been seen in December, 1628, in Berlin. She is said to affect somewhat scanty vapoury tissue as she floats through space, beckoning invitingly as she does so.
Since time began a belief in the supernatural has existed which was modelled to a considerable extent by the introduction of the Greek and Roman mythologies, the symbolic deities of which were supposed to come down now and again from Olympus to regulate the affairs of men, while side by side with these we have Hindoo, Persian, and Chinese spirits too numerous to mention, with whom wilder tribes have brought up the rear, accompanied by all sorts of grim monsters.
Then, in later years, came the canonisation of saints, who were for all sorts of worldly ends propitiated, and a belief in whose healing and other powers developed by easy stages into the propitiation of ghosts, fiends, sprites, and hobgoblins of every description. In this short pen and pencil sketch it has been impossible to do more than glance, in passing, at Ghostland. Yet the theme has been, at least to me, an interesting one, and may, I venture to hope, afford the readers of The Strand Magazine some pleasure as well.
