"What happened to this Sir Roger? Has he told you?"
"Oh! yes he fell over the cliffs."
"Bless me, and did this old housekeeper woman push him over. Was she a murderess?"
"Oh, how can I tell," said Greenbracket peevishly, "he has told me nothing of the kind."
"Well, old fellow," I said, "you really do not get much interesting information out of your ghostly friends, but what I like about you is that all your numerous ghosts come straight to you, straight to head-quarters at once—you don't go fooling about with chairs and tables and sideboards and other pieces of timber in an idiotic way. If, as some people say, they can get chairs and tables and other articles of furniture to follow them about, why don't they go in for cheap furniture removals at night when the streets are empty?"
"Don't make a joke of everything," said Greenbracket, "I do see and converse with departed spirits. I do not ask them to come; they come to me, and half of them I have never heard of before or thought of either."
"May I ask, my good friend Greenbracket, what sort of clothes they wear when they pay you these visits; for instance, what does your latest apparition, Sir Rodger, clothe himself in?"
"Bless me!" said Theophilus, "why in the dress of his times, of course—a jerken, doublet, and hose, a rapier, and all that sort of thing; sometimes he wears a sort of coarse fustian cassock with a double breast."
"I can't make out," I said to my spiritualistic friend, "where these clothes come from. Have they got a sort of theatrical wardrobe wherever they are existing? If so, why can't the ghosts of old world clothes come alone? In such a case you might see a modern suit of evening togs, or armour, or boots and spurs, or military dress walk into your room without anything inside them; or you might, with a stretch of imagination, see a suit of pyjamas, or a pair of slippers going about the place."
"Shut up talking like that," said Theophilus, "you don't possess the sense—I mean the extra sense to see these beings; but read this document I have written out. Surely it will con-
