a sliding movement, as if slipping over polished
ice."

"Ghosts fly on clouds and ride on winds,"
said Connal's voice of wisdom.

Of course the theory of them was duly
reasoned out by scholars. Plato taught
that the souls of good men were raised
heavenward by their virtues, but that those
of wicked men were miserably weighed down
and bound to earth by the burden of their
sins. Here, however, our concern is not with
Plato, but with Europe, as it was three
centuries ago. The prevalent opinions among
philosophers concerning ghosts were those
taught by Paracelsus and Cardan.
Paracelsus followed Servius, Honoratus, and
Sabinus, in dividing man into three parts:
soul, shadow, and body. The shadow he
called the astral spirit. "At the death of a
man," he said, "the soul goes to heaven, the
body to earth, but the astral spirit, which is
kindred to the firmament, and consists of the
two superior elements, namely, air and fire,
returns also to its own grave, namely, to the
air. In this it decays, but slowly. It takes
more time in decomposition than the body,
because its elements are purer than the
body's. Moreover, all astral spirits do not
take equal time in rotting; the purer
sort are more enduring than the rest, and lie
in the air much longer before they can be
decomposed." These astral spirits are the
spectres.

Cardan's theory brings us to our own day
—to Bacon, Reichenbach, and Odzle.
Spectres, he says, are emanations from the
dead, which, being condensed, terrify men
with the image of the body out of which
they come.

But they were regarded commonly as
astral spirits when they were not evestra;
an evestrum being a demon raised by the
black arts in shape of a dead man; as it was
held to be an evestrum that the witch of
Endor raised.

Concerning astral spirits, it was taught by
Paracelsus and by others that they are so
delicate of texture as to suffer pain when
exposed to a blaze of light. Therefore
spectres are to be met with in caverns and
dark places, and appear abroad only in the
night-time. It is of course also for that reason,
as the philosophers supposed, that they retire
at cockcrow, warned to escape the first stroke
of the morning sun.

Spectres were transparent. To quote
Macpherson again: "The ghost of Congal
came from the cave of his hill. The stars
dim-twinkled through his form." Dante's
idea of a ghost is thoroughly brought out by
his incidents, that contrast the body of
himself and Virgil's spirit moving among shades.
A ghost, according to Dante, casts no
shadow, moves nothing that it touches, or
against which it strikes, and—does not
breathe.

In the old abbey chronicles kept by the
monks, ghosts were registered as quietly as
any other incidents of life. We find such
entries as these, for example, in the annals of
the monks of Corbei: "At the feast of St
John the Baptist, a Will-o'-the-wisp misled
Brother Sebastian, who had preached in an
adjacent village, and was coming back to
Corbei in the twilight. On the succeeding
day he died of his terror." "In the oratory
on the Solling, huntsmen have seen lights,
and heard beautiful voices singing. Upon
their shouting, all was dark and silent."
"Brother Becelin, librarian, going into the
library at noon, on the twenty-third of
September, saw a man in our dress, who sat at
a table and turned over the leaves of the
Psalms of David. He shuddered; but the
other, looking round, bade him be of good
cheer. He exactly resembled our Ansgarius
as he appears in his picture hung up in the
convent." "Spectres have abounded nightly
in the kitchen and orchard, but by prayers
they have been expelled." "Christian
Cramur and Christopher von Swichelt having
denied that there are ghosts, were cruelly
tormented by them, though nobody else in
this room has either seen or heard one."

To wind up, with an illustration of its
character and tendency, this mention of the good
old positive belief in ghosts, I quote a
passage from the published records of a little
continental tour. "In the year fifteen
hundred and sixteen, a wonderful but true thing
happened in St. Laurence's church and
churchyard. When a pious aged matron
went early one morning before dawn, according
to her custom, to the Angel's Mass,
thinking that it was the right hour, she
comes at midnight to the town door, and
finds it open; so she goes into the church,
and sees an old priest, whom she does not
know, celebrating mass before the altar.
Many people, most of them strange to her,
sit here and there upon the benches on each
side; some of them are without heads, and
there are some who have been not long dead,
and whom she knew when they were living.

"The woman sits down with great awe and
terror on one of the benches, and as she sees
none but dead people known and unknown,
supposes that these are souls of the dead, and
does not know whether she shall leave the
church or stay in it, because she has arrived
too soon, and her hair stands on end. Then
comes a woman to her out of the crowd, who
in life had been a cousin of hers, and was
dead about three weeks, certainly one of
God's good angels, and pulls her by her
cloak, that is made (as usual among us) of
skins, wishes her good morning, and says,
'Why, my dear cousin, Heaven preserve us,
how do you come here? I beg you, for
mercy's sake, and by the mother of mercy, to
take care when the priest begins to come
round or consecrate, and mind then that you
run as fast as you can without once looking
about, or it will be the death of you.'