Hollow moans and fiendish grins are, one may be sure, energetically
practised up. Blood-curdling shrieks and marrow-freezing gestures
are probably rehearsed for weeks beforehand. Rusty chains and gory
daggers are over-hauled, and put into good working order; and
sheets and shrouds, laid carefully by from the previous year's
show, are taken down and shaken out, and mended, and aired.
Oh, it is a stirring night in Ghostland, the night of December the
twenty-fourth!
Ghosts never come out on Christmas night itself, you may have
noticed. Christmas Eve, we suspect, has been too much for them;
they are not used to excitement. For about a week after Christmas
Eve, the gentlemen ghosts, no doubt, feel as if they were all head,
and go about making solemn resolutions to themselves that they will
stop in next Christmas Eve; while lady spectres are contradictory
and snappish, and liable to burst into tears and leave the room
hurriedly on being spoken to, for no perceptible cause whatever.
Ghosts with no position to maintain--mere middle-class ghosts--
occasionally, I believe, do a little haunting on off-nights: on
All-hallows Eve, and at Midsummer; and some will even run up for a
mere local event--to celebrate, for instance, the anniversary of
the hanging of somebody's grandfather, or to prophesy a misfortune.
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