The Ghosts

The argument that I had with my brother in his great lonely house will scarcely interest my readers.  Not those, at least, whom I hope may be attracted by the experiment that I undertook, and by the strange things that befell me in that hazardous region into which so lightly and so ignorantly I allowed my fancy to enter.  It was at Oneleigh that I had visited him.

Now Oneleigh stands in a wide isolation, in the midst of a dark gathering of old whispering cedars.  They nod their heads together when the North Wind comes, and nod again and agree, and furtively grow still again, and say no more awhile.  The North Wind is to them like a nice problem among wise old men; they nod their heads over it, and mutter about it all together.  They know much, those cedars, they have been there so long.  Their grandsires knew Lebanon, and the grandsires of these were the servants of the King of Tyre and came to Solomon’s court.  And amidst these black-haired children of grey-headed Time stood the old house of Oneleigh.  I know not how many centuries had lashed against it their evanescent foam of years; but it was still unshattered, and all about it were the things of long ago, as cling strange growths to some sea-defying rock.  Here, like the shells of long-dead limpets, was armour that men encased themselves in long ago; here, too, were tapestries of many colours, beautiful as seaweed; no modern flotsam ever drifted hither, no early Victorian furniture, no electric light.  The great trade routes that littered the years with empty meat tins and cheap novels were far from here.  Well, well, the centuries will shatter it and drive its fragments on to distant shores.  Meanwhile, while it yet stood, I went on a visit there to my brother, and we argued about ghosts.  My brother’s intelligence on this subject seemed to me to be in need of correction.  He mistook things imagined for things having an actual existence; he argued that second-hand evidence of persons having seen ghosts proved ghosts to exist.  I said that even if they had seen ghosts, this was no proof at all; nobody believes that there are red rats, though there is plenty of first-hand evidence of men having seen them in delirium.  Finally, I said I would see ghosts myself, and continue to argue against their actual existence.  So I collected a handful of cigars and drank several cups of very strong tea, and went without my dinner, and retired into a room where there was dark oak and all the chairs were covered with tapestry; and my brother went to bed bored with our argument, and trying hard to dissuade me from making myself uncomfortable.  All the way up the old stairs as I stood at the bottom of them, and as his candle went winding up and up, I heard him still trying to persuade me to have supper and go to bed.