The supernatural tales of Mrs. Gaskell, whose gift for story-telling made Dickens call her his Scheherazade, were, like those of Cunningham, based directly on tradition.  She was always attracted by the subject of witchcraft; and she had collected a store of “creepy” legends of the kind which made the nervous ladies of Cranford bid their sedan-chairmen hasten rapidly down Darkness Lane at nights.  The best of Mrs. Gaskell’s short tales is perhaps The Nurse’s Story, which appeared in the Christmas number of Household Words in 1852.  Mrs. Gaskell has a happy gift for preserving the natural aroma of a tale of bygone days. The Nurse’s Story has a hint of the old-world grace of Lamb’s Dream Children.  The carefully disposed tableau of ghosts—­the unforgiving old man, and the vindictive sister, spurning the lady and her child from the hall—­is too definite and distinct, but the conception of the wraith of the dead child outside the manor, pleading piteously to be let in, and luring away the living child, is delicately wrought.  The tale is told in the rambling, circumstantial style, suitable to the fireside and the long leisure of a winter’s evening.  Dickens tells a very different nurse’s story in one of the chapters of An Uncommercial Traveller.  The tone of Mrs. Gaskell’s nurse is kindly and protective; that of Dickens’ nurse severe, admonitory and emphatic.  She, who told the grim legend of Captain Murderer, meant, clearly, to scare as well as to entertain her hearer.  She leads up to the climax of her story, the deadly revenge of the dark twin’s poisoned pie, with admirable art.  The nurse’s name was Mercy, but, as Dickens remarks, she showed none to him.  Though Dickens shrank timorously in childhood from her frightful stories, he himself, like the fat boy in Pickwick, sometimes “wants to make our flesh creep.”  It seems, indeed, an odd trait of the humorist that he can at will wholly discard his gaiety, and, like the Pied Piper, pipe to another measure.  W.W.  Jacobs, besides his humorous sailor yarns, has given us The Monkey’s Paw; and Barry Pain’s gruesome stories, Told in the Dark, are as forcible as any of his humours to be read in the daylight.  Dickens, in his excursions into the supernatural, does not, however, always cast off his mood of jocularity.  His treatment of Marley’s ghost lacks dignity and decorum.  Clanking its chains in a remote cellar of the silent, empty house, it has the power to disturb us, but we lose our respect for the shade when we gaze upon it eye to eye.  Applied to the spirit world, there is much truth in the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt.  The account of the thirteenth juryman, in Dr. Marigold’s Prescriptions, is much more alarming.  The story of the signalman, No. 1 Branch line, in Mugby Junction, is indefinably horrible.  The signalman’s anguish of mind, his exact description of the Appearance, his sense of overhanging calamity, are all strangely disquieting.  The coincidence of the manner of his death, with which the story closes, is wisely left to make its own inevitable impression.