telling them that if they wished to avoid carnage they might cut the cards to see which one should take the poison.  Then he waited anxiously for their reply.  For a little space there was silence.  Then he became conscious of a tremulous shivering in one corner of the room, and he remembered that he had heard from that direction what sounded like a frightened sigh when he made the first suggestion of the duel.  Something told him that this was the domiciliary ghost, and that it was badly scared.  Then he was impressed by a certain movement in the opposite corner of the room, as though the titular ghost were drawing himself up with offended dignity.  Eliphalet couldn’t exactly see these things, because he never saw the ghosts, but he felt them.  After a silence of nearly a minute a voice came from the corner where the family ghost stood—­a voice strong and full, but trembling slightly with suppressed passion.  And this voice told Eliphalet it was plain enough that he had not long been the head of the Duncans, and that he had never properly considered the characteristics of his race if now he supposed that one of his blood could draw his sword against a woman.  Eliphalet said he had never suggested that the Duncan ghost should raise his hand against a woman and all he wanted was that the Duncan ghost should fight the other ghost.  And then the voice told Eliphalet that the other ghost was a woman.”

“What?” said Dear Jones, sitting up suddenly.  “You don’t mean to tell me that the ghost which haunted the house was a woman?”

“Those were the very words Eliphalet Duncan used,” said Uncle Larry; “but he did not need to wait for the answer.  All at once he recalled the traditions about the domiciliary ghost, and he knew that what the titular ghost said was the fact.  He had never thought of the sex of a spook, but there was no doubt whatever that the house ghost was a woman.  No sooner was this firmly fixed in Eliphalet’s mind than he saw his way out of the difficulty.  The ghosts must be married!—­for then there would be no more interference, no more quarreling, no more manifestations and materializations, no more dark seances, with their raps and bells and tambourines and banjos.  At first the ghosts would not hear of it.  The voice in the corner declared that the Duncan wraith had never thought of matrimony.  But Eliphalet argued with them, and pleaded and persuaded and coaxed, and dwelt on the advantages of matrimony.  He had to confess, of course, that he did not know how to get a clergyman to marry them; but the voice from the corner gravely told him that there need be no difficulty in regard to that, as there was no lack of spiritual chaplains.  Then, for the first time, the house ghost spoke, in a low, clear, gentle voice, and with a quaint, old-fashioned New England accent, which contrasted sharply with the broad Scotch speech of the family ghost.  She said that Eliphalet Duncan seemed to have forgotten that she was married.