The appropriateness of the coincidence was striking.  I turned quickly to my friends, who were in conversation behind me, and asked: 

“Speaking of ghosts—­did you see that door open?”

It is my recollection that none of them had seen it.  Certainly not more than one of them had, for I remember my feeling of disappointment that any one present should have missed so strange a circumstance.  Some one may have asked what I had seen; at all events I was full of the idea, and, indicating the open door, I began to tell what I had seen, when—­exactly as though the thing were done deliberately to circumstantiate my story—­with the slow, steady movement of a heavy door pushed by a feeble hand, the other portal of the huge cabinet swung open.

This time all four of us were looking.

Presently, as we moved across the wide hall to go downstairs again, Bryan came from one of the other chambers, whither, I think, he had carried the young lady’s supper on a tray.

“Are there supposed to be any ghosts in this house?” I asked him.

Bryan showed his white teeth in the semi-darkness.  Whether he believed in ghosts or not, evidently he did not fear them.

“Yes, sir,” he said.  “We’re supposed to have a ghost here.”

“Where?”

“In that room over there,” he answered, indicating the bedroom from which we had come.

We listened attentively to Bryan while he told how the daughter of Governor Swan had come to attend a ball at Hampton, and how she had died in the four-post bed in that old shadowy guest room, and of how, since then, she had been seen from time to time.

“They’s several people say they saw her,” he finished.  “She comes out and combs her hair in front of the long mirror.”

However, as we drove back to Baltimore that evening, we repeatedly assured one another that we did not believe in ghosts.

CHAPTER IX

ARE WE STANDARDIZED?

Almost all modern European critics of the United States agree in complaining that our telephones and sleeping cars are objectionable, and that we are “standardized” in everything.  Their criticism of the telephone seems to be that the state of perfection to which it has been brought in this country causes it to be widely used, while their disapproval of our sleeping cars is invariably based on the assumption that they have no compartments—­which is not the fact, since most of the great transcontinental railroads do run compartment cars, and much better ones than the best wagons lits, and since, also, all our sleeping cars have drawing-rooms which are incomparably better than the most comfortable European compartments.