and have popped my candle out), and he should say, “You mistrust me, you hate me, do you?  And you, don’t you know how Jack, Tom, and Harry, your brother authors, hate you?” I grin and laugh in the moonlight, in the midnight, in the silence.  “O you ghost in black-satin breeches and a wig!  I like to be hated by some men,” I say.  “I know men whose lives are a scheme, whose laughter is a conspiracy, whose smile means something else, whose hatred is a cloak, and I had rather these men should hate me than not.”

“My good sir,” says he, with a ghastly grin on his lean face, “you have your wish.”

“Apres?” I say.  “Please let me go to sleep.  I shan’t sleep any the worse because—­”

“Because there are insects in the bed, and they sting you?” (This is only by way of illustration, my good sir; the animals don’t bite me now.  All the house at present seems to me excellently clean.) “’Tis absurd to affect this indifference.  If you are thin-skinned, and the reptiles bite, they keep you from sleep.”

“There are some men who cry out at a flea-bite as loud as if they were torn by a vulture,” I growl.

“Men of the genus irritabile, my worthy good gentleman!—­and you are one.”

“Yes, sir, I am of the profession, as you say; and I dare say make a great shouting and crying at a small hurt.”

“You are ashamed of that quality by which you earn your subsistence, and such reputation as you have?  Your sensibility is your livelihood, my worthy friend.  You feel a pang of pleasure or pain?  It is noted in your memory, and some day or other makes its appearance in your manuscript.  Why, in your last Roundabout rubbish you mention reading your first novel on the day when King George IV. was crowned.  I remember him in his cradle at St. James’s, a lovely little babe; a gilt Chinese railing was before him, and I dropped the tear of sensibility as I gazed on the sleeping cherub.”

“A tear—­a fiddlestick, Mr. Sterne,” I growled out, for of course I knew my friend in the wig and satin breeches to be no other than the notorious, nay, celebrated Mr. Laurence Sterne.

“Does not the sight of a beautiful infant charm and melt you, mon ami?  If not, I pity you.  Yes, he was beautiful.  I was in London the year he was born.  I used to breakfast at the ‘Mount Coffee-house.’  I did not become the fashion until two years later, when my ‘Tristram’ made his appearance, who has held his own for a hundred years.  By the way, mon bon monsieur, how many authors of your present time will last till the next century?  Do you think Brown will?”

I laughed with scorn as I lay in my bed (and so did the ghost give a ghastly snigger).

“Brown!” I roared.  “One of the most over-rated men that ever put pen to paper!”

“What do you think of Jones?”

I grew indignant with this old cynic.  “As a reasonable ghost, come out of the other world, you don’t mean,” I said, “to ask me a serious opinion of Mr. Jones?  His books may be very good reading for maid-servants and school-boys, but you don’t ask me to read them?  As a scholar yourself you must know that—­”