Three Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens
Page: 16

friend, I hope you are pretty well. There are two in this railway
carriage. How do you do? There are seventeen thousand four hundred
and seventy-nine spirits here, but you cannot see them. Pythagoras
is here. He is not at liberty to mention it, but hopes you like
travelling." Galileo likewise had dropped in, with this scientific
intelligence. "I am glad to see you, AMICO. COME STA? Water will
freeze when it is cold enough. ADDIO!" In the course of the night,
also, the following phenomena had occurred. Bishop Butler had
insisted on spelling his name, "Bubler," for which offence against
orthography and good manners he had been dismissed as out of temper.
John Milton (suspected of wilful mystification) had repudiated the
authorship of Paradise Lost, and had introduced, as joint authors of
that poem, two Unknown gentlemen, respectively named Grungers and
Scadgingtone. And Prince Arthur, nephew of King John of England,
had described himself as tolerably comfortable in the seventh
circle, where he was learning to paint on velvet, under the
direction of Mrs. Trimmer and Mary Queen of Scots.

If this should meet the eye of the gentleman who favoured me with
these disclosures, I trust he will excuse my confessing that the
sight of the rising sun, and the contemplation of the magnificent
Order of the vast Universe, made me impatient of them. In a word, I
was so impatient of them, that I was mightily glad to get out at the
next station, and to exchange these clouds and vapours for the free
air of Heaven.

By that time it was a beautiful morning. As I walked away among
such leaves as had already fallen from the golden, brown, and russet
trees; and as I looked around me on the wonders of Creation, and
thought of the steady, unchanging, and harmonious laws by which they
are sustained; the gentleman's spiritual intercourse seemed to me as
poor a piece of journey-work as ever this world saw. In which
heathen state of mind, I came within view of the house, and stopped
to examine it attentively.

It was a solitary house, standing in a sadly neglected garden: a
pretty even square of some two acres. It was a house of about the