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Lone Sahib's coreligionists found that meaning in it; but their translation was refined and full of four-syllable words. They held a sederunt, and were filled with tremulous joy, for, in spite of their familiarity with all the other worlds and cycles, they had a very human awe of things sent from ghostland.

"Christmas Eve parade," as I expect they themselves term it, is a function, doubtless, eagerly prepared for and looked forward to throughout Ghostland, especially the swagger set, such as the murdered Barons, the crime-stained Countesses, and the Earls who came over with the Conqueror, and assassinated their relatives, and died raving mad.

There must be plenty of dead comic lovers; why are they never allowed to give a performance? Where are the dead Humorists? A cheerful person contemplates death with alarm. What is he to do in this land of ghosts? there is no place for him. Imagine the commonplace liver of a humdrum existence being received into ghostland. He enters nervous, shy, feeling again the new boy at school.

In Mary Magdalen he dressed up a traditional courtesan in the splendors of purple and gold and perfumed her with many quaint, dangerous essences more exciting than her later career as penitent; in Imperial Purple he undertook a chronicle of the Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Heliogabolus, exhibiting them in the most splendid of all their extravagances and sins; in Historia Amoris he followed the maddening trail of love and in The Lords of the Ghostland the saddening trail of faith through the annals of mankind.

It would be almost like dreamland and ghostland, not the ghostland cultivated by a heated imagination, but a real communication from a distance, based on true physical laws."

He says, "Edgar Saltus is the best writer in America with a few insignificant exceptions," but he deplores the fact that Saltus knows nothing about the cows and chickens; only cities and gods seem to interest him. Still there is some atmosphere in this study, which is devoted to one book, "The Lords of the Ghostland."

Oh, it is a stirring night in Ghostland, the night of December the twenty-fourth! Ghosts never come out on Christmas night itself, you may have noticed. Christmas Eve, we suspect, has been too much for them; they are not used to excitement.

By eight she had entered the atmosphere of Venus, and was dropping slowly towards a vast sea of sunlit cloud, out of which, on all sides, towered thousands of snow-clad peaks, rounded summits, and widespread stretches of upland about which the clouds swept and surged like the silent billows of some vast ocean in Ghostland.

On Christmas Eve everybody in Ghostland who IS anybody or rather, speaking of ghosts, one should say, I suppose, every nobody who IS any nobody comes out to show himself or herself, to see and to be seen, to promenade about and display their winding-sheets and grave-clothes to each other, to criticise one another's style, and sneer at one another's complexion.

Much of what is in it is neither helped nor harmed by time and place and mood; some of it actually requires to be read at once while it is fizzing. But my story is not of that character. It is not 'the very latest advices' from Ghostland. You are not expected to keep yourself au courant with what is going on in the realm of spooks.