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TITLE: THE WATER GHOST AND OTHERS
AUTHOR: JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
EBOOK: E07046 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

[Illustration]

John Kendrick Bangs

THE WATER GHOST AND OTHERS

To Francis Sedgwick Bangs

CONTENTS

THE WATER GHOST OF HARROWBY HALL

THE SPECTRE COOK OF BANGLETOP

THE SPECK ON THE LENS

A MIDNIGHT VISITOR

A QUICKSILVER CASSANDRA

THE GHOST CLUB

A PSYCHICAL PRANK

THE LITERARY REMAINS OF THOMAS BRAGDON

ILLUSTRATIONS

"'WELCOME TO BANGLETOP'"
A DEPARTING COOK
THE BARON'S BREAKFAST WAS NOT PAY-DAY
TERWILLIGER TO THE RESCUE
"COOK!" HE WHISPERED
THE PRESENCE HAD ASSUMED SHAPE
"'NO TALKERS,' RETORTED THE GHOST"
THEY SHOOK HANDS AND PARTED
THE H'EARL, OF MUGLEY
"'TO ARIADNE, OF COURSE'"
"A DUKE IS A DUKE THE WORLD OVER"
BACK TO THE SPIRIT VALE
"MARTYRS' NIGHT"
"DO YOU HEAR THAT BOLT SLIDE?"
THE VISITOR ARRIVES
"I LOOKED UPON MY REFLECTION IN THE GLASS"
THE RED TIE
"NOT A CARD FELL"
"'GRAB HOLD OF ME, BOYS'"
"I MUST HAVE FAINTED"
THE MIND-READING FEATS ON THE CLUB'S BUTLER
"5010"
"PEGGING SHOES LIKE A GENTLEMAN"
5010 BECOMES EXCITED
"NO LESS A PERSON THAN HAWLEY HICKS"
"'JUST WATCH ME'"
NOAH AND DAVY CROCKETT
SOLOMON AND DOCTOR JOHNSON
MOZART TRIES HIS HAND AT THE BANJO
WAITING FOR THE CRITICS
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE AND THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON
THE GIFT OF THE SPOONS
"'LET ME SHAAK DTHOT HAND'"
"HE WAS IN AN UNUSUALLY EXUBERANT MOOD"
ON A SPIRIT SHIP
"MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN THE REALITY"
GIUSEPPE ZOCCO
"BUT FINALLY I OPENED THE BOX"
"GAZING INTO THE FIRE WAS TOM BRAGDON"
"'YOU GOIN' TO KEEP A DIARY?'"

THE WATER GHOST OF HARROWBY HALL

The trouble with Harrowby Hall was that it was haunted, and, what was
worse, the ghost did not content itself with merely appearing at the
bedside of the afflicted person who saw it, but persisted in remaining
there for one mortal hour before it would disappear.

It never appeared except on Christmas Eve, and then as the clock was
striking twelve, in which respect alone was it lacking in that originality
which in these days is a _sine qua non_ of success in spectral life. The
owners of Harrowby Hall had done their utmost to rid themselves of the
damp and dewy lady who rose up out of the best bedroom floor at midnight,
but without avail. They had tried stopping the clock, so that the ghost
would not know when it was midnight; but she made her appearance just the
same, with that fearful miasmatic personality of hers, and there she would
stand until everything about her was thoroughly saturated.

Then the owners of Harrowby Hall calked up every crack in the floor with
the very best quality of hemp, and over this was placed layers of tar and
canvas; the walls were made water-proof, and the doors and windows
likewise, the proprietors having conceived the notion that the unexorcised
lady would find it difficult to leak into the room after these precautions
had been taken; but even this did not suffice. The following Christmas Eve
she appeared as promptly as before, and frightened the occupant of the
room quite out of his senses by sitting down alongside of him and gazing
with her cavernous blue eyes into his; and he noticed, too, that in her
long, aqueously bony fingers bits of dripping sea-weed were entwined, the
ends hanging down, and these ends she drew across his forehead until he
became like one insane. And then he swooned away, and was found
unconscious in his bed the next morning by his host, simply saturated with
sea-water and fright, from the combined effects of which he never
recovered, dying four years later of pneumonia and nervous prostration at
the age of seventy-eight.

The next year the master of Harrowby Hall decided not to have the best
spare bedroom opened at all, thinking that perhaps the ghost's thirst for
making herself disagreeable would be satisfied by haunting the furniture,
but the plan was as unavailing as the many that had preceded it.

The ghost appeared as usual in the room--that is, it was supposed she did,
for the hangings were dripping wet the next morning, and in the parlor
below the haunted room a great damp spot appeared on the ceiling. Finding
no one there, she immediately set out to learn the reason why, and she
chose none other to haunt than the owner of the Harrowby himself. She
found him in his own cosey room drinking whiskey--whiskey undiluted--and
felicitating himself upon having foiled her ghostship, when all of a
sudden the curl went out of his hair, his whiskey bottle filled and
overflowed, and he was himself in a condition similar to that of a man who
has fallen into a water-butt. When he recovered from the shock, which was
a painful one, he saw before him the lady of the cavernous eyes and
sea-weed fingers. The sight was so unexpected and so terrifying that he
fainted, but immediately came to, because of the vast amount of water in
his hair, which, trickling down over his face, restored his consciousness.

Now it so happened that the master of Harrowby was a brave man, and while
he was not particularly fond of interviewing ghosts, especially such
quenching ghosts as the one before him, he was not to be daunted by an
apparition. He had paid the lady the compliment of fainting from the
effects of his first surprise, and now that he had come to he intended to
find out a few things he felt he had a right to know. He would have liked
to put on a dry suit of clothes first, but the apparition declined to
leave him for an instant until her hour was up, and he was forced to deny
himself that pleasure. Every time he would move she would follow him, with
the result that everything she came in contact with got a ducking. In an
effort to warm himself up he approached the fire, an unfortunate move as
it turned out, because it brought the ghost directly over the fire, which
immediately was extinguished. The whiskey became utterly valueless as a
comforter to his chilled system, because it was by this time diluted to a
proportion of ninety per cent of water. The only thing he could do to ward
off the evil effects of his encounter he did, and that was to swallow ten
two-grain quinine pills, which he managed to put into his mouth before the
ghost had time to interfere. Having done this, he turned with some
asperity to the ghost, and said:

"Far be it from me to be impolite to a woman, madam, but I'm hanged if it
wouldn't please me better if you'd stop these infernal visits of yours to
this house. Go sit out on the lake, if you like that sort of thing; soak
the water-butt, if you wish; but do not, I implore you, come into a
gentleman's house and saturate him and his possessions in this way. It is
damned disagreeable."

"Henry Hartwick Oglethorpe," said the ghost, in a gurgling voice, "you
don't know what you are talking about."

"Madam," returned the unhappy householder, "I wish that remark were
strictly truthful. I was talking about you. It would be shillings and
pence--nay, pounds, in my pocket, madam, if I did not know you."

"That is a bit of specious nonsense," returned the ghost, throwing a quart
of indignation into the face of the master of Harrowby. "It may rank high
as repartee, but as a comment upon my statement that you do not know what
you are talking about, it savors of irrelevant impertinence. You do not
know that I am compelled to haunt this place year after year by inexorable
fate. It is no pleasure to me to enter this house, and ruin and mildew
everything I touch. I never aspired to be a shower-bath, but it is my
doom. Do you know who I am?"

"No, I don't," returned the master of Harrowby. "I should say you were the
Lady of the Lake, or Little Sallie Waters."

"You are a witty man for your years," said the ghost.

"Well, my humor is drier than yours ever will be," returned the master.

"No doubt. I'm never dry. I am the Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall, and
dryness is a quality entirely beyond my wildest hope. I have been the
incumbent of this highly unpleasant office for two hundred years
to-night."

"How the deuce did you ever come to get elected?" asked the master.

"Through a suicide," replied the spectre. "I am the ghost of that fair
maiden whose picture hangs over the mantel-piece in the drawing-room. I
should have been your great-great-great-great-great-aunt if I had lived,
Henry Hartwick Oglethorpe, for I was the own sister of your
great-great-great-great-grandfather."

"But what induced you to get this house into such a predicament?"

"I was not to blame, sir," returned the lady. "It was my father's fault.
He it was who built Harrowby Hall, and the haunted chamber was to have
been mine. My father had it furnished in pink and yellow, knowing well
that blue and gray formed the only combination of color I could tolerate.
He did it merely to spite me, and, with what I deem a proper spirit, I
declined to live in the room; whereupon my father said I could live there
or on the lawn, he didn't care which. That night I ran from the house and
jumped over the cliff into the sea."

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