“All right, all right,” I said impatiently. “If you must—and believe me I know how communicative you ghosts can be—let me have it as briefly as possible, and without poetry. I’m very well up in Hamlet. Who are you?”

“That is my trouble,” said the ghost. “I’m a private person, but not therefore utterly without poetry and feeling. In life I was that particular type of gentleperson called a Poor Relation.”

“Whose Poor Relation were you?” said I.

“A Rich Relation’s, of course. He was a country squire in Gloucestershire. Not an ill-natured fellow. He knew I had no prospects and no luck, and he let me live in his manor house in a subordinate position, helping with the estate accounts, writing letters, teaching the children a little Latin, and sometimes drawing scale plans for his drainage projects, while he and the Vicar were out shooting. You know the kind of things Poor Relations do. I had been something of a scholar, you see, and I had hoped for a college fellowship, but I had no influential friends; I had hoped to enter the Church, but the Bishop had too many nephews, and altogether I was a failure and a dependant. I didn’t complain. Not very much, that is to say. But I was a cousin of the squire, and it irked me that the servants treated me so badly.”

This was the sorriest excuse for a ghost I had ever met. Failure in the spirit world is particularly chilling, and I was beginning to shiver. But I couldn’t break away. It would have been unfeeling.

“But you have apparently achieved some success after death,” said I. “You are a ghost, and you are far from home. How have you got leave to travel?”

“That is the saddest part of my story,” said he. “But you must hear me out. Don’t bustle me.”

I groaned, but I had not the heart to leave him.

“It came to a head this very night, two hundred and fifty years ago,” said the ghost. “It was on December the ninth, in 1728. Our good King George II had just entered the eleventh year of his long reign—”

“Yes, yes,” said I; “I know a little history myself. Do make haste.”

“What a fidget you are,” said the ghost, rather sharply I thought for a Poor Relation. “Then hear me. My cousin, the squire and his lady had gone to Sudeley Castle, to a ball. I was not invited. Of course not. I was a nobody and I had no fine clothes. I was left at home without even a word of apology. Nor had any dinner been ordered. My cousin’s wife, who was inclined to be mean, said that doubtless I could get something in the kitchen with the servants.

“That would not have been so bad, because the servants saw to it that they ate very well, but it meant that I had to brave my greatest enemy, the butler; he took every chance to make me feel my position as a Poor Relation. And that night he was particularly tyrannous, because he was drunk. We quarrelled. He killed me.”

“Stabbed you?” I asked.

“No.”

“Shot you? The great kitchen blunderbuss, kept above the chimney, loaded in case of burglars? In his drunken rage the butler tore it from its place and shot you while the womenfolk screamed?”

“You have been seeing too much television,” said the ghost. “The eighteenth century wasn’t like that at all.”

I continued to be hopeful and romantic. “But the quarrel,” I said; “he insulted you, spoke slightingly of your birth, and your good blood was aroused. You lunged at him with your sword, but lost your footing, and he seized the sword and stabbed you to the heart. Please say it was like that.”

“I never owned a sword in my life,” said the ghost. “Nasty, dangerous things. No: I’ll tell you exactly how it was. I was rather drunk myself, you see, and we were having a dispute about how to make boot-blacking. I had complained that the blacking he used had too much brown sugar in it. You know, the secret of good boot-blacking is the proportion of brown sugar to the amount of soot and vinegar. It’s the butler’s work to make it. And I said he put in too much brown sugar. I said my boots were always sticky. He said I lied. I said he forgot himself in the presence of his betters. He said what betters, and I was no more than a servant myself and begged the Squire’s old wigs. Then I absent-mindedly picked up a table fork and stuck it into his right buttock. He must have had very soft flesh because it went much farther in than I had expected. Right up to the handle. Then he picked up a pewter tankard and hit me over the head, and to my surprise and indignation I fell to the floor, dead as a nit.”

This was the lowest ghost I had ever been pestered by. A wearer of second-hand wigs! Brained in a kitchen brawl with a pewter pot! And he had the gall to haunt Massey College! Nevertheless, as a tale of low-life, this had its interest.

“What happened then?” I asked.

“That was the cream of the whole thing,” said the ghost, as near to laughter as a ghost can get. “You see, as soon as the butler hit me with that pot, I found myself about nine inches above the ground, watching everything—myself stretched out on the floor, the cook trying to staunch the blood from my head with a towel, all the maids in hysterics, the footman saying he knew it would come to this some day, and the butler, as white as a sheet, blubbering: ‘Oh zur, come back I beg ‘ee. I never went fur to do it, zur. Come back and I’ll go light on the brown sugar as long as I live, indeed zur, I will.’ But it was hopeless. I was gone, so far as they were concerned. The butler ran off and became a highwayman, but he was too fat and stupid for the work, and he was caught and hanged within a year.

“But there was one thing about the affair that was truly impressive. The cook was a wise woman, in her fashion, and before the butler ran off she begged him to taste my blood—just a little, just to dip his finger in the blood and lick it. He refused. She took a few licks herself, to show him that there was nothing really unpleasant about it, but of course she was professionally accustomed to tasting uncooked substances. Why? Because, you see, she knew that if he did that my ghost would never be able to appear. Now you remember that, if ever you kill anybody; swallow some of his blood, or you’ll be sorry. But of course in these days so many murderers are careless and ignorant that what I am telling you has almost been forgotten. I have always been glad that butler was thoroughly stupid; otherwise my fine career, my real achievement, would have been impossible.”

The ghost was markedly more cheerful, now. “Do you know, that was the best thing that ever happened to me? From being a Poor Relation, I was suddenly promoted to Family Ghost. My cousin and his wife were proud of me, and as succeeding generations appeared in the manor I became quite a celebrity. I was once investigated by the Society for Psychical Research, and Harry Price himself gave me the coveted three star rating: Accredited Spectre, First Class.”

I continued to be patient, under difficulties. “But what brings you here?” I asked. A ghost from Gloucestershire with a nice little local reputation—what sent him travelling?

He groaned. All ghosts groan, and it is a very disquieting sound. This ghost was a first-rate groaner.

“You read the newspapers, I suppose?” he said.

“Unfailingly,” I replied.

“Zena Cherry?” said he.

“Religiously,” said I, and made the sign of the gossip columnist—one hand cupped to the ear, the other reaching for the pencil.

“Then surely you remember her account of the old English manor house that had been bought by a Toronto entrepreneur and re-built, stone by stone, in Don Mills, near the Bridle Path?”

I did remember it.

“It was, literally, an uprooting,” said the ghost. “But I took it philosophically. The trouble with a ghost’s situation, you see, is the sameness of it. After two hundred and fifty years I was beginning to feel housebound, and I thought a new country, new people to frighten, new people to boast about me, would be an adventure. So I didn’t mind the move to Toronto; the journey by airline freight wasn’t bad, in spite of the delays by strikes. But when I arrived at last, all sorts of terrible things began to happen.”