“Climate unfavourable, I suppose?” said I, sympathetically.

“Not that, so much as the structural changes,” said the ghost. “Our splendid old manorhouse kitchen was thought too big for a Canadian dwelling. To begin, it was a good hundred and forty feet from the dining-room, and there was a flight of stone stairs on the way. You should have heard what the real-estate people had to say about that! And it had a flagstone floor, which was hard and cold to Canadian feet. Further, our house was a proper gentleman’s residence, and without a butler and a footman and six maids and a cook and a scullion nothing more ambitious than sandwiches could be managed. So the real estate people decided that an entirely new kitchen should be built, and the old kitchen should become something called a rumpus room, where the children of the family could be at a suitable distance from their elders. I gather that ‘rumpus’ is the modern word for what in my day was called hullabaloo.

“To accommodate the new kitchen, the contractor bought in England and transferred to Don Mills an object that would never be seen attached to a respectable manor. It was an oast-house. You know what an oast-house is?”

I didn’t.

“It’s a kiln for drying hops, a great tower-like building with a pointed roof. An unseemly object. But they stuck it to the side of the manor, right by the dining-room, and put a modern kitchen in it.

“A modern kitchen is no place for a ghost. Crackling with electric current, cold things, hot things, and cramped so that one miserable servant can do the work of five. Where is the ingle-nook, where visiting grooms and coachmen can dry themselves in bad weather? Where is the cheerful fire, and the spit, the dogs, the cat and her kittens, the hens running in and out, the ducks peeping in at the door, and, in winter, the shadowy corners for haunting? But the worst thing of all was that the builders and the contractor couldn’t get the name right, and they called the horrid thing an oaf-house. Who wants to haunt an oaf-house, I ask you? A Poor Relation I may have been, but an oaf—never!

“Nevertheless, I determined to make the best of it. All immigrants have a hard time in a new country, for a few hundred years. I decided to divide my time between the oaf-house, on the housekeeper’s day off, and the rumpus room when the children weren’t doing whatever children do in a rumpus room, which is something I never found out.

“Because, you see, the house didn’t sell. Even with all the tinkering and destruction and costly misery and modern convenience it somehow failed to catch on. So the people who were trying to sell it hit on a great idea; they would let the public visit it.

“That was the end, for me. We phantoms have our feelings, and I never undertook to haunt wholesale, so to speak. Servants I will frighten—yes, gladly. Gentlefolk of my own kindred I will provide with the thrill of a true family phantom, though I have always drawn the line at manifesting myself to more than two at a time—usually a man and his wife or better still, somebody who ought to be his wife. But haunt I must. It is part of my condition of existence, you see. Unless I make an appearance at least once a year, I am in serious trouble with—well, never you mind who. But appearing to people who have paid admission on behalf of a charity—no, no, the thing is not to be thought of.”

“I suppose a great many people visited the house?” said I. I knew what had happened, but I wanted to hear his version of it.

“They came by scores and hundreds,” said he. “And what they did to our family manor beggars description, as Old Shakespeare says. They invited Toronto decorators to refurbish it, a room to each decorator, and the decorators themselves made my eyes start out of my head. They were men of an affected elegance—what in my day might have been called exquisites or beaux, except that these were not gentlemen—they worked for their living, and what they sold was Taste. As if anyone of any consequence ever had taste, or wanted any! They filled our comfortable old manor with spindly walnut and mahogany that might have done well enough in a fashionable bawdy-house in London, but was not to be compared with our comfortable old oak and chairs stuffed with the wool of our own sheep. They brought in pictures of people nobody had ever heard of, and declared they were by Sir Peter Lely and later masters. They stuck up curtains and threw down carpets of horrid gaudy colours, as if brown were not the only colour a lady of good family would endure in her rooms. But there was worse to come, much worse.

“They did up some of the rooms in what they called ‘contemporary taste’ and that was Chaos and Old Night, I assure you. They papered the floors, and stuck fur to the walls, and hung pictures by madmen, and set out furniture in which even I, as a weightless spectre, could not have sat with any comfort. And when all this was done the procession of viewers appeared. They were the friends of the Women’s Committees of the charities that were to be benefited by this dreadful rape of my dear old manor, and they tramped everywhere and poked into everything.

“They seemed to have no idea of the comforts of an eighteenth-century house, and so they admired all the po-boxes in the bedrooms and said what charming little bedside tables they were, and they admired the silver chamber-pot my cousin had kept in the dining-room sideboard, for his convenience after dinner, and to my shame it was kept in full sight, filled with flowers. They loved all the modern rooms because they reminded them of their own homes. Best of all they liked the new kitchen, and said how wonderful it was that an inconvenient old manor could be so elegantly adapted for really civilized living. There were blue-haired ladies who came in aid of the Art Gallery and there were ladies with hair of improbable shades who came in aid of the Ballet, and noisy stout ladies who were patrons of Opera, and there were garden ladies who came to see the dreadful tropical plants that the decorators called ‘growies’ which were stuck up everywhere—as if garden rubbish didn’t belong outside a respectable gentleman’s house.”

“And you couldn’t bear it?” said I, sympathetically.

“I could bear everything,” said he, and I swear that if ever a ghost had tears in his eyes, it was at that moment. “Everything, that is, except the air-conditioning. Would you believe that they filled the fine old walls with metal guts that conveyed jets of air that stank of mice to every part of that dear old place—jets that squirted out where one least expected, blowing me about like a leaf in a storm and playing merry hell with my ectoplasm until I developed the worst case of phantom arthritis that has ever been seen at any of our Hallowe’en meetings. That was the finish. That settled the matter forever. I had to leave or I should have become a mere knotted bundle of malice, and would probably have dwindled into a Poltergeist of the lowest class. It was leave my home or lose countenance irreparably in the phantom world.

“So will you take me in? You are a modern foundation, I know, but your College has some of what I regard as the comforts of home. Draughts, mostly; I miss normal, healthy draughts more than you can imagine.”

I pondered, and that is always fatal, for when I ponder my resolution leaks away. He was a humble creature, as ghosts go, but his story had gone to my heart. Still—where on earth was I to put him?

“I could make myself useful,” he said, wistfully. “I have heard that a trade flourishes on this continent—that of a Ghost Writer, and I know a lot of writing is done here. Yourself, for instance. I know you write romances, and though I despise romances perhaps, in time, I could grind out a three-volume novel about an unfortunate young man who wanted to be a College fellow, and then wanted to take holy orders, but who was slain untimely in an affair of honour with an aristocratic adversary. I promise to put in lots of theology. You could sign it, of course.”