‘Some old love-letter,’ I thought, and stepped nearer. So cool was I now, that I actually peeped over her shoulder. With mingled surprise and dismay I found that the dim page over which she bent was that of an old account-book. Ancient household records, in rusty ink, held up to the glimpses of the waning moon, which shone through the parting in the curtains, their entries of shillings and pence!—Of pounds there was not one. No doubt pounds and farthings are much the same in the world of thought—the true spirit-world; but in the ghost-world this eagerness over shillings and pence must mean something awful! I To think that coins which had since been worn smooth in other pockets and purses, which had gone back to the Mint, and been melted down, to come out again and yet again with the heads of new kings and queens—that dinners, eaten by men and women and children whose bodies had since been eaten by the worms—that polish for the floors, inches of whose thickness had since been worn away—that the hundred nameless trifles of a life utterly vanished, should be perplexing, annoying, and worst of all, interesting the soul of a ghost who had been in Hades for centuries! The writing was very old-fashioned, and the words were contracted. I could read nothing but the moneys and one single entry—‘Corinths, V s. ’
“¡Pasas para un pudin de Navidad, con toda probabilidad!—¡Ay, pobre señora! el pudin y no la Navidad era su preocupación; no la alegría de los niños por este, sino los miserables centavos que costaba. Y no se lo puede quitar de la cabeza, aunque su cerebro fue ‘reducido a polvo tan fino como la harina’ hace siglos en el mortero de la Muerte. «¡Ay, pobre fantasma!». ¡No hace falta un tesoro atesorado que se haya dejado atrás, ni un suelo manchado con la sangre del niño asesinado, ni un pergamino