until they both got into such good spirits with the wind and the
height, that I thought they would never come down. Another night,
they turned out again, and had a chimney-cowl off. Another night,
they cut a sobbing and gulping water-pipe away. Another night,
they found out something else. On several occasions, they both, in
the coolest manner, simultaneously dropped out of their respective
bedroom windows, hand over hand by their counterpanes, to
"overhaul" something mysterious in the garden.

The engagement among us was faithfully kept, and nobody revealed
anything. All we knew was, if any one's room were haunted, no one
looked the worse for it.



The foregoing story is particularly interesting as illustrating the
leaning of Dickens's mind toward the spiritualistic and mystical
fancies current in his time, and the counterbalance of his common
sense and fun.

"He probably never made up his own mind," Mr. Andrew Lang declares
in a discussion of this Haunted House story. Mr. Lang says he once
took part in a similar quest, and "can recognize the accuracy of
most of Dickens's remarks. Indeed, even to persons not on the
level of the Odd Girl in education, the temptation to produce
'phenomena' for fun is all but overwhelming. That people
communicate hallucinations to each other 'in some diseased way
without words,' is a modern theory perhaps first formulated here by
Dickens."