[Why not, occasionally, a cheerful Ghost.]

But to return to our ghosts. These four gentlemen must now and
again, during their earthly existence, have sat down to a merry game
of cards. There must have been evenings when nobody was stabbed.
Why choose an unpleasant occasion to harp exclusively upon it? Why
do ghosts never give a cheerful show? The lady who was poisoned!
there must have been other evenings in her life. Why does she not
show us "The first meeting": when he gave her the violets and said
they were like her eyes? He wasn't always poisoning her. There must
have been a period before he ever thought of poisoning her. Cannot
these ghosts do something occasionally in what is termed "the lighter
vein"? If they haunt a forest glade, it is to perform a duel to the
death, or an assassination. Why cannot they, for a change, give us
an old-time picnic, or "The hawking party," which, in Elizabethan
costume, should make a pretty picture? Ghostland would appear to be
obsessed by the spirit of the Scandinavian drama: murders, suicides,
ruined fortunes, and broken hearts are the only material made use of.
Why is not a dead humorist allowed now and then to write the sketch?
There must be plenty of dead comic lovers; why are they never allowed
to give a performance?

[Where are the dead Humorists?]

A cheerful person contemplates death with alarm. What is he to do in
this land of ghosts? there is no place for him. Imagine the
commonplace liver of a humdrum existence being received into
ghostland. He enters nervous, shy, feeling again the new boy at
school. The old ghosts gather round him.