is curious.
"The first significance of the word, as well as 'spirit,' is breath, or
wind." It is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and is from _gust_, the wind. Hence, a
_gust_ of _wind_. The Irish word _goath_, wind, comes nearer to the modern
English pronunciation, and shows how easily it could have been corrupted
to _ghost_.
It is easy to imagine the good old Saxon ladies, sitting around the
evening fireside, and just as one of them has finished some marvellous
story of that superstitious age, they are startled by a sudden blast of
wind, sweeping around the gabled cottage, and her listeners exclaim, in
suppressed breath,--
"Hark! There's a fearful gust!"
The transit from _gust_ to _ghost_ is easily done. The clothes spread upon
the bushes without, or pinned to the lines, flapping in the night air, are
seen through the shutterless windows, and they become the object of
attraction. The _effect_ supersedes the _cause_, and the clothes become
the gust, goath, or ghost! The clothes, necessarily, must be white, or
they _could not be seen in the night time_! Hence a ghost is always
clothed in white. Therefore the wind (gust) is no longer the ghost, but
any white object seen moving in the night air.
[Illustration: "HARK! THERE'S A FEARFUL GUST!"]
"But I am a wandering ghost--
I am an idle breath,
That the sweets of the things now lost
Are haunting unto death.
Pity me out in the cold,
Never to rest any more,
Because of my share in the purple and gold,
Lost from the world's great store.
"I whirl through empty space,
A hapless, hurried ghost;
For me there is no place--
I'm weary, wandering, lost.
Safe from the night and cold,
All else is sheltered--all,
From the sheep at rest in the fold,
To the black wasp on the wall."
Moffat says that a tribe of Caffres formerly employed the word _Morino_ to
designate the Supreme Being; but as they sank into savagery, losing the
idea of God, it came to mean only a fabulous ghost, of which they had
great terror.
Having briefly shown the folly of the existence of the word in our
vocabulary, I will proceed to explode a few of the best authenticated--so
called--"ghost stories;" and if I leave anything unexplained in
ghostology, let the reader attribute it to either my want of space in
which to write so much, or the neglect of my early education in the _dead
languages_.