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I hate to say it, but I think that in “The Rose Garden,�� the master of the antiquarian English ghost story is just going through the motions. The essential idea—an old post buried in a country house garden has been removed, but should not have been removed—is a good one, but the tale that explains the origin of the haunting is merely passable, and the two events which are necessary to move the plot along—the opportune visit of Miss Wilkins the former owner amd a random inquiry from the Sussex Historical Society—are so coincidental that they dissipate the ghostly mood.

Still, mediocre M.R. James is still M.R. James. The following passages are particularly fine:

She rose and turned towards the house, pausing for a time to take delight in the limpid green western sky. Then she passed on between the dark box-bushes, and, at a point just before the path debouched on the lawn, she stopped once again and considered the quiet evening landscape, and made a mental note that that must be the tower of one of the Roothing churches that one caught on the sky-line. Then a bird (perhaps) rustled in the box-bush on her left, and she turned and started at seeing what at first she took to be a Fifth of November mask peeping out among the branches. She looked closer.

It was not a mask. It was a face �� large, smooth, and pink. She remembers the minute drops of perspiration which were starting from its forehead: she remembers how the jaws were clean-shaven and the eyes shut. She remembers also, and with an accuracy which makes the thought intolerable to her, how the mouth was open and a single tooth appeared below the upper lip. As she looked the face receded into the darkness of the bush.