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The Canterville Ghost
The Canterville Ghost
Mr. Hiram B. Otis, the American ambassador, bought an old house. It was calledCanterville Chase. Everyone told him he was doing a very foolish thing, because everyone knew that there was a ghost in the house. Even though he was selling the house, Lord Canterville felt that he really should tell Mr. Otis about the ghost before he brought the house. Lord Canterville was an honest man, and he did not want to hide anything. Lord Canterville said `We have not wanted to live in the house since my mother's aunt, the Dowager Duchess of Bolton, was frightened by the ghost. It put its hands (they were just bones!) on her shoulders while she was getting ready for dinner. The dutchess was very scared and she never really got better. I have to tell you, Mr. Otis, that many people in my family have seen the ghost. Even the priest, the Rev. Augustus Dampier, has seen it, and he is a member of King's College, at Cambridge University. After the ghost frightened the Duchess, none of our younger servants wanted to stay in the house. My wife often couldn't sleep at night, because of the strange noises that came from the passage and the library.'
Lord Canterville did not know what Mr Otis was talking about. He said "Well I thought that I should tell you about the ghost, but if you want to have the house even with the ghost in it, then that's fine." After a few weeks Canterville Chase was sold to Mr Otis. When he had finished meeting and having parties with important people in London, the Ambassador and his family went to live at the house. Before she married Mr Otis, Mrs. Otis was Miss Lucretia R. Tappen, who lived at West 53rd Street. She had been one of the most beautiful girls in New York. Now she was a very good-looking woman who was about 35 years old. She had lovely eyes, and was not too fat or too thin. Many American ladies who go to Europe act as though they are not very healthy, because they think this is how well-educated ladies should behave. Mrs. Otis had never pretended to be sick when she was not. She was very healthy and she had lots of energy. Sometimes she almost seemed to be English. This is because today England and America are almost the same, except, of course, the language is very different. Mrs Otis' oldest son was named Washington. His parents had wanted to show respect for that great American, but their son always wished that they had called him something else. He was a good-looking young man who had fair hair. Everyone knew that he would be a good American diplomat, because he danced so well. He liked some kinds of flower, and he was always impressed byaristocrats. Except for these two things, he was very sensible.
`I knew that my cleaner would clean it,' said Washington happily to his family. But as soon as he said these words, there was a terrible flash of lightning which lit up the dark room, and a frightning bang of thunder made them all jump to their feet. Mrs. Umney fainted. `What a bad climate there is in England!' said the American Ambassador calmly. He lit a long cigar for himself. `I think that there are so many people in England that they don't have enough good weather for everybody. I have always thought that the best thing that people can do to help England is to leave the country.' `My dear Hiram,' said Mrs. Otis, `Mrs Umney has fainted. What can we do about a woman who faints?'
Interest in ghosts.
Now everybody in the family was interested in what was happening. Mr. Otis started to think that maybe there were such things as ghosts after all. Mrs. Otis said that she wanted to join a club of people who were interested in ghosts, and Washington wrote a long letter to a detective agency telling them about how difficult it was to remove blood stains that were connected with crimes. Then, that night something happened which made them all completely certain that ghosts existed. Before that night, it had been a warm and sunny day, and in the cool of
the evening, the whole family went out of the house. They did not come home till nine o'clock, and then they had a small meal. They did not talk about ghosts. Sometimes, people see ghosts because they have been talking about ghosts, and they are expecting to see something. But this was not true about the Otis family that evening. Mr. Otis told me later that the things that they talked about were ordinary things. The sort of things that you might expect from Americans who have travelled and been well educated. For instance, they discussed the fact that the American actress Miss Fanny Davenport was so much better than Sara Bernhardt, the English actress. They talked about how difficult it was to get their favourite foods - green corn, buckwheat cakes, andhominy - even in the best English houses. They discussed why the city of Boston made the world a better place; why railway travel was done much better in the United States; and why the New York accent sounded so much nicer than the London one.
An upset Ghost
After he had said this, Mr Otis put the bottle down on a stone table near his door. Then he closed the door, and went back to bed. The Canterville Ghost could not believe what had just happened to him. He stood completely still for several seconds, and then he threw the bottle on to
the floor as hard as he could. He ran off along the corridor, making a horrible noise and lit up by a terrible green light. Soon he reached the wooden stairs at the end of the corridor. A door opened suddenly, and the ghost saw two boys wearing white sleeping clothes. Suddenly the boys threw a large pillow at his head. The ghost decided that he had to escape very quickly, so he jumped into the fourth dimension, and vanished through the wall. After he had gone, the house became quiet again. The ghost went to his small secret room in the west part of the house. He stopped there, and tried to get his breath back. He really did not understand what had happened to him. He had been a ghost for more than three hundred years, and he had been a very good and frightening ghost. He had never had anyone behave so badly to him as had happened that evening.
Like any really good artist, the ghost was only interested in himself and the things that he had done. Now he thought of his very best performances, and smiled to himself, even though he was angry. He remembered some of the ghosts he had been - Red Reuben, or the Strangled Baby. He had pretended to be Gaunt Gibeon, the Bloodsucker of Bexley. And one lovely June evening he had made everyone very upset and excited, just because he was playing ninepins with his own bones on the grass tennis court. And after the ghost had done all this, some horrible modern Americans had come and offered him oil for his chains, and had thrown pillows at his head! Nobody should do this to him. No ghost in history had ever had anything like that done to it. So the ghost decided that he would do something horrible to the family, because of what they had done to him. He stayed in his room until the morning, thinking about what he would do.
where they found that a large suit of armour had fallen over on to the stone floor. The Canterville ghost was sitting in a chair. He was rubbing his knees and the expression on his face showed that he wasin very great pain. The twins had brought their pea-shooters with them. Now they started to shoot at the ghost. They hit him too, because of the great amount of practice that they had got from shooting the pea-shooters at their teachers. The United States ambassador pointed his gun at the ghost and told him to put up his hands. (This is the correct way to do things in California.) The ghost jumped up and screamed with anger, and floated through them like a mist. As he passed the family, he blew out Washington Otis's candle. This left them all in complete darkness. When he got to the top of the staircase, the ghost turned around. He had decideed to give his famous horrible laugh. He had used this laugh in the past and it had been very useful to him. This laugh had turned Lord Raker's wig grey in a single night. Also the laugh had once made three of Lady Canterville's French teachers leave Canterville Chase in a hurry.