At half-past ten he heard the family going to bed. For some time he was
disturbed by wild shrieks of laughter from the twins, who, with the light-
hearted gaiety of schoolboys, were evidently amusing themselves before
they retired to rest, but at a quarter past eleven all was still, and, as
midnight sounded, he sallied forth. The owl beat against the window
panes, the raven croaked from the old yew-tree, and the wind wandered
moaning round the house like a lost soul; but the Otis family slept
unconscious of their doom, and high above the rain and storm he could
hear the steady snoring of the Minister for the United States. He
stepped stealthily out of the wainscoting, with an evil smile on his
cruel, wrinkled mouth, and the moon hid her face in a cloud as he stole
past the great oriel window, where his own arms and those of his murdered
wife were blazoned in azure and gold. On and on he glided, like an evil
shadow, the very darkness seeming to loathe him as he passed. Once he
thought he heard something call, and stopped; but it was only the baying
of a dog from the Red Farm, and he went on, muttering strange sixteenth-
century curses, and ever and anon brandishing the rusty dagger in the
midnight air. Finally he reached the corner of the passage that led to
luckless Washington's room. For a moment he paused there, the wind
blowing his long grey locks about his head, and twisting into grotesque
and fantastic folds the nameless horror of the dead man's shroud. Then
the clock struck the quarter, and he felt the time was come. He chuckled
to himself, and turned the corner; but no sooner had he done so, than,
with a piteous wail of terror, he fell back, and hid his blanched face in
his long, bony hands. Right in front of him was standing a horrible
spectre, motionless as a carven image, and monstrous as a madman's dream!
Its head was bald and burnished; its face round, and fat, and white; and
hideous laughter seemed to have writhed its features into an eternal
grin. From the eyes streamed rays of scarlet light, the mouth was a wide
well of fire, and a hideous garment, like to his own, swathed with its
silent snows the Titan form. On its breast was a placard with strange
writing in antique characters, some scroll of shame it seemed, some
record of wild sins, some awful calendar of crime, and, with its right
hand, it bore aloft a falchion of gleaming steel.
Never having seen a ghost before, he naturally was terribly frightened,
and, after a second hasty glance at the awful phantom, he fled back to
his room, tripping up in his long winding-sheet as he sped down the
corridor, and finally dropping the rusty dagger into the Minister's jack-
boots, where it was found in the morning by the butler. Once in the
privacy of his own apartment, he flung himself down on a small pallet-
bed, and hid his face under the clothes. After a time, however, the
brave old Canterville spirit asserted itself, and he determined to go and
speak to the other ghost as soon as it was daylight. Accordingly, just
as the dawn was touching the hills with silver, he returned towards the
spot where he had first laid eyes on the grisly phantom, feeling that,
after all, two ghosts were better than one, and that, by the aid of his
new friend, he might safely grapple with the twins. On reaching the
spot, however, a terrible sight met his gaze. Something had evidently
happened to the spectre, for the light had entirely faded from its hollow
eyes, the gleaming falchion had fallen from its hand, and it was leaning
up against the wall in a strained and uncomfortable attitude. He rushed
forward and seized it in his arms, when, to his horror, the head slipped
off and rolled on the floor, the body assumed a recumbent posture, and he
found himself clasping a white dimity bed-curtain, with a sweeping-brush,
a kitchen cleaver, and a hollow turnip lying at his feet!--_The
Canterville Ghost_.