The Canterville Ghost

All the great things he had done came back to his memory. There was the butler who had shot himself in the pantry because he had seen a green hand tapping at the window pane. There was a beautiful woman, Lady Stutfield, who always had to wear black velvet around her throat to hide the mark of five fingers burnt upon her white skin. Finally, Lady Stutfield had drowned herself in the pond at the end of the King's Walk.

Like any really good artist, the ghost was interested only in himself and what he had done. Now he thought of his very best performances, and smiled bitterly to himself. He remembered some of the ghosts he had acted as - Red Reuben, or the Strangled Baby, the time he had first pretended to be Gaunt Gibeon, the Blood-sucker of Bexley. And one lovely June evening he had caused a terrible amount of confusion and excitement just by playing ninepins with his own bones upon the lawn-tennis ground.

And after all this, some horrible modern Americans had come and offered him the Rising Sun Lubricator, and had thrown pillows at his head! It was quite unbearable. No ghost in history had ever been treated in this manner. Therefore, he decided that he would have his revenge, and he stayed in his room until the morning, thinking about what he would do.

Vocabulary:

Pantry: A room for keeping food in.
Tap: To hit softly, but often.
Pane: The glass in a window.
Velvet: A kind of soft cloth.
Pond: a small area od water.
King's Walk:A part of Canterville chase.
Bitter: Angry and blaming somebody.
Ninepins: A bowling game.
Lawn-tennis: Tennis played on grass.
Unbearable: Something you cannot alow to happen to you.
Treat: To behave to someone in a particular way'.
Manner: Here it means 'way' , 'like this'.