He thought of the Dowager Duchess, whom he had frightened senseless while she stood in front of the mirror in her lace and diamonds; of the four housemaids, who had gone off into hysterics just because he had grinned at them through the curtains of one of the spare bedrooms.

Of the local churchman, whose candle he had blown out as he was coming from the library late one night. That man had needed to be cared for by the doctor ever since, as he suffered terribly from nerves.

And old Madame de Tremouillac, who woke up early one morning and saw a skeleton seated in an armchair by the fire reading her diary. She had needed to stay in her bed for six weeks with an attack of brain fever.

When she got better, she started going to church again and stopped speaking to her friend the notorious sceptic Monsieur de Voltaire.

The ghost remembered the terrible night when the wicked Lord Canterville was found choking in his dressing-room. There was a playing card half-way down his throat, and Lord Canterville confessed, just before he died, that he had cheated the famous politician Charles James Fox, and won £50,000 with that playing card.

The wicked lord swore that the ghost had made him swallow the same card that he had cheated with.