The Canterville Ghost

I have to tell you that the ghost found it very hard to make himself use the Rising Sun Lubricator, even though he knew it would protect him from the family. However, one night, while the family were at dinner, he slipped into Mr. Otis's bedroom and took away the bottle. He felt rather humiliated about using the oil, but he was sensible enough to see that in fact the oil was a very useful invention, and it did what he needed, which was to quieten the noise of his chains.

Still, in spite of everything, he could not do his job without being disturbed. Very often he found that string had been stretched across the corridor , so that he tripped over in the dark. Once he fell over very severely on a butter-slide which the twins had put down from the entrance of the one of the main rooms all the way to the top of the oak staircase. This made him so angry that he decided that he would make one last effort to make himself respected by the family. He decided he would visit the bad-mannered young Americans the next night in his famous disguise as the Headless Earl.

He had not used this disguise for more than seventy years. The last time he had used it had been to frighten the pretty Lady Barbara Modish. Lady Modish was going to marry Lord Canterville's grandfather, but she now she decided that she was not going to do it after all. Instead she ran away and married a handsome young man called Jack Castletown. Afterwards she said that nothing in the world would make her marry someone in a family that allowed horrible phantoms to walk up and down in the garden in the twilight. Poor Jack was afterwards shot in a duel by Lord Canterville on Wandsworth Common, and Lady Barbara died of a broken heart at Tunbridge Wells before the end of the year. So, in every way, the ghost's disguise had been a great success.

Vocabulary:

Slip: to go quietly without being seen.
Sensible: Thinking properly.
Trip: Fall over because something has caught your foot.
Severely: Badly, strongly, hard.
Butter-slide: Butter put on the floor to make someone fall over
Oak: Wood from trees of the same name which grow in England
Respected: Someone who people try not to offend
Earl: A high rank in the British aristocracy.
Phantom: Ghost
Wandsworth Common: A park in London.
Twilight: Between night and day.
Duel: A very polite fight in which people can get killed.