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' 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 had been to frighten the pretty Lady Barbara Modish. Lady Modish was going to marry Lord Canterville's grandfather, but she 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.

She said that nothing would make her marry someone whose family allowed 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 before the end of the year. So the ghost's disguise had been a great success.