realise his position. Never, in a brilliant and uninterrupted
career of three hundred years, had he been so grossly insulted. He
thought of the Dowager Duchess, whom he had frightened into a fit as
she stood before the glass in her lace and diamonds; of the four
housemaids, who had gone off into hysterics when he merely grinned
at them through the curtains of one of the spare bedrooms; of the
rector of the parish, whose candle he had blown out as he was coming
late one night from the library, and who had been under the care of
Sir William Gull ever since, a perfect martyr to nervous disorders;
and of old Madame de Tremouillac, who, having wakened up one morning
early and seen a skeleton seated in an arm-chair by the fire reading
her diary, had been confined to her bed for six weeks with an attack
of brain fever, and, on her recovery, had become reconciled to the
Church, and broken off her connection with that notorious sceptic
Monsieur de Voltaire. He remembered the terrible night when the
wicked Lord Canterville was found choking in his dressing-room, with
the knave of diamonds half-way down his throat, and confessed, just
before he died, that he had cheated Charles James Fox out of 50,000
pounds at Crockford's by means of that very card, and swore that the
ghost had made him swallow it. All his great achievements came back
to him again, from the butler who had shot himself in the pantry
because he had seen a green hand tapping at the window pane, to the
beautiful Lady Stutfield, who was always obliged to wear a black
velvet band round her throat to hide the mark of five fingers burnt
upon her white skin, and who drowned herself at last in the carp-
pond at the end of the King's Walk. With the enthusiastic egotism
of the true artist he went over his most celebrated performances,
and smiled bitterly to himself as he recalled to mind his last
appearance as 'Red Ruben, or the Strangled Babe,' his debut as
'Gaunt Gibeon, the Blood-sucker of Bexley Moor,' and the furore he