baying of a dog from the Red Farm, and he went on, muttering strange
sixteenth-century curses, and ever and anon brandishing the rusty
dagger in the midnight air. Finally he reached the corner of the
passage that led to luckless Washington's room. For a moment he
paused there, the wind blowing his long grey locks about his head,
and twisting into grotesque and fantastic folds the nameless horror
of the dead man's shroud. Then the clock struck the quarter, and he
felt the time was come. He chuckled to himself, and turned the
corner; but no sooner had he done so, than, with a piteous wail of
terror, he fell back, and hid his blanched face in his long, bony
hands. Right in front of him was standing a horrible spectre,
motionless as a carven image, and monstrous as a madman's dream!
Its head was bald and burnished; its face round, and fat, and white;
and hideous laughter seemed to have writhed its features into an
eternal grin. From the eyes streamed rays of scarlet light, the
mouth was a wide well of fire, and a hideous garment, like to his
own, swathed with its silent snows the Titan form. On its breast
was a placard with strange writing in antique characters, some
scroll of shame it seemed, some record of wild sins, some awful
calendar of crime, and, with its right hand, it bore aloft a
falchion of gleaming steel.

Never having seen a ghost before, he naturally was terribly
frightened, and, after a second hasty glance at the awful phantom,
he fled back to his room, tripping up in his long winding-sheet as
he sped down the corridor, and finally dropping the rusty dagger
into the Minister's jack-boots, where it was found in the morning by
the butler. Once in the privacy of his own apartment, he flung
himself down on a small pallet-bed, and hid his face under the
clothes. After a time, however, the brave old Canterville spirit