Unit - 10th - - Imagination of odd things always leads to absolute humour. Read the lesson and enjoy the narrator's experience with his grandfather who creates chaos and laughter with his imaginative stories. The ghost that got into our house on the night of November , , raised such a hullabaloo of misunderstandings that I am sorry I didn’t just let it keep on walking, and go to bed. Its advent caused my mother to throw a shoe through a window of the house next door and ended up with my grandfather shooting a patrolman .
I am sorry, therefore, as I have said, that I ever paid any attention to the footsteps. They began about a quarter past one o’clock in the morning, a rhythmic, quick- cadenced walking around the dining- room table. My mother was asleep in one room upstairs, my brother-Herman in another, grandfather was in the attic , in the old walnut bed which, as you will remember, once fell on my father. I had just stepped out of the bathtub and was busily rubbing myself with a towel when I heard the steps.
They were the steps of a man walking rapidly around the dining-table downstairs. The light from the bathroom shone down the back-steps, which dropped directly into the dining-room; I could see the faint shine of plates on the plate-rail; I couldn’t see the table. The steps kept going round and round the table; at regular intervals a board creaked, when it was trod upon. I supposed at first that it was my father or my brother Roy, who had gone to Indianapolis but were expected home at any time.
I suspected next that it was a burglar. It did not enter my mind until later that it was a ghost. After the walking had gone on for perhaps three minutes, I tiptoed to Herman’s room. ‘Psst!’ I hissed, in the dark, shaking him.
‘Awp’, he said, in the low, hopeless tone of a despondent beagle – he always half suspected that something would ‘get him’ in the night. I told him who I was. ‘There’s something downstairs!’ I said. He got up and followed me to the head of the back staircase.
The steps had ceased. Herman looked at me in some alarm: I had only the bath towel around my waist. He wanted to go back to bed, I gripped his arm. ‘There’s something down there!’ I said.
Instantly the steps began again, circled the dining-room table like a man running, and started up the stairs towards us, heavily, two at a time. The light still shone palely down the stairs; we saw nothing coming; we only heard the steps. Herman rushed to his room and slammed the door. I slammed shut the door at the stairs top and held my knee against it.
a. Where was the author when he heard the noise? b. What did the narrator think the unusual sound was?