“You, with your English notions!” was all the comfort her visitor got, offered in tones of good-humour not unmixed with contempt. Or else: “What you smell, my dear, is only carbolic; and that is very healthy.”
A few dabs of disinfectant had indeed been distributed about the moat, on much the same principle, and with the same effect, as the red pepper which is served with wild duck, just to heighten the flavour of the dish.
ENTOMOLOGICAL MYSTERIES
Perhaps the most lasting impression of that Lombardy sojourn was the morning discovery in a glass of drinking-water which had been placed beside the bed the previous night, of the most extraordinary creature any of us had ever seen. It was like a very large shrimp, perfectly transparent, with such gigantic antennæ and legs that they protruded over the top of the tumbler!
No one else in the castle had ever beheld anything like it either, it appeared; except one old woman, who described it vaguely as “una bestia del acqua.” But as it most certainly had not been in the tumbler when the water was put into it, its origin remains for ever a mystery.
A few nights later the little girl of the party of travellers found one of these zoological mysteries in a quite empty tumbler! We might have thought it a practical joke played on the forestieri, only that no one could have come into the room without the knowledge of its occupants.
This, and the sudden departure of the “chef” who had been responsible for the little quails in the soup, did upset the equanimity of the pretty hostess.
“To think,” she cried, “that I should invite my best friend here, to starve or poison her!... And that unknown beasts should get into her drinking-water! I—I have been here every summer for eleven years and I have never seen a beast like that!”
She thought we had dreamt the first monster. The second was carried in to her, with its horrible transparent legs bristling over the tumbler. She surveyed it hopelessly.