Sir William raised his wineglass. "Gentlemen," said he, "I drink to the Tubercle Bacillus!"
"Our master!" chorused the others, and every glass was drained.
I quickly refilled all but Sir William's, wondering the while whether I had fallen among an assembly of ghouls, or if I was not the victim of some ghastly joke. The pièce de résistance of the dinner was a dressed calf's head, which Sir William Dagmar carved. Not one of his guests began to eat until all were helped. But when that was done, my master suddenly ordered me to leave the room. Butts regarded me enquiringly as I came out. "Spoke some foreign lingo, didn't they?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They allers do," he went on. "Why, I don't know, for the life o' me. A lot of death's heads I call them."
"They look like consumptives," I suggested.
"Like as not they hare!" he returned. "Look at this muss, Brown! What do you make of it?"
He held up a huge bowl of cream into which a hundred different species of nuts had been grated. "This is what they take for sweets," he said with a shiver. "It tastes 'orrible!"
"Perhaps it is medicine."
"May be. I spose you didn't make out hanything they said, Brown?"