CHAPTER I.
A discourse on light—Quangrollart explains the word crashee—Believes a fowl is a fruit—Gives a further account of Youwarkeds reception by her father, and by the king—Tommy and Hallycarnie provided for at court—Youwarkee and her father visit the colambs, and are visited—Her return put off till next winter, when her father is to come with her.
THE next day I prepared again of the best of everything for my new guests. I killed three fowls, and ordered Pedro (who was as good a cook almost as myself) to get them ready for boiling, whilst we took a walk to the lake. Though we went out in the clearest part of the morning, I heard no complaint of the light. I took the liberty to ask my brother if the light did not offend him; for I told him my wife could not bear so much without spectacles.—"What is that spectacle?" says he.—"Something I made your sister," says I, "to prevent the inconvenience of too much light upon her eyes."—He said the light was scarce at all troublesome to him, for he had been in much greater, and was used to it; and that the glumms, who travelled much abroad, could bear more light than the gawrys, who stayed much at home: these stirring but little out unless in large companies, and that of one another, and very rarely admitted glumms amongst them before marriage. For his own part, he said, he had an office at Crashdoorpt, * which, though he executed chiefly by a deputy, obliged him to reside there sometimes for a long season together; that being a more luminous country than Arndrumnstake, light was become familiar to him; for it was very observable that some who had been used to it young, though they might in time overcome it, yet at first it was very uneasy.
* The country of the Slits.