“Have human beings such immense eyes?” she asked at last.
“Please think of me in the position I was in,” cried Hannibal, vexed. “Try to imagine how I felt. Who’d like to be hanging by the leg in front of eyes twenty times as big as his own body and a mouth full of gleaming teeth, each fully twice as big as himself? Well, what do you think?”
“Awful! Perfectly awful!”
“Thank the Lord, my leg broke off. There’s no telling what might have happened if my leg had not broken off. I fell to the table, and then I ran, I ran as fast as my remaining legs would take me, and hid behind the bottle. There I stood and hurled threats of violence at the man. They saved me, my threats did, the man was afraid to run after me. I saw him lay my leg on the white paper, and I watched how it wanted to escape—which it can’t do without me.”
“Was it still moving?” asked Maya, prickling at the thought.
“Yes. Our legs always do move when they’re pulled out. My leg ran, but I not being there it didn’t know where to run to, so it merely flopped about aimlessly on the same spot, and the man watched it, clutching at his nose and smiling—smiling, the heartless wretch!—at my leg’s sense of duty.”
“Impossible,” said the little bee, quite scared, “an offen leg can’t crawl.”
“An offen leg? What is an offen leg?”
“A leg that has come off,” explained Maya, staring at him. “Don’t you know? At home we children used the word offen for anything that had come off.”