“What,” we asked our younger hostess, the third day of this infliction, “what are these carillons, morning after morning?”
“Oh, that?—That is for the Angels’ Mass,” she answered us indifferently.
“There have been several deaths lately. It is the fever from the rice fields.”
Pleasant hearing for a woman with an only little daughter just recovering from a rather serious illness! Every smell that greeted her nostrils afterwards—and they were of a diversified and poignant description—seemed laden with the germs of death. But the young _Principessa_ had absorbed a good deal of the indolent indifference of her adopted country towards hygiene.
“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.
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!”