Carmilla

Then he advanced to the window with many smiles and salutations, and

his hat in his left hand, his fiddle under his arm, and with a fluency

that never took breath, he gabbled a long advertisement of all his

accomplishments, and the resources of the various arts which he placed

at our service, and the curiosities and entertainments which it was in

his power, at our bidding, to display.

"Will your ladyships be pleased to buy an amulet against the oupire,

which is going like the wolf, I hear, through these woods," he said

dropping his hat on the pavement. "They are dying of it right and left

and here is a charm that never fails; only pinned to the pillow, and you

may laugh in his face."

These charms consisted of oblong slips of vellum, with cabalistic

ciphers and diagrams upon them.

Carmilla instantly purchased one, and so did I.

He was looking up, and we were smiling down upon him, amused; at least,

I can answer for myself. His piercing black eye, as he looked up in our

faces, seemed to detect something that fixed for a moment his curiosity.

In an instant he unrolled a leather case, full of all manner of odd

little steel instruments.

"See here, my lady," he said, displaying it, and addressing me, "I

profess, among other things less useful, the art of dentistry. Plague

take the dog!" he interpolated. "Silence, beast! He howls so that your

ladyships can scarcely hear a word. Your noble friend, the young lady at

your right, has the sharpest tooth,--long, thin, pointed, like an awl,

like a needle; ha, ha! With my sharp and long sight, as I look up, I

have seen it distinctly; now if it happens to hurt the young lady, and I

think it must, here am I, here are my file, my punch, my nippers; I will

make it round and blunt, if her ladyship pleases; no longer the tooth of

a fish, but of a beautiful young lady as she is. Hey? Is the young lady

displeased? Have I been too bold? Have I offended her?"

The young lady, indeed, looked very angry as she drew back from the

window.

"How dares that mountebank insult us so? Where is your father? I shall

demand redress from him. My father would have had the wretch tied up to

the pump, and flogged with a cart whip, and burnt to the bones with the

cattle brand!"

She retired from the window a step or two, and sat down, and had hardly

lost sight of the offender, when her wrath subsided as suddenly as it

had risen, and she gradually recovered her usual tone, and seemed to

forget the little hunchback and his follies.

My father was out of spirits that evening. On coming in he told us that

there had been another case very similar to the two fatal ones which had

lately occurred. The sister of a young peasant on his estate, only a

mile away, was very ill, had been, as she described it, attacked very

nearly in the same way, and was now slowly but steadily sinking.