The bell ceases. The lion sighs with relief and lays his head once more upon his heavy paws: "Now I sleep!"
Then, from uhe bed curtains, oher side of the bed, begins to pour a veritable torrent that quickly forms into dark, viscous, livid puddles on the floor.
But, before you accuse the Archduke of the unspeakable, dip your finger in the puddle and lick it.
Delicious!
For these are sticky puddles of freshly squeezed grape juice, and apple juice, and peach juice, juice of plum, pear, or raspberry, strawberry, cherry ripe, blackberry, black currant, white currant, red. . . The room brims with the delicious ripe st of summer pudding, even though, outside, on the frozen tower, the raven still creaks out his melancholy call:
"Poor Toms a-cold!"
And it is midwinter.
Night was. Widow Night, an old woman in m, with big, black wings, came beating against the window; they kept her out with lamps and dles.
When he went bato the laboratory, Ned Kelly found that Dr Dee had nodded off to sleep as the old man often did nowadays towards the end of the day, the crystal ball having rolled from palm to lap as he lay ba the black oak chair, and now, as he shifted at the impulse of a dream, it rolled again off his lap, down on to the floor, where it landed with a soft thump on the rushes -- no harm done -- and the little calico cat disabled it at oh a swift blow of her right paw, then began to play with it, batting it that way and this before she administered the coup de grace.
With a gusty sigh, Kelly once more addressed his sg disc, although today he felt barren of iion. He reflected ironically that, if just so much as one wee feathery angel ever, even the oime, should escape the sg disd flutter into the laboratory, the cat would surely get it.
Not, Kelly khat such a thing ossible.
If you could see inside Kellys brain, you would discover a calculating mae.
Widow Night paihe windows black.
Then, all at ohe cat made a noise like sharply crumpled paper, a noise of inquiry and . A rat? Kelly turo look. The cat, head on one side, was sidering, with such scrupulous iy that its prickled ears met at the tips, something lying on the floor beside the crystal ball, so that at first it looked as if the glass eye had shed a tear.
But look again.
Kelly looked again and began to sob and gibber.
The cat rose up and backed away all in one liquid motion, hissing, its bristling tail stuck straight up, stiff as a broom haoo scared to permit even the impulse of attack upon the creature, about the size of a little fihat popped out of the crystal ball as if the ball had been a bubble.
But its passage has not cracked or fissured the ball; it is still whole, has sealed itself up again directly after the departure of the infinitesimal child who, suddenly released from her sudden fi, now experimentally stretches out her tiny limbs to test the limit of the new invisible circumference around her.
Kelly stammered: "There must be some rational explanation!"
Although they were too small for him to see them, her teeth still had the transparend notched edges of the first stage of the sed set; her straight, fair hair was cut in a stern fringe; she scowled and sat upright, looking about her with evident disapproval.
The cat, c ecstatically, now knocked over an alembid a quantity of elixir vitae ran away through the rushes. At the bang, the Doctor woke and was not