to this point, dear Mr. Flemming, I have not contradicted your errors—you seemed to feel a need for a Vehmic Council, and I indulged you—but now that it has brought out the perspiration over your temples and nose, thus including you among the tortured, I suppress it. No Vehmic Council ever sat here."
Even painful feelings are sometimes not without their sweetness. I felt like keeping mine. I observed that the magnitude of these terrible halls witnessed
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Ex Voto
that they were constructed for some awful purpose. The guide, furnished only with the name and definition of each room, declined to take part in the discussion. After having made us pass over a little bridge, whose gaping planks allowed a damp, tomblike air to ascend to our nostrils, he turned suddenly. "The oubliettes!" he said in his hollowest tones.
I took a stone, and let it fall through a crack in the boards: it was ten seconds arriving at the bottom.
I crossed my arms and looked firmly at Sylvester. "Well?" I said.
"A well, certainly," he answered.
I was put out at having the word thus taken from my mouth to my disadvantage. I asked the guide if he knew no story of the dark old times, with the name of some illustrious victim plunged into the oubliette.
He confessed to knowing, of his own memory, that formerly, a long while ago, when he was quite young, a little dog, that had stolen in at the heels of its master, had disappeared between the planks of the bridge. The animal's name was Love. The owner was an Englishman, and therefore very rich. He offered enormous bribes for the body of his dog, living or dead. With the dog, which was got out alive, but sneezing, they brought up a kind of dust, half white and half red, which evidently pro
