_Barnstaple_. And pray what may be the title of this book of yours, for I have known it take more time to fix upon a title than to write the three volumes. _Ansard_. I call it _The Undiscovered Secret_, and very properly so too, for it never is explained. But if you please, I will read you some passages from it. I think you will approve of them. For instance, now let us take this, in the second volume. You must know, that Angelicanarinella (for that is the name of my heroine) is thrown into a dungeon not more than four feet square, but more than six hundred feet below the surface of the earth. The ways are so intricate, and the subterranean so vast, and the dungeons so numerous, that the base Ethiop, who has obeyed his master's orders in confining her, has himself been lost in the labyrinth, and has not been able to discover what dungeon he put her in. For three days he has been looking for it, during which our heroine has been without food, and he is still searching and scratching his woolly head in despair, as he is to die by slow torture, if he does not reproduce her--for you observe, the chief who has thrown her into his dungeon is most desperately in love with her. _Barnstaple_. That of course; and that is the way to prove romantic love--you ill treat--but still she is certainly in a dilemma, as well as the Ethiop. _Ansard_. Granted; but she talks like the heroine of a romance. Listen. (ANSARD _reads_.) "The beauteous and divinely moulded form of the angelic Angelicanarinella pressed the dank and rotten straw which had been thrown down by the scowling, thick-lipped Ethiop for her repose--she, for whom attendant maidens had smoothed the Sybaritic sheet of finest texture, under the elaborately carved and sumptuously gilt canopy, the silken curtains, and the tassels of the purest dust of gold." _Barnstaple_. Tassels of dust of gold! only figuratively, I suppose.