There was worse to come. For while the sun yet lingered on the horizon news of further portents came thick and fast. A plum tree belonging to a farmer of good standing had unaccountably lost all its leaves. The Duchess arrived in a state of unusual trepidation, declaring that the tortoise-shell of her lorgnette gave forth a crackling sound. She appealed to Don Francesco to explain the meaning of this extraordinary circumstance; it crackled most distinctly, she declared. Not far from the little bay where only yesterday the streamlet of Saint Elias still trickled into the sea, a fisherman had caught a one-eyed lamprey--a beast, unquestionably, of ill repute. The bibliographer, strolling about with Denis, recollected that his fox-terrier that very morning had been violently sick. He seemed to attach no great importance to the affair; all the same, he said, it was rather queer; dogs are not like that; now, if it had been Keith.... The baby of the principal grocer had tumbled downstairs and thereupon proceeded to swallow eight of its elder brother's marbles which had been carelessly left on the floor--without experiencing, so far as could be ascertained, any appreciable injury. A mysterious disease, known as the scabies, had broken out among the Russian apostles. The yacht of the American millionaire, Mr. van Koppen, arrived that day; there was nothing startling in this since he visited the island year after year at the same season; but why should she collide with a fishing-boat at the moment of anchoring? And from the Old Town came news of a portentous fowl which had suddenly assumed the plumage of the male sex. It was a hen renowned, hitherto, for her temperate and normal habits and, as it happened, known by sight to the local parish priest, who, horrified at the transformation of the feathered monster and mindful of the Papal Bull NE NIMIS NOCEANT NOBIS which enjoins upon Christians the duty of destroying all unnatural productions however generated, incontinently ordered it to be put out of the way. But the destruction of this androgyne proved an arduous task. It was reported that the creature fought for its life with the energy of a demon, crowing vigorously the while and laying, in the very act of death, an egg--an egg of spheroidal form, bluish in colour, and apparently hard-boiled--an egg which the Chief Medical Officer of Health had no great difficulty in recognizing as that of a cockatrice. In view of these and other sinister occurrences it is not surprising that a sense of insecurity should have fallen upon the more credulous section of the natives. Even sceptical persons thought it rather provoking on the part of Providence, or whoever managed these things, that the disquieting of men's minds should take place during this particular fortnight, the most important of the whole year, midway between the great feasts of Saint Dodekanus and Saint Eulalia when the island was crammed with visitors.