The ladies now appeared--our hostess, really a splendid woman, and her daughter, fresh off the irons from a fashionable English boarding-school, a very pretty girl, but suffering under prickly heat (a sort of a what-do-ye-call-um, a kind of Jamaica imitation, but deucedly like 'tother thing in Scotland notwithstanding); and the plague of freckles--ods bobs, how I do hate freckles!--where was I--oh--so our lunch, or second breakfast, was really a very pleasant one. From that time until dinner, we talked, and read, and played bagatelle, and amongst other means employed to kill time, Miss Cornstick was set to play on the piano. She was, I make no doubt, a first-rate performer, and _spanged_ her fingers from the keys as if they had been red hot iron, and tossed her head about as she sung, and cast her eyes towards the roof as if she had seen something rather surprising there. "That's what I call singing with animation, at all events; oh, how I wish the pedals were mine enemies," whispered Don Felix. "Ah, how missie _do_ sing--how him do play on de pinano--wery extonishing fine," quoth the brown ladies' maid _sotto voce_, behind the open door of the anteroom, but loud enough for me to overhear. However, allow for some few trifling peculiarities of this kind, and we had every reason to be exceedingly pleased with our entertainment; for we had a capital dinner, and some superb Madeira, and the evening passed over delightfully on the whole. When we came to retire, I was shown to my sleeping apartment, a small room partitioned off from the end of the piazza; that is, altogether _without_ the brick shell of the house itself. I had proceeded in disrobing, and was about putting out the candle, when I heard a "cheep, cheep," overhead, as of a mouse in the paws of pussy. I looked up, and lo! an owl, perched on what seemed a shelf, that ran along the wall overhead, with mousey sure enough in his beak. "Hillo," said I, "Master Owl, this will never do; you must make yourself scarce, my boy," and I seized a fishing-rod that happened to stand in the corner of the room--"there, take that, your owlship," and I made a blow at him with the but-end, but missed; however it had the effect of startling him off his perch, and with a loud _squake_, he took wing round the room. The first consequence of his vagary was the extinction of the light, whereby he got the weather-gage of me regularly, for although he could not see _in the light_, he saw beautifully _in the darkness_, and avoided my haphazard blows most scientifically. At length, amongst other feats of skill, and evidences of composure, I fractured the _monkey_, or earthen water-jar that garnished my toilet table, and finally capsized over the steps at the bedside, to the great loss of the skin on my shinbone, and the large effusion of my patience. "Why, Jinker, Jinker!" I could hear a door open. "Why, Jinker," said a man's voice,--"what noise is that in the piazza, in the name of wonder?"