Here we are, in what they call the Villa of the Fountains, as if there was n't water enough before the door but they must have it spouting up out of a creature's nose in one corner, another blowing it out of a shell, and three naked figures--females, Molly--dancing in a pond of it in the garden, that kept me out of the place till I had them covered with an old mackintosh of K. I.'s. We have forty-seven rooms, and there's barely furniture, if it was all put together, for four; and there 's a theatre, and a billiard-room, and a chapel; but there 's not a chair would n't give you the lumbago, and the stocks at Bruff is pleasant compared to the grand sofa. The lake comes round three sides of the house, and a mountain shuts in the other one, for there 's no road whatever to it. You think I 'm not in earnest, but it's as true as I 'm here; the only approach is by water, so that everything has to come in boats. Of course, as long as the weather keeps fine, we 'll manage to send into the town; but when there comes--what we 're sure to have in this season--aquenoctial gales, I don't know what 's to become of us. The natives of the place don't care, for they can live on figs and olives, and those great big green pumpkins they call watermelons; but, after K. I.'s experience, I don't think we'll try _them_. It was at a little place on the way here, called Colico, that he insisted on having a slice of one of these steeped in rum for his supper, because he saw a creature eating it outside the door. Well, my dear, he relished it so much that he ate two, and--you know the man--would n't stop till he finished a whole melon as big as one of the big stones over the gate piers at home. "Jemi," says he, when he'd done, "is this the place the hand-book says you should n't eat any fruit in, or taste the wines of the country?" "I don't see that," said I; "but Murray says it's notorious for March miasma, which is most fatal in the fall of the year." "What's the name of it?" said he. I could n't say the word before he gave a screech out of him that made the house ring. "I 'm a dead man," says he; "that's the very place I was warned about."