Perhaps I had gone a league and a half when I came to a village full of people. Half a dozen miserable houses placed streetwise, one of them a disreputable inn, formed a background to a motley assembly of tattered vagrants, of which peasants of the countryside of both sexes, children, pigs and turkeys formed a small part. The others were men and women of the most extravagant attire and behaviour it is possible to imagine. I saw a punchinello on stilts wading among the rest; there were women flaunting feathers on their tousled heads, and moustachioed bullies who might have come from the ruck of some army on the march; pages, minions, magicians, astrologers, women's ruffians, castrati--it was as if one of the wildest hours of the Piazzetta of Venice had been transported by witchcraft to this quiet place. As I approached, wondering at what I saw, a creature, I knew not then whether man or woman, came and stood in my path, and with a great gesture of the arm greeted me in this remarkable apostrophe: "Hail, all hail, Bombaces, King of the Halicarnassians!" He, or she, repeated this shrilly three or four times, but nobody took any notice. This hermaphrodite had a face of the most vivid and regular beauty I ever saw--a face of perfect oval, freshly and rarely coloured, a pair of dark and lustrous eyes, a straight, fine nose and a mouth exquisitely shaped, provokingly red. Its hair, which was dark brown, fell in a tide of wealth far over its shoulders. It wore a woman's bodice cut square in the neck, after the fashion of unmarried women in Venice, and short in the sleeves; but at the waist that sex stopped and the male began, for it had on a pair of man's breeches, worsted stockings and Venice slippers, and its shape as revealed by these garments was not that of a woman. The creature, as a fact, declared itself to be a male; and when he began to declaim against me again, I addressed him for what he was. "My good young man," I said, "I am too weary, too desperate and too hungry to be entertained by your antics, and too poor to reward you for them--being, as you see me, an exile and a stranger. If you can find me something to eat, I shall be grateful; if you cannot, go in peace, and leave me to do the same."