For in Acaire, even when you went as far as Brunbelois, the boy found nothing hurtful. It was true that, had he not at the beginning of his wandering met with the small bright-haired woman who guided him thereafter, he might have made mistakes: and mistakes, as Mélusine acknowledged, might have turned out awkwardly in approaching the high place, since monsters have to be handled in just the right way. She explained to Florian, on that warm long October afternoon, that sympathy is the main requisite, because the main trouble with such monsters as the bleps and the strycophanês and the calcar (she meant only the gray one, of course) is that each is unique, and in consequence lonely. The hatred men feel for every ravening monster that wears fangs and scales, she pointed out, is due to its apparel being not quite the sort of thing to which men are accustomed: whereas people were wholly used to having soldiers and prelates and statesmen ramping about in droves, and so viewed these without any particular wonder or disapproval. All that was needed, then, was to extend to the bleps and the strycophanês a little of the confidence and admiration which men everywhere else accorded to the destroyers of mankind; and you would soon see that these glittering creatures—as well as the tawny eale, and the leucrocotta, with its golden mane and whiskers, and the opal-colored tarandus,—were a great deal nicer to look at than the most courted and run-after people, and much less apt to destroy anybody outside of their meal hours. In any event, it was Mélusine who had laid an enchantment upon the high place in the midst of the wood, and who had set the catoblepas here and the mantichora yonder to prevent the lifting of her spell, so that Florian could not possibly have found a better guide than Mélusine. She was kindly, you saw, but not very happy: and from the first, Florian liked and, in some sort, pitied her. So he rode with her confidingly, upon the back of the queerest steed that any boy of ten had ever been privileged to look at, not to speak of riding on it: and the two talked lazily and friendlily as they went up and up, and always upward, along the windings of the green way which long ago had been a road.