THE next day I prepared again of the best of everything for my new guests. I killed three fowls, and ordered Pedro (who was as good a cook almost as myself) to get them ready for boiling, whilst we took a walk to the lake. Though we went out in the clearest part of the morning, I heard no complaint of the light. I took the liberty to ask my brother if the light did not offend him; for I told him my wife could not bear so much without spectacles.--"What is that spectacle?" says he.--"Something I made your sister," says I, "to prevent the inconvenience of too much light upon her eyes."--He said the light was scarce at all troublesome to him, for he had been in much greater, and was used to it; and that the glumms, who travelled much abroad, could bear more light than the gawrys, who stayed much at home: these stirring but little out unless in large companies, and that of one another, and very rarely admitted glumms amongst them before marriage. For his own part, he said, he had an office at Crashdoorpt, * which, though he executed chiefly by a deputy, obliged him to reside there sometimes for a long season together; that being a more luminous country than Arndrumnstake, light was become familiar to him; for it was very observable that some who had been used to it young, though they might in time overcome it, yet at first it was very uneasy. * The country of the Slits. I was upon the tenter whilst he spoke, lest, before he had done, a question I had a thousand times thought to have asked my wife, should slip out of my head, as it had so often done before, and was what I had for years desired to be resolved in; viz., what the meaning of the word slit was, when applied to a man. So, on his pausing, I said that his mention of Crashdoorpt reminded me of inquiring what crashee meant, when applied to a glumm or gawry. "It would be no hard task," he said, "to satisfy me in respect of that, as I already understood the nature of the graundee;" whereupon he went on thus: "Slitting is the only punishment we use to incorrigible criminals: our method is, where any one has committed a very heinous offence, or, which is the same thing, has multiplied the acts of offence, he has a long string tied round his neck, in the manner of a cravat; and then two glumms, one at each end, take it in their hands, standing side by side with him; two more standing before him, and two behind him; all which in that manner take flight, so that the string keeps the criminal in the middle of them: thus they conduct him to Crashdoorpt, which lies farther on the other side of Arndrumnstake than this arkoe does on this side of it, and is just such an arkoe as ours, but much bigger within the rocks. When they come to the covett they alight, where my deputy immediately orders the malefactor to be slit, so that he can never more return to Normnbdsgrsutt, or indeed by any means get out of that arkoe, but must end his days there. The method of slitting is thus: The criminal is laid