Perhaps I vaguely understood by this something of the nature of our welcome. Given an isolated fishing village skipped by tourists because of its remoteness; given the sudden withdrawal from that village of its natural advantages for an illicit trade; given a clerical enthusiast, introduced at the right moment, to point out to a depressed population it’s locality’s potentialities as a watering-place, and to show the way for them to win an honest prosperity out of the ruins of evil; given, to top all, a dressing of local superstition, and the position was clear. Such deduction, no doubt, was for the adult rather than the child; but though I could not draw it at the time, it was there to _be_ drawn, I am sure. As we talked we had reached the inn, and my companion, touching his cap, passed on. But he came back before I had time to enter, and addressed me breathlessly, as if on an after-thought. “Begging _your_ pardon, sir--but you makes me laugh, you reely does--about that there lugger belonging to poor Jole Rampick.” And he went off chuckling, and looking, with his little head and slouching shoulders and stilts of legs, like the hind-quarters of a pantomime elephant. I found my uncle sitting up in preparation to breakfast in bed. He was very genial and happy; but, so it seemed to me, extraordinarily vague. I told him about my adventure and the story of the earthquake, which he seemed somehow unable to dissociate from his own accident. “I knew it, Richard,” he said; “but it was taking rather a mean advantage of a lame man, eh? There’s no security against it but balloons--that I’ve often thought. You see, when the ground itself gives underneath you, where are you to go? If one could only pump oxygen into one’s own head, you know. I’ll think about it in the course of the morning. I don’t fancy I shall get up just at present. That despatch-box, now--it was a drastic way of impressing its claims upon me, eh? Well, well!” He laughed, rather wildly I thought. “Uncle,” I said, “you’ve never told me--how did you get lame?” “How did I get lame?” he murmured, pressing the bandage on his forehead. “Why, to be sure, it was a parachute, Richard--a really capital thing I invented. But the wires got involved--the merest accident--and I came to the ground.” He was interrupted by two young ladies, daughters of the inn, who came themselves--out of curiosity, I think--to serve us breakfast. They were over-dressed, all but for their trodden slippers, with large bows of hair on their heads, and they giggled a good deal and answered questions pertly. “Well, my dears,” said Uncle Jenico, “how about the earthquake?” They stared at him, and then at one another, and burst out laughing. “O, there now!” said one; “earthquake yourself, old gentleman! Go along with you!” And they ran out, and we heard them tittering all down the stairs.