"And have never returned to tell what they found!" concluded the
little monster, with a diabolical leer. And as the landlord
fell, gray and gasping, back in his seat, he broke out into a
loud and hyena-like laugh.
"My dear little friend," said Sir Norman, staring at him in
displeased wonder, "don't laugh, if you can help it. You are
unprepossessing enough at best, but when you laugh, you look like
the very (a downward gesture) himself!"
Unheeding this advice, the dwarf broke again into an unearthly
cachinnation, that frightened the landlord nearly into fits, and
seriously discomposed the nervous system even of Sir Norman
himself. Then, grinning like a baboon, and still transfixing our
puissant young knight with the same tiger-like and unpleasant
glare, he nodded a farewell; and in this fashion, grinning, and
nodding, and backing, he got to the door, and concluding the
interesting performance with a third hoarse and hideous laugh,
disappeared in the darkness.
For fully ten minutes after he was gone, the young man kept his
eyes blankly fixed on the door, with a vague impression that he
was suffering from an attack of nightmare; for it seemed
impossible that anything so preposterously ugly as that dwarf
could exist out of one.
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