After sitting some time at table, conversing on the progress of science, its splendid achievements, and the pleasing prospects which it yet dimly showed in the future, our hospitable entertainer, perceiving we were fatigued with the labours of the day, invited us to take our next lallaneae, or sleep, with him, for which hospitality we felt very grateful.  We were then shown to a room, in which there were marks of the same fertile invention, in saving labour and promoting convenience; but we were too sleepy to take much notice of them.  Our beds were filled with air, which is quite as good as feathers, except that when the leather covering gets a hole in it, from ripping, or other accidents, it loses its elasticity with its air—­an accident which happened to me this very night; for a mouse having gnawed the leather where the housemaid’s greasy fingers had left a mark, I sunk gently down, not to soft repose, but on the hard planks, where I uncomfortably lay until the bell warned us to rise for breakfast.

As soon as I was dressed, I walked out into a large garden, and, as the sun was not yet so high as to make it sultry, was enjoying the balmy sweetness of the air, and the flowering shrubs, which in beauty and fragrance almost exceeded those of India, when I saw a servant run by the garden wall, enter the stable, and bring out a zebra.  On inquiring the cause, I was made to understand that our noble host was taken suddenly ill.  I immediately returned to the house, and found the domestics running to and fro, and manifesting the greatest anxiety, as well as hurry, in their looks.  I went into the Brahmin’s room, and found him dressed.  He went out, and after some time, informed me that our kind host had a violent cholera morbus, in consequence of the various kinds of food with which he had overloaded his stomach at dinner; that he considered himself near his last end, and was endeavouring to arrange his affairs for the event.

I could not help meditating on the melancholy uncertainty of human life, when I contrasted the comforts, the pleasures, the pride of conscious usefulness and genius felt by this gentleman a short time since, with the agony which that trying and bitter hour brings to the stoutest and most callous heart—­when it must quit this state of being for another, of which it knows so little, and over which fear and doubt throw a gloom that hope cannot entirely dispel.

CHAPTER XI.

Lunarian physicians:  their consultation—­While they dispute the patient recovers—­The travellers visit the celebrated teacher Lozzi Pozzi.