Carmilla instantly purchased one, and so did I.

He was looking up, and we were smiling down upon him, amused; at least, I can answer for myself.  His piercing black eye, as he looked up in our faces, seemed to detect something that fixed for a moment his curiosity.  In an instant he unrolled a leather case, full of all manner of odd little steel instruments.

“See here, my lady,” he said, displaying it, and addressing me, “I profess, among other things less useful, the art of dentistry.  Plague take the dog!” he interpolated.  “Silence, beast!  He howls so that your ladyships can scarcely hear a word.  Your noble friend, the young lady at your right, has the sharpest tooth,—­long, thin, pointed, like an awl, like a needle; ha, ha!  With my sharp and long sight, as I look up, I have seen it distinctly; now if it happens to hurt the young lady, and I think it must, here am I, here are my file, my punch, my nippers; I will make it round and blunt, if her ladyship pleases; no longer the tooth of a fish, but of a beautiful young lady as she is.  Hey?  Is the young lady displeased?  Have I been too bold?  Have I offended her?”

The young lady, indeed, looked very angry as she drew back from the window.

“How dares that mountebank insult us so?  Where is your father?  I shall demand redress from him.  My father would have had the wretch tied up to the pump, and flogged with a cart whip, and burnt to the bones with the cattle brand!”

She retired from the window a step or two, and sat down, and had hardly lost sight of the offender, when her wrath subsided as suddenly as it had risen, and she gradually recovered her usual tone, and seemed to forget the little hunchback and his follies.

My father was out of spirits that evening.  On coming in he told us that there had been another case very similar to the two fatal ones which had lately occurred.  The sister of a young peasant on his estate, only a mile away, was very ill, had been, as she described it, attacked very nearly in the same way, and was now slowly but steadily sinking.

“All this,” said my father, “is strictly referable to natural causes.  These poor people infect one another with their superstitions, and so repeat in imagination the images of terror that have infested their neighbors.”

“But that very circumstance frightens one horribly,” said Carmilla.

“How so?” inquired my father.

“I am so afraid of fancying I see such things; I think it would be as bad as reality.”

“We are in God’s hands:  nothing can happen without his permission, and all will end well for those who love him.  He is our faithful creator; He has made us all, and will take care of us.”

“Creator! Nature!” said the young lady in answer to my gentle father.  “And this disease that invades the country is natural.  Nature.  All things proceed from Nature—­don’t they?  All things in the heaven, in the earth, and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains?  I think so.”