Perhaps I had gone a league and a half when I came to a village full of people.  Half a dozen miserable houses placed streetwise, one of them a disreputable inn, formed a background to a motley assembly of tattered vagrants, of which peasants of the countryside of both sexes, children, pigs and turkeys formed a small part.  The others were men and women of the most extravagant attire and behaviour it is possible to imagine.  I saw a punchinello on stilts wading among the rest; there were women flaunting feathers on their tousled heads, and moustachioed bullies who might have come from the ruck of some army on the march; pages, minions, magicians, astrologers, women’s ruffians, castrati—­it was as if one of the wildest hours of the Piazzetta of Venice had been transported by witchcraft to this quiet place.  As I approached, wondering at what I saw, a creature, I knew not then whether man or woman, came and stood in my path, and with a great gesture of the arm greeted me in this remarkable apostrophe:  “Hail, all hail, Bombaces, King of the Halicarnassians!” He, or she, repeated this shrilly three or four times, but nobody took any notice.

This hermaphrodite had a face of the most vivid and regular beauty I ever saw—­a face of perfect oval, freshly and rarely coloured, a pair of dark and lustrous eyes, a straight, fine nose and a mouth exquisitely shaped, provokingly red.  Its hair, which was dark brown, fell in a tide of wealth far over its shoulders.  It wore a woman’s bodice cut square in the neck, after the fashion of unmarried women in Venice, and short in the sleeves; but at the waist that sex stopped and the male began, for it had on a pair of man’s breeches, worsted stockings and Venice slippers, and its shape as revealed by these garments was not that of a woman.  The creature, as a fact, declared itself to be a male; and when he began to declaim against me again, I addressed him for what he was.  “My good young man,” I said, “I am too weary, too desperate and too hungry to be entertained by your antics, and too poor to reward you for them—­being, as you see me, an exile and a stranger.  If you can find me something to eat, I shall be grateful; if you cannot, go in peace, and leave me to do the same.”

The droll beauty changed his tone in an instant.  “Follow me, sir,” said he, “and you shall have everything you want.  I entreat your pardon for inflicting my impertinences upon you at such an ill-judged moment.”  He took me by the hand and addressed himself to the crowd about the inn doors; by pushing, punching, jostling, cursing, praying and coaxing in turns, he made a way into the house.  But that was full to suffocation of the actors and their belongings, and of the peasantry who had come to gape at them.  Everybody was engaged in getting drunk who was not drunk already.  Some were fighting, some lovemaking, some filching.  I saw a curious sight.  A man dressed like a harlequin was picking a countryman’s pocket, and having