countess in her room, to
beg her to excuse my presence at dinner. She was very polite, and told me
by no means to trouble myself. I suspected that she was trying to impose
on me, but I wanted her to think she was doing so successfully. In my
character of dupe I told her that in Lent I would make amends for the
dissipation which prevented me paying my court to her. "Happily," I
added, "Lent is not far off."

"I hope it will be so," said the deceitful woman with an enchanting
smile, of which only a woman with poison in her heart is capable. With
these words she took a pinch of snuff, and offered me her box.

"But what is this, my dear countess, it isn't snuff?"

"No," she replied, "it makes the nose bleed, and is an excellent thing
for the head-ache."

I was sorry that I had taken it, but said with a laugh, that I had not
got a head-ache, and did not like my nose to bleed.

"It won't bleed much," said she, with a smile, "and it is really
beneficial."

As she spoke, we both began to sneeze, and I should have felt very angry
if I had not seen her smile.

Knowing something about these sneezing powders, I did not think we should
bleed, but I was mistaken. Directly after, I felt a drop of blood, and
she took a silver basin from her night-table.

"Come here," said she, "I am beginning to bleed too."

There we were, bleeding into the same basin, facing each other in the
most ridiculous position. After about thirty drops had fallen from each
of us, the bleeding ceased. She was laughing all the time, and I thought
the best thing I could do was to imitate her example. We washed ourselves
in fair water in another basin.

"This admixture of our blood," said she, still smiling, "will create a
sweet sympathy between us, which will only end with the death of one or
the other."

I could make no sense of this, but the reader will soon see that the
wretched woman did not mean our friendship to last very long. I asked her
to give me some of the powder, but she refused; and on my enquiring the
name of it, she replied that she did not know, as a lady friend had given
it to her.

I was a good deal puzzled by the effects of this powder, never having
heard of the like before, and as soon as I left the countess I went to an
apothecary to enquire about it, but Mr. Drench was no wiser than I. He
certainly said that euphorbia sometimes produced bleeding of the nose,
but it was not a case of sometimes but always. This small adventure m