some of the incredible
absurdities of those insects which crawl upon the outward surface of our
globe.

"At present, my brother gnomes, we have a great work before us; our
wants must be satisfied, and we must adopt the means to satisfy them. We
thirst for blood, and we must have it. This fool loves to feast his eyes
upon gold, and gold he shall see by the stratum. He but barters his
blood for gold, after the fashion of his own vile race. What else can he
expect from us?

"It is not often, my friends, that we have a feast of blood. Only now
and then when some stray traveller falls into a crevice or impudently
approaches too near to the craters of Vesuvius and Etna, till he gets
suffocated by the fumes and falls senseless into our maws.

"Happily for us, we are not so constituted as to need sustenance to the
extent of those gross gormandisers of the upper world who, would you
believe it, my comrades, find it necessary to devour food three or four
times a day.

"Ah! well you may open your august eyes at the mention of a vice so
brutally preposterous. Thus it is to be sons of clay. We, who are more
finely organised beings, of an essence more ethereal, are content to
allow ages to pass before we indulge our appetites with a full meal; yet
we, too, my brethren, need sustenance sometimes.

"Again we are suffering from the pangs of hunger, and we must be
satisfied. Patience, my fellow sages and students of those sublime and
abstruse sciences ignored by the gross intellects of our reptile
neighbours, patience, for to-morrow I bring you a feast of blood. I have
brought you blood before, and I will do so again. It is for this that I
have taken upon me the base form of one of the vilest among their own
vile race.

"My own comely shape by which I am known here below is ill-suited to
brook the atmosphere of the surface world; therefore, partly to excite
compassion, and consequently disarm suspicion, I have adopted a
loathsome disguise, through which even ye, my friends, would fail to
recognise me. At this moment, while I am speaking, the filthy clay that
for your sakes I shall don to-morrow lies in the chamber of the victim.

"I am so far able to free myself from it as to speak with you in the
spirit, but I much fear that the sympathy which to some extent must
exist between my spirit and the fulsome mask that awaits me in the world
above, may so influence the organs of the foul body as to cause it to
correspond audibly to th