need
a sword to guard your meat. The unicorn has his horn always, and even
then he sometimes sleeps."

"It is bad, you think, to sleep," Rodriguez said.

"For some it is very bad, master. They say they never take the unicorn
waking. For me I am but dog's meat: when I have eaten hams I curl up
and sleep; but then you see, master, I know I shall wake in the
morning."

"Ah," said Rodriguez, "the morning's a pleasant time," and he leaned
back comfortably in his chair. Morano took one shrewd look at him, and
was soon asleep upon his three-legged stool.

The door opened after a while and mine host appeared. "It is late," he
said. Rodriguez smiled acquiescently and mine host withdrew, and
presently leaving Morano whom his master's voice had waked, to curl up
on the floor in a corner, Rodriguez took the candle that lit the room
and passed once more through the passages of the inn and down the great
corridor of the fastness of the family that had fallen on evil days,
and so came to his chamber. I will not waste a multitude of words over
that chamber; if you have no picture of it in your mind already, my
reader, you are reading an unskilled writer, and if in that picture it
appear a wholesome room, tidy and well kept up, if it appear a place in
which a stranger might sleep without some faint foreboding of disaster,
then I am wasting your time, and will waste no more of it with bits of
"descriptive writing" about that dim, high room, whose blackness
towered before Rodriguez in the night. He entered and shut the door, as
many had done before him; but for all his youth he took some wiser
precautions than had they, perhaps, who closed that door before. For
first he drew his sword; then for some while he stood quite still near
the door and listened to the rats; then he looked round the chamber and
perceived only one door; then he looked at the heavy oak furniture,
carved by some artist, gnawed by rats, and all blackened by time; then
swiftly opened the door of the largest cupboard and thrust his sword in
to see who might be inside, but the carved satyr's heads at the top of
the cupboard eyed him silently and nothing moved. Then he noted that
though there was no bolt on the door the furniture might be placed
across to make what in the wars is called a barricado, but the wiser
thought came at once that this was too easily done, and that if the
danger that the dim room seemed gloomily to forebode were to come from
a door so readily