For
merely refusing to dance with her--at midnight, by the shores of a
mountain lake; neither the time nor the place calculated to appeal
to an elderly gentleman, suffering possibly from rheumatism--she on
one occasion transformed an eminently respectable proprietor of tin
mines into a nightingale, necessitating a change of habits that to a
business man must have been singularly irritating. On another
occasion a quite important queen, having had the misfortune to
quarrel with Malvina over some absurd point of etiquette in
connection with a lizard, seems, on waking the next morning, to have
found herself changed into what one judges, from the somewhat vague
description afforded by the ancient chroniclers, to have been a sort
of vegetable marrow.
Such changes, according to the Professor, who is prepared to
maintain that evidence of an historical nature exists sufficient to
prove that the White Ladies formed at one time an actual living
community, must be taken in an allegorical sense. Just as modern
lunatics believe themselves to be china vases or poll-parrots, and
think and behave as such, so it must have been easy, the Professor
argues, for beings of superior intelligence to have exerted hypnotic
influence upon the superstitious savages by whom they were
surrounded, and who, intellectually considered, could have been
little more than children.
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