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"Ah taisez-vous donc ma chère!" cried Aurora, flopping her ears with her hands, and running round the room shaking her long curls furiously. "Vous me faites absolument frémir! Excuse my French, but I am certain you are the eldest daughter of the old woman in the wood, and you are just now dropping vipers, toads, newts, and efts from your mouth at every word you utter!"
The people had brought up on great wagons the heavy tortoise roof and the huge necks of stone, and all the thousand and one oddities that made up that unity, the owls and the efts and the crocodiles and the kangaroos, which hideous by themselves might have been magnificent if reared in one definite proportion and dedicated to the sun.
"Half-civilized man makes blunders that both the savage and the civilized avoid. The savage builds his hut by a running stream. The civilized man draws good water to his door, though he must lay down pipes from a highland lake to a lowland city. It is only half-civilized man that builds a village on a hill, and drinks worms, and snakes, and efts, and antediluvian monsters in limeless water.
"Don't know, I'm sure, Sir!" answered Dixon, with a careless and half impertinent accent; "but there are great things, like alligators, in the cellar, which break all the bottles!" "Alligators in my cellar!" said the astonished Clutterbuck. "Yes, Sir at least a venomous sort of reptile like them, which the people about here call efts!"
Is it no miracle that not one of those black spots ever turns into anything save a frog? Why should not some of them turn into toads or efts? Why not even into fishes or serpents? Why not? The eggs of all those animals, in their first and earliest stages are exactly alike; the microscope shows no difference.
She tried again and again to lure him into an unconscious confession of the pleasure which he felt already in the society of the beautiful Miss Bygrave; she twined herself in and out of every weakness in his character, as the frogs and efts twined themselves in and out of the rock-work of her Aquarium.
Little tadpoles and efts began to bubble up through the water, and to race along beneath it; toads made noises like very young ducks, and advanced to the margin in twos and threes; overhead, bumble-bees flew hither and thither in the thickening light, their drone coming and going like the sound of a gong.
Besides, that alone of all house-animals makes no return for her entertainment. The stork, though she is neither covered, fed, nor defended by us, yet pays for the place where she builds, going about and killing the efts, snakes, and other venomous creatures.
And now, my dear little man, what should we learn from this parable? We should learn thirty-seven or thirty-nine things, I am not exactly sure which; but one thing, at least, we may learn, and that is this when we see efts in the pond, never to throw stones at them, or catch them with crooked pins.
He was struck by hearing that the dream of Christian's adventures had visited that same tinker, whose congregation his own wicked practices had broken up. "He would take me for one of the hobgoblins that beset Master Christian." "Nay," said Mrs. Woodford, "he would say you were Christian floundering in the Slough of Despond, and deeming yourself one of its efts or tadpoles."
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