I was very happy there. I had good jam and strange
honey-cakes for tea, that I liked, and the little old ladies pattered
round in a great stir, always whirling like two dry leaves after the
restless dog.
'Why must he not go out?' I said.
'Because it is wet,' they answered, 'and he coughs and sneezes.'
'Without a handkerchief, that is not _angenehm_' I said.
So we became bosom friends.
'You are Austrian?' they said to me.
I said I was from Graz; that my father was a doctor in Graz, and that I
was walking for my pleasure through the countries of Europe.
I said this because I knew a doctor from Graz who was always wandering
about, and because I did not want to be myself, an Englishman, to these
two old ladies. I wanted to be something else. So we exchanged
confidences.
They told me, in their queer, old, toothless fashion, about their
visitors, a man who used to fish all day, every day for three weeks,
fish every hour of the day, though many a day he caught nothing--nothing
at all--still he fished from the boat; and so on, such trivialities.
Then they told me of a third sister who had died, a third little old
lady.
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