I was standing in the corner of a room bending towards the wall,
supporting my head, and my eyes fixed upon a stream of blood flowing from
my nose to the ground. My grandmother, Marzia, whose pet I was, came to
me, bathed my face with cold water, and, unknown to everyone in the
house, took me with her in a gondola as far as Muran, a thickly-populated
island only half a league distant from Venice.

Alighting from the gondola, we enter a wretched hole, where we find an
old woman sitting on a rickety bed, holding a black cat in her arms, with
five or six more purring around her. The two old cronies held together a
long discourse of which, most likely, I was the subject. At the end of
the dialogue, which was carried on in the patois of Forli, the witch
having received a silver ducat from my grandmother, opened a box, took me
in her arms, placed me in the box and locked me in it, telling me not to
be frightened--a piece of advice which would certainly have had the
contrary effect, if I had had any wits about me, but I was stupefied. I
kept myself quiet in a corner of the box, holding a handkerchief to my
nose because it was still bleeding, and otherwise very indifferent to the
uproar going on outside. I could hear in turn, laughter, weeping,
singing, screams, shrieks, and knocking against the box, but for all that
I cared nought. At last I am taken out of the box; the blood stops
flowing. The wonderful old witch, after lavishing caresses upon me, takes
off my clothes, lays me on the bed, burns some drugs, gathers the smoke
in a sheet which she wraps around me, pronounces incantations, takes the
sheet off me, and gives me five sugar-plums of a very agreeable taste.
Then she immediately rubs my temples and the nape of my neck with an
ointment exhaling a delightful perfume, and puts my clothes on me again.
She told me that my haemorrhage would little by little leave me, provided
I should never disclose to any one what she had done to cure me, and she