That evening I took that queer, odd-scented sandal-wood box out of my safe, and turned the rustling skins over.  The gentleman who wrote the recipes for my great-grandmother evidently had a weakness for skins of a miscellaneous origin, and his handwriting was cramped to the last degree.  Some of the things are quite unreadable to me—­though my family, with its Indian Civil Service associations, has kept up a knowledge of Hindustani from generation to generation—­and none are absolutely plain sailing.  But I found the one that I knew was there soon enough, and sat on the floor by my safe for some time looking at it.

“Look here,” said I to Pyecraft next day, and snatched the slip away from his eager grasp.

“So far as I can make it out, this is a recipe for Loss of Weight. ("Ah!” said Pyecraft.) I’m not absolutely sure, but I think it’s that.  And if you take my advice you’ll leave it alone.  Because, you know—­I blacken my blood in your interest, Pyecraft—­my ancestors on that side were, so far as I can gather, a jolly queer lot.  See?”

“Let me try it,” said Pyecraft.

I leant back in my chair.  My imagination made one mighty effort and fell flat within me.  “What in Heaven’s name, Pyecraft,” I asked, “do you think you’ll look like when you get thin?”

He was impervious to reason, I made him promise never to say a word to me about his disgusting fatness again whatever happened—­never, and then I handed him that little piece of skin.

“It’s nasty stuff,” I said.

“No matter,” he said, and took it.

He goggled at it.  “But—­but—­” he said

He had just discovered that it wasn’t English.

“To the best of my ability,” I said, “I will do you a translation.”

I did my best.  After that we didn’t speak for a fortnight.  Whenever he approached me I frowned and motioned him away, and he respected our compact, but at the end of the fortnight he was as fat as ever.  And then he got a word in.

“I must speak,” he said, “It isn’t fair.  There’s something wrong.  It’s done me no good.  You’re not doing your great-grandmother justice.”

“Where’s the recipe?”

He produced it gingerly from his pocket-book.

I ran my eye over the items.  “Was the egg addled?” I asked.

“No.  Ought it to have been?”

“That,” I said, “goes without saying in all my poor dear great-grandmother’s recipes.  When condition or quality is not specified you must get the worst.  She was drastic or nothing...  And there’s one or two possible alternatives to some of these other things.  You got fresh rattlesnake venom?”

“I got a rattlesnake from Jamrach’s.  It cost—­it cost——­”

“That’s your affair anyhow.  This last item——­”

“I know a man who——­”

“Yes.  H’m.  Well, I’ll write the alternatives down.  So far as I know the language, the spelling of this recipe is particularly atrocious.  By-the-by, dog here probably means pariah dog.”