"Rumors of assassins in the garden are absurd," Eliza said, "They are chimæras, figments of her royal highness’s fevered brain. Even if they did exist, they would face grave difficulties gaining entrance to the place to which we are taking her, which, as you know if you have been studying your family history, was built on a rock in a lake by a rich Baron so concerned for his personal security that he believed that even the birds of the air were wind-up toys invented by hashishin to fly in his windows and put anthrax into his beer."