6
Seven years later, by the time he was seventeen, he had recorded over nine thousand different
recipes, all of them original, all of them delicious.
But now, suddenly, his labours were interrupted by the tragic¹ death of Aunt Glosspan. She was
afflicted² in the night by a violent seizure³, and Lexington, who had rushed into her bedroom to see
what all the noise was about, found her lying on her bed yelling and cussing and twisting herself
into all manner of complicated knots. Indeed, she was a terrible sight to behold⁴, and the agitated⁵
youth danced around her in his pyjamas⁶, wringing⁷ his hands, and wondering what on earth he
should do. Finally in an effort to cool her down, he fetched a bucket of water from the pond in the
cow field and tipped it over her head, but this only intensified⁸ the paroxysms, and the old lady
expired within the hour.
‘This is really too bad,’ the poor boy said, pinching her several times to make sure that she was
dead. ‘And how sudden! How quick and sudden! Why only a few hours ago she seemed in the
very best of spirits. She even took three large helpings⁹ of my most recent creation, devilled
mushroomburgers, and told me how succulent it was.’
After weeping bitterly for several minutes, for he had loved his aunt very much, he pulled
himself together and carried her outside and buried her behind the cowshed.
The next day, while tidying up her belongings¹⁰, he came across an envelope that was addressed

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