The Virginia Gazette

A droll circumstance happened during the late carnival at Paris. At one of the masquerades, which are always permitted there in Lent time, a mask appeared in a dress representing a windmill. A Prince of the Blood, struck with the novelty of the character, put some trying questions to the mask. The latter replied in a manner that piqued his Highness greatly. The Prince, chagrined at his answers, stepped up to one of the sentinels, and bid him take care not to lose sight of that mask, but to arrest him when all was over, with as little noise as possible. The mask retired to a corner of the room, where he seemingly sat down and went to sleep. After nodding there several hours, in the morning when the sentinel came to execute his orders, finding the mask, as he thought, still asleep, he gave him several shakes in order to wake him. These proving ineffectual, he examined the mask more closely, when to his surprise he found that the bird was flown, and nothing but the carcass of the windmill left behind.