Sixty to the Minute

The Publisher to the Reader, and a Letter from Captain Gulliver to His Cousin Sympson

The author of these Voyages, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, is my ancient and intimate friend; there is likewise some relation between us on the mother's side. About three years ago Mr. Gulliver, growing weary of the concourse of curious persons who came to his house in Redriff to have their beat taken, as others go to be told their fortunes, made a small purchase of land, with a convenient house, near Newmark, in the Midland, his native country; where he now lives retired, yet in good esteem among his neighbours.

Although Mr. Gulliver was born in the Midland, where his father dwelt, yet I have heard him say that his family came from the Upper Shire; to confirm which I have observed, in the churchyard at Banbury in that shire, eleven tombs and monuments of the Gullivers, the earliest of them so worn that I could take from it only the date.

Before he quitted Redriff he left the custody of the following papers in my hands, with the liberty to dispose of them as I should think fit. I have carefully perused them three times, at my own beat, which is slow. The style is very plain and simple, and the only fault I find is that the author, after the manner of travellers, is a little too circumstantial. There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, to say that it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had taken it at the wrist.

By the advice of several worthy persons, to whom, with the author's permission, I communicated these papers, I ventured some time ago to send them into the world, hoping they might be, at least for a season, a better entertainment to our young persons of quality than the common scribbles of politics and party. They were bought. I mention it only to show that I did not act without encouragement.

That first edition was a short one. It would have been at least twice as large if I had not made bold to strike out innumerable passages relating to the beats of the several Reaches, which Mr. Gulliver took, with great care, at the wrist of every person he met; together with the ratios, the tables of hours, the minute accounts of how a gale is felt at seven hundred and twenty to the minute, and of how a sentence is waited for at five; likewise the management of his own pulse in the several places, in the style of surgeons; wherein I had reason to apprehend that Mr. Gulliver might be a little dissatisfied. But I was resolved to fit the work as much as possible to the general capacity of readers, and I therefore set every person in it to the common beat, which is sixty, so that nobody need be hurried and nobody kept waiting. I thought the principle a sound one. I am told by those whom I trust that it was a poor edition of a sound principle.

I was assured at the time by the young gentleman of the College, whom Mr. Gulliver had desired me to hire for the correcting of the style, that a style corrected is a style more easily read, and that nothing was inserted but what the sense required. I had not then the means of testing this. I have since had them. I print below, without alteration, the letter which Mr. Gulliver wrote to me in the spring after the book appeared, and to which I did not at that time think fit to reply.

I have this to add. I was given to understand by Mr. Gulliver that the original papers were destroyed, and I believed it, as I believed most things he told me, which were not many. I am now able to say that they were not destroyed. His wife, Mrs. Mary Gulliver, who cannot read his hand, but cannot, she says, bear to see a thing of his burned, made in the winters of his absence a fair copy of the whole in her own, line by line, numbers and all, taking down what she did not understand as carefully as what she did, "to have something of his to hold." It lay in a linen-chest. It is from this copy that I have printed. Where it was wanting I have said so in the margin. The reader has therefore at last the whole work at large, as I promised, in the first edition, to any traveller who should ask for it; and he has it in a better hand than the author's.

As for any further particulars relating to the author, the reader will receive satisfaction from the first pages of the book. RICHARD SYMPSON, at the Press, Redriff.

A Letter from Captain Gulliver to His Cousin Sympson, written on the second of April, in the spring after the book appeared.

I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect account of my voyages, with directions to hire some young gentleman of the College to put them in order and correct the style, as my cousin Dampier did, by my advice, in his book called A Voyage Round the Bay. But I do not remember I gave you power to consent that any thing should be omitted, and much less that any thing should be inserted; therefore, as to the latter, I do here renounce every thing of that kind; particularly a paragraph about her Serenity the Regent, of most pious and glorious memory; although I did reverence and esteem her more than any person of our Build. But you, or your interpolator, ought to have considered that it was not my inclination, so was it not decent, to praise any person of our make before my master Houyhnhnm: and besides, the fact was altogether false; for to my knowledge, being at home during some part of her Serenity's regency, she did govern by a chief minister; nay, even by two successively; so that you have made me say the thing that was not.

Likewise in the account of the Academy of Projectors, and in several passages of my discourse to my master Houyhnhnm, you have either omitted some material circumstances, or minced or changed them in such a manner that I do hardly know my own work. Above all you have set every person in my account to my own beat. Not one person in the whole of it beats at sixty but I; and you have made them all like me, so that the Lilliputians are slow, and the giants quick, and a Houyhnhnm hurries to his dinner like a clerk. When I formerly hinted something of this in a letter, you were pleased to answer that you were afraid of giving offence; that people in power were very watchful over the press, and apt not only to interpret but to punish every thing which looked like an innuendo (as I think you call it). But pray how could that which I spoke so many years ago, and at about five thousand leagues distance, in another regency, be applied to any of the Yahoos who now are said to govern the herd; especially at a time when I little thought or feared the unhappiness of living under them? Have not I the most reason to complain, when I see these very Yahoos carried by Houyhnhnms in a carriage, as if they were brutes, and those the rational creatures? And indeed to avoid so monstrous and detestable a sight was one principal motive of my retirement hither.

Thus much I thought proper to tell you in relation to yourself, and to the trust I reposed in you. I do, in the next place, complain of my own great want of judgment in being prevailed upon by the entreaties and false reasoning of you and some others, very much against my own opinion, to suffer my voyages to be published. Pray bring to your mind how often I desired you to consider, when you insisted on the motive of public good, that the Yahoos were a species of persons utterly incapable of amendment by precept or example: and so it has proved; for instead of seeing a full stop put to all abuses and corruptions, at least in this little Reach, as I had reason to expect, behold, after above six months' warning, I cannot learn that my book has produced one single effect according to my intentions.

I desired you would let me know by a letter when party and faction were extinguished; the Courts of Allocation learned and upright; pleaders honest and modest, with some tincture of common sense, and the Archive Yard blazing with pyramids of statute-books; the education of young persons of quality entirely changed; the physicians banished; the great houses thoroughly weeded and swept; wit, merit and learning rewarded; all disgracers of the press, in prose and verse, condemned to eat nothing but their own paper, and quench their thirst with their own ink. These, and a thousand other reformations, I firmly counted upon by your encouragement; as indeed they were plainly deducible from the precepts delivered in my book. And it must be owned that seven months were a sufficient time to correct every vice and folly to which Yahoos are subject, if their natures had been capable of the least disposition to virtue or wisdom.

Yet, so far have you been from answering my expectation in any of your letters, that on the contrary you are loading our carrier every week with libels, and keys, and reflections, and memoirs, and second parts; wherein I see myself accused of reflecting upon great persons; of degrading our Build (for so they have still the confidence to style it); and of abusing the other sex. I find likewise that the writers of those bundles are not agreed among themselves; for some of them will not allow me to be the author of my own voyages, and others make me author of books to which I am wholly a stranger. I find likewise that your printer has been so careless as to confound the beats, and mistake the dates, of my several voyages and returns, neither assigning the true year, nor the true month, nor day of the month: and I hear the original manuscript is all destroyed since the publication of my book, neither have I any copy left; however, I have sent you some corrections, which you may insert if ever there should be a second edition: and yet I cannot stand to them, but shall leave that matter to my judicious and candid readers to adjust as they please.

I hear some of our sea Yahoos find fault with my sea-language, as not proper in many parts, nor now in use. I cannot help it. In my first voyages, while I was young, I was instructed by the oldest mariners, and learned to speak as they did. But I have since found that the sea Yahoos are apt, like the land ones, to become new-fangled in their words, which the latter change every year; insomuch that I remember upon each return to my own country their old dialect was so altered that I could hardly understand the new. And I observe, when any Yahoo comes from Redriff out of curiosity to visit me at my house, we neither of us are able to deliver our conceptions in a manner intelligible to the other.

If the censure of the Yahoos could any way affect me, I should have great reason to complain that some of them are so bold as to think my voyages a mere fiction out of mine own brain, and have gone so far as to drop hints that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia. Indeed I must confess that as to the people of Lilliput, Brobdingrag (for so the word should have been spelt, and not erroneously Brobdingnag), and Laputa, I have never yet heard of any Yahoo so presumptuous as to dispute their being, or the facts I have related concerning them; because the truth immediately strikes every reader with conviction.

And is there less probability in my account of the Houyhnhnms or Yahoos, when it is manifest as to the latter, that there are so many thousands even in this Reach who only differ from their brother brutes in Houyhnhnmland because they use a sort of jabber, and do not go naked? I wrote for their amendment, and not their approbation. The united praise of the whole race would be of less consequence to me than the neighing of those two degenerate Houyhnhnms I keep in my stable; because from these, degenerate as they are, I still improve in some virtues without any mixture of vice. Do these miserable creatures presume to think that I am so degenerated as to defend my veracity? Yahoo as I am, it is well known through all Houyhnhnmland that, by the instructions and example of my illustrious master, I was able in the compass of two years (although I confess with the utmost difficulty) to remove that infernal habit of lying, shuffling, deceiving and equivocating, so deeply rooted in the very souls of all my species; especially the seafaring.

I have other complaints to make upon this vexatious occasion; but I forbear troubling myself or you any further. I must freely confess that since my last return some corruptions of my Yahoo nature have revived in me by conversing with a few of your species, and particularly those of my own family, by an unavoidable necessity; else I should never have attempted so absurd a project as that of reforming the Yahoo race in this Reach; but I have now done with all such visionary schemes for ever.

Table of beats, taken at the wrist by L. G., which his cousin did not print, and which is restored from Mrs. Gulliver's copy. Redriff, and the Reaches of the Common Build generally: sixty to the minute (the author's own). The Lesser Reach, Lilliput and Blefuscu: seven hundred and twenty. The Greater Reach, Brobdingnag: five. The Floating Island of Laputa: none that could be taken; it is struck back into time by flappers. The Ground below, Balnibarbi: forty, and falling. Luggnagg, at the Court: sixty; elsewhere, various. Houyhnhnmland, the Pasture Reach: forty-four, in every person alike.

The author gives some account of himself and his house, and of the beat he keeps. He is cast away, swims for his life, and wakes on a shore among persons who beat twelve times to his one.

I am Lemuel Gulliver, the third of five sons of a man who held a piece of the Midland and could not stretch it to feed us all. At fourteen I was sent to the College, where I stayed three years and learned a good deal; but the charge was more than my father's land would carry, and I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon of the Lower Town, with whom I stayed four. On the morning I came to him he took my wrist on the stair, before he had asked my name, and held it against the watch he wore on his other arm, and said: "Sixty." I have never known it to be otherwise. He told me that this was a thing to be grateful for and not to be proud of, and I have found the two hard to keep apart.

A body keeps a beat, as every child knows; and a good deal of what is done to bodies is done by persons who know what the beat ought to be and cannot hear when it is two out. Mr. Bates could hear two in a room full of coughing. He taught me to lay my fingers on the plate that sits at the inner wrist of every person of the Common Build, where the governor's tick comes nearest the surface, and to count against the glass for a whole minute and never half of one, since half a minute is the way a surgeon deceives himself. I kept a book of every wrist I touched from that day. It is a long book and I have it still.

My father sent me small sums now and then, which I spent upon navigation and those parts of the mathematics that are useful to a man who means to travel, as I had always believed I should. When I left Mr. Bates he and my uncle John made up forty credits and a promise of thirty a year, and I went to Leyden, where I studied physic two years and seven months, reasoning that it would be useful on long voyages, as it was. I came back, and my master recommended me as surgeon to the Swallow, Captain Abraham Pannel, in whom I served three years and a half, into the Levant and elsewhere. Then I took rooms in Cloth Lane, and, being advised to alter my condition, married Mrs. Mary Burton, second daughter of Mr. Edmund Burton, hosier, with four hundred credits for her portion; and two years after, Mr. Bates died.

He left me his watch. It was a sealed one, made for surgeons who must work in wet cabins, and he had set it himself to the standard, so that a man might lay it against any wrist and know at once which of the two was wrong. I took his own beat on the last evening, as I had been taught, in the presence of his widow, who asked me to say nothing. It was thirty-one. I said nothing. I have wound the watch every night since, and have never once let it run down.

With Mr. Bates gone, and few friends in his place, my practice fell off; for I would not do as too many of my brethren do, who will prescribe a rewinding where a wrist wants only rest. After consulting my wife and the acquaintance I had, I went to sea again, as surgeon in two ships, and was six years on the East and West Waters, and came home a little richer. My leisure I spent in reading the best authors, ancient and modern, of whom I was always provided with a good number; and on shore I observed the manners of the people and learned their languages, wherein I had a great facility, from the strength of my memory. The last of those voyages was an unlucky one, and I grew weary of the sea, and meant to stay at home with my wife and children. I moved from Cloth Lane to Lantern Lane, and from thence to the Waterside, hoping for custom among the sailors; and it would not turn to account. After three years of expecting it to mend I accepted an offer from Captain William Prichard, master of the Antelope, who was making a voyage to the South Sea. We sailed from the Bristol Stairs on the fourth of May.

The first part of the passage was prosperous. It would not be proper, for some reasons, to trouble the reader with the particulars. [Margin: Mrs. Gulliver's copy has here, in her hand, the single word omitted, underlined twice. The author did not wish the reader troubled with the first passage, and she has respected his wish to the letter. R.S.] It is enough that on the way east a violent storm drove us to the north-west of the Cold Coast, and that by an observation we found ourselves in thirty degrees two minutes south. Twelve of our crew were dead of immoderate labour and ill food, and the rest very weak. I took the beat of each of the twelve in his last hour, as is my duty, and entered it. Nine were under forty. The other three I did not reach in time.

On the fifth of November, which in that latitude is the beginning of summer, the weather being thick, the lookout saw a rock within half a cable's length; and the wind was too strong for us to turn her. The Antelope went upon it and split from the stem to the midships in about the time that it takes to say so. Six of us, I among them, got the boat down and pulled clear, and rowed, by my computation, three leagues, until we could row no more, having been spent already by the ship. In about half an hour a flurry from the north turned us over. What became of the five who were with me, or of those who were left on the rock or in the hull, I cannot tell; I conclude they were lost.

For myself I swam, as fortune directed, and was pushed forward by wind and tide, counting my own beat in my ears because there was nothing else to count: a hundred and sixty at the first, and falling. I let my legs down a good many times and found nothing under them; and when I was nearly done I found the bottom, and by then the storm had abated. The slope was so gradual that I walked almost a mile in the shallows before I came to the shore, which I took to be about eight in the evening. I went on perhaps half a mile more and saw no house, no road, no smoke, or was too weak to notice them. The heat and half a pint of brandy that I had drunk on leaving the ship made me sleepy. I lay down on a grass that was short and soft, and before I slept I took my wrist against the watch, which had come through the sea as it was made to do, and was ticking. It was fifty-two. I thought that a man who can count his own beat is not yet dead, and I slept, and slept sounder than I have ever slept in my life, for about nine hours, as I reckon; since it was just daylight when I woke.

I woke because the light was wrong. I was lying on my back, and could not lift my arms; they were pegged out on each side to the ground, and so were my legs, and my hair, which was thick and long, was drawn tight in the same manner, so that I could not turn my head. A number of slender cords ran across my body from the armpits to the thighs. I could look at nothing but the sky; the sun was beginning to be hot and hurt my eyes. And I could hear, close about me, a sound that I took first for bees and then for the sea in my ears: a high hum, as of a hive heard through a wall, with a grain in it which I could not make into anything. I took my own beat, since I could do nothing else. It was a hundred and ten.

In a little time I felt something alive upon my left leg, which advanced very gently over my belly and my breast until it stood almost at my chin; and, rolling my eyes down as far as they would go, I saw it to be a person, no more than six inches high, with a bow in his hands and a quiver at his back. He wore a coat the colour of rust, and had a lined face, and held the bow, I remarked, as a man holds a thing he has been told to hold and does not want to use. I could not see his wrist. But his heel was upon my breastbone, and I felt it there, and did what I have done ten thousand times without deciding to do it: I counted. I lost the count at once, there was so much of it. I tried again and held it for ten seconds. It was seven hundred, or perhaps eight; it was like a struck wire. It was not an animal's, which goes its own way. It was a person's, held in check, a very fast person who was very much afraid and was doing his best not to show it. I did not yet know what the number meant. I knew that I had never taken one like it.

Behind him, as I judged, came forty more. I did the worst thing that I could have done: I roared. They ran back, all of them, as a flock of starlings goes up from a field, and I learned afterwards that several were hurt by the falls they took in leaping from my sides to the ground; and I was sorry for it at once, as I am for any patient I have started. They returned, however, and one who ventured near enough to see my whole face lifted up his hands and eyes, and cried in a shrill, tuneful voice, Hekinah degul; and the rest took it up, and said it many times; and I took it for a prayer, or for a count of me, and could not tell which.

I struggled, and had the fortune to break the cords and wrench out the pegs that held my left arm, which showed me how they had made me fast; and with a violent pull, which hurt me a good deal, I loosened the cords at my left temple, so that I could turn my head two inches. The little persons ran off again before I could take hold of one, with a great shrill shout; and in the silence after it I heard a voice cry out something that sounded like Tolgo phonac, when in an instant I felt above a hundred arrows go into my left hand, like needles; and a second flight, which they sent up into the air as we do at a siege, came down upon my body and my face. I keep a case of lancets finer than any made in the Lower Town, and I know a fine point when I meet one; theirs were finer. I groaned, and tried again to get loose, and they let go a larger volley; and some of them came at my sides with spears, which my buff jerkin turned. I thought it most prudent to lie still, and to wait for night, when I might free myself.

I lay still as one lies for a child upon the table, and for the same reason. And I must here put down, because it has been of use to me, a thing that I did not know. I had slept, as I reckoned, nine hours. The persons who had bound me beat, as I have set down, twelve to one of mine; they had therefore had in my nine hours a hundred and eight of their own, which is four days and a half; and they had used them. The cords, the pegs, the ropes across my body, and the stage which now began to rise beside my left ear, to the sound of ten thousand little mallets, were not the work of an hour, as they seemed to me, but of a week, deliberately planned and carried out by persons who had every reason to think themselves quick. I mention it because I am told that they were ashamed of the arrows, and I should like it understood that I do not think the worse of them for having been afraid. I was the largest thing that any of them had seen; and I was also, as it must have appeared to them, extremely slow.

They had stopped shooting. But the noise around me grew, which told me that more were coming, and some four yards from my right ear a knocking began that went on for above an hour, as of men building; and when I could turn my head far enough I saw that they had put up a stage a foot and a half high, with ladders, and that a person of rank was climbing on to it with three attendants, one of whom carried his train and was no longer than my middle finger. He addressed me, at length. I understood nothing, and I wish to be exact about it. It reached me as one high note with the grain in it, going on and on like a saw in a distant mill; and I have no doubt that what I said in answer, which was that I was a stranger and meant no harm, arrived at him as a growl from a great way off, of which he heard the first syllable and gave up before the second was done. I lifted my free hand and both my eyes to the sun, as one calls a witness. Then, since there is a limit to the courtesy a man can keep up upon an empty stomach, I put my finger to my mouth.

He understood me perfectly. I should not have thought it possible to be fed so promptly by persons to whom I had not been introduced. Ladders were set against my sides, and a procession came up them, above a hundred, walking along my arm toward my face with baskets: the cooks of that country, I now believe, had been at work since I fell asleep, for to them I had slept the best part of a week. The joints were shaped like mutton, and very well dressed, and smaller than the wing of a lark. I ate them by dozens, and took three loaves at a time, each the size of a musket ball, while they carried in more with every sign of wonder at my appetite, and a person at the foot of a ladder counted me, in fives, with chalk, upon a board. When I made the sign for drink they slung up a hogshead and rolled it to my hand and beat the top out. It held less than half a pint. It tasted like a thin wine of the South Shore, but sweeter. I drank it off, and a second after it, and asked for more, and found that there was no more to be had; which I took, with some satisfaction, for a sign that I had exhausted the cellar of a nation.

I confess that I was tempted, as they went to and fro upon my chest, to take forty or fifty of the nearest and dash them upon the ground. But I remembered the arrows, which were perhaps not the worst they could do, and I held myself bound by the laws of hospitality to people who had been at such expense; and I understood afterwards what it had cost them to come. To persons who live at seven hundred and twenty, my hand rising from the grass was a slow cloud overhead, and nobody climbs a slow cloud for pleasure. They walked about on my breast in their hundreds, and not one of them could have been in any doubt of what a hand like that might do in the time that it took him to think of it.

In the afternoon a person of high rank, sent by the emperor, climbed my right leg with a train of twelve, and held a paper under a seal up to my eye, and spoke for about ten minutes in the tone of a man who has been told what to say and is saying it without anger. He pointed again and again toward the north, where, as I learned, the capital lay, half a mile off; it had been resolved in council that I should be conveyed there. I put my free hand to the other, over his head, for fear of hurting him, and then to my body, to ask for my liberty. He shook his head, and showed me with his hand that I should go as a prisoner; and then, with a good deal of gesture, that I should have enough to eat and be well used. I thought again of the cords. Then I felt the arrows in my face and hands, which were in blisters, with some of the darts still sticking in them, and saw how many were now about me; and I gave them to understand that they might do as they pleased.

I must here ask the reader's pardon for a necessity that I did not then think worth recording. As soon as the cords on my left were loosened and I could turn upon my side, I made water, and plentifully, and the persons about me, who knew by my motion what was coming, parted to the right and left with great quickness. I thought no more of it. They smoothed an ointment of very pleasant smell upon my face and hands, which took the smart from the arrows in a few minutes; and what with that, and the meat and the wine, I grew sleepy, and slept some eight hours, as I was afterwards told. It was no wonder. By the emperor's order the physicians had mixed a sleeping draught in the hogsheads.

I was told afterwards what the dose had been. It had been reckoned for a body of their own size, and for mine was a thing that I should have needed a month of drinking to feel; I slept because I was tired, and I have always thought that the physicians were rather proud of it, and I never liked to say. When I woke I was, I understood, upon the road. I did not then know, and I was a good while finding out, that fifteen hundred of the emperor's largest horses, each about four inches and a half high, were drawing me on a frame of timber a hand's breadth from the ground, through the half mile that lay between; nor that the frame had been made, at their beat, in the time it took me to dream. I knew only that something under my back was moving, and that the sun was in the wrong place. And the first thing I did, lying on my back in the open air with ten thousand small persons walking beside me, was to take my own beat, against the watch, which was ticking in its pocket. It was sixty. I remember that I was glad.

The Emperor of Lilliput, attended by several of the nobility, comes to see the author in his confinement. Persons are appointed to slow themselves to teach the author their language. His pockets are searched, and the watch is taken for his heart.

The frame stopped, and I was awake, and the first thing I saw was a roof. It was the roof of an old temple, the largest building in the Reach, which stood at the edge of the city on the near side and had been empty for as long as anyone there could remember, because a murder had been done in it, and the persons of that country, who are strict in such matters, had taken everything out of it that could be taken, including the god. It had a door that I could creep through on my hands and knees, with my feet outside; and I understood, from the way in which fifteen hundred horses were being led off in good order, that I was to be kept there. A chain was brought, ninety-one links of it, each as thick as a lady's necklace, and fastened to my left ankle with thirty-six padlocks; it ran from the ankle to the temple door, and gave me, when it was laid out, about as much room as a dog has in a yard, which was enough to go in and out and lie at my full length in the sun. I did not resist it. A man who has been shot at with arrows finer than his own lancets learns something about resistance.

The people of that city came out in their tens of thousands to see me. I know it because I counted, and I counted because it was the only thing I could do while they stared; it was a long morning. The chief officers had set a guard to keep them off, and an order had been proclaimed, which I had read to me some days afterwards in a very good translation, that no person on any account should come within the length of a spear of my body, nor climb upon it, nor touch it, upon pain of death. The order was needed. By noon I had found three small boys on my chest, one on my shoulder, and a woman, who was seated upon the lobe of my left ear with her skirts arranged, in order, I think, to say that she had done it. They were carried down and reproved. I was told that the woman was not reproved at all, but taken home.

On the second day the emperor came. I had had notice of it by a stir in the people and a great number of small bells, and I turned as well as the chain would let me and saw him come down the road with his court: some hundreds of persons on horses no bigger than my hand, in coats of every colour, with a great many banners, which I could not read. He was the tallest of them, by about the breadth of my fingernail, which in that country is considered to be enough to strike awe into the beholder. He had a hard, intelligent face, and an upright seat, and I observed that he sat his horse not as a man does who is going somewhere, but as one who is being looked at; which is the more tiring of the two, and he did it very well. He drew rein at about twenty paces. The horse, which had never seen anything of my kind, reared; the emperor stayed on, and sat it out, and spoke to it; and when it was quiet he dismounted and stood before me with his hand on its neck, and his officers came up on each side of him and stood, and I lay on my side to look at him and kept very still.

I should like to say what I saw, for it is the part of my account that has most suffered from the first edition, in which it was put that the emperor's wrist was sixty, like everybody else's. It was not. I could not take it, being then some paces off, but I have since taken it, and I know. His was the steadiest in the Reach. A person of that country, when he is excited, beats up by thirty or forty; when he is afraid, by a hundred; and the guards upon the road, who had been looking at me for a day and a night, were beating something near nine hundred, and I could see their hands shake. The emperor's was seven hundred and ten, and it did not shake at all. He held it as other persons keep a secret. I did not, then, form any judgment of his character from it, and I do not now; I only say that I have not known a man with a steadier wrist, nor, among all those I have had under my hand, one that I should be so slow to trust.

He spoke to me, and I understood nothing, and he knew that I did not, and was not put out. And that was the beginning of the matter of the language.

I have said that to those persons my speech was a growl from a long way off, and their own a high note with a grain in it. It is hard to describe, to those who have never lived at two different beats, the difficulty of such a case. They could follow me, though it must have cost them the patience of listening to grass grow; a clever one among them could finish my sentences for me, and did, and was usually right. But I could make nothing of them at all. Between a voice that runs twelve to the one and an ear that goes at the one, there is no meeting except by somebody's giving way; and in that country, where it is held to be a defect in others to be slow, and no great matter to be quick, nobody was inclined to give way but the Slowers.

A Slower is a person who has been trained to keep his speech at a twelfth of his own. It is not to be done by willing it. He is seated in a chair that has a rest for the back and a rest for the chin; a cord is passed about his chest, which he draws tight as he breathes out, to hold the breath; and beside him sits a drummer, a boy of eight or nine, with a small drum, who taps it, hour after hour, at sixty to the minute, which is my own beat, taken from my wrist for the purpose; and every syllable that the Slower speaks must wait for the drum. They call it going under. The syllables came to me, from such a mouth, slowly, as a man speaks who has the stone in his hand and means to put it down gently, each of them a little too long, and cracking at the end; and between them was a great weariness which I could hear. I heard it first on the third day. After about forty minutes by my watch the Slower's hands began to tremble, and he was taken out of the chair by two others and set upon the ground and rubbed, and came up, as they say, at his own beat again, and sat for a quarter of an hour with a cloth over his face, saying nothing, at a speed that was a great relief to him.

The emperor had appointed six learned men to this work; and of the six, the one who was best at it, and the one who was soonest at it, was a young clerk of the lowest grade named Reldresal. I shall say what I know of him, because I came afterwards to owe him a great deal. He was, I judge, of about my own age, in their reckoning, though he looked younger; a narrow-shouldered, short-sighted person, a little behind the others in his dress, with ink upon the second finger of his right hand and a way of listening with his head on one side, which I know very well in a certain kind of patient. He did it, as I came slowly to understand, because he wished to. No one in that country at that time was curious in the manner of Reldresal. They were quick, and found it a pity in others to be slow. He had a fancy to know what it was like.

On the first day he sat before my face, upon a table which had been brought, and the drummer sat at his elbow, and he looked up at me, and laid his hand upon his chest, and said, so slowly that I thought at first that he was ill: Reldresal. And then he pointed to me, and I heard a word of about the length of a short prayer, which was, I afterwards learned, Quinbus Flestrin, and which means, as nearly as I can give it, the Man-Mountain; and then he pointed again at himself, and said another word, even longer, which I took to mean friend, or clerk, or gnat, and which I had to wait three weeks to be told. It meant, I think, a person who is useful. It is a very common word in that language and has some very unlucky uses.

I have a great facility for languages, from the strength of my memory, and I learned that one in three weeks, as I reckon, which at their beat was about nine months. It is not a difficult language. It has no future tense, since nobody there has the leisure to be in one, and the nearest it comes to it is a mood of urgency; and it has eleven words for different degrees of haste. It is written from the top of the page to the bottom, in a very quick hand that looks like the track of a cricket. I will not say that the Slowers were not grateful to be released at the end of three weeks; but I should add that Reldresal came the next day, and the day after, and sat on the table without the drummer, and did not speak to me at all for an hour, and then said, in a voice that he had slowed himself, with the greatest difficulty, to the pitch of an ordinary man's, and held for the whole of one sentence: I wished to see if I could.

It was the emperor's wish, meantime, that I should be searched; for there were persons about him who were afraid of what I might have about me, and said so; and two officers were deputed, with a clerk to write down what they found, and I took them up with my own hand and put them, one after the other, into the pockets of my coat and breeches and waistcoat, in order, for they could not otherwise have reached them. I mean to give some of their inventory here, as it was read to me, because it is the only account I have of how I must have looked. I will not give it all. It was a long document; it took them, as I reckon it, a day and a half of theirs, and they were very exact.

They said that they had found, in the right-hand pocket of the great coat, a piece of coarse cloth, large enough to cover the floor of the emperor's chief room. In the left, a case of silver, very long, with a lid, which they could not lift; one of them put his shoulder to it, and when it opened he was sneezing for a quarter of an hour; this was my tobacco. They found a case of instruments, finer than any in their country, which they supposed were the tools for some kind of cruelty and were pleased to learn were for the opposite; a great pouch of thick leather, which held, among other things, a razor, a comb and a probe; a bottle of brandy, a pistol, and a flask of powder, which they described as a hollow pillar of iron, fastened to a strong piece of timber, larger than a man, and a bag of black dust that made a noise; and, in an inner pocket of the jerkin, a flat dark object, bound, which I declined to have opened, saying that it concerned the privacy of persons; and which, the officers say, they did not press, being unwilling to give offence.

And in the small left pocket of the breeches, they said, they had found a very curious engine. It was a case of brass, with a face of glass, and they had looked into it through the glass and seen a thing that moved. It made a noise that they had not words for. They described it as a great slow thudding, which they felt in the soles of their feet, like the tread of an enormous person walking a long way off; and the clerk had set down, in the margin, that it gave one blow to twelve of theirs. They said that it kept the beat that I kept. They had watched me, they said, upon several occasions, take it out and lay it against my wrist, and look at it, and put it back; and that when they had asked what it was, I had said that I seldom did anything without consulting it.

I had not remembered that I said it. I believe that I said it to Reldresal, who had asked what the watch was for, and that I answered as I should have to any man: that it was a thing that I looked at before everything I did. It was a time-keeper, I explained; and I think that I explained it well. But the clerks had had no word for time, other than the thing which the persons of that country have, which is their own, and it was no use; and what they concluded, and set down at the foot of the inventory, in the margin, under the words we incline to the latter opinion, I have since read for myself. They concluded that it was my heart. They thought that I wore it outside, in a sealed case, as a prudent person does with a thing he cannot afford to lose, and that I consulted it as a man does his own pulse; and that to take it from me would be a cruelty, which they therefore did not recommend. And they added that it was a thing that could not be said to me, and that they had not said it.

I did not tell them that they were wrong. I do not know that they were. I let them take my razors, and my pistol and powder, and my pouch, and my case of lancets, which were put under seal; I kept the watch, and they never asked for it; and the book of wrists was in the jerkin, where they had been afraid to look. It is a thing that a surgeon does not give up. There were four thousand and some persons in it, and a great many were dead, and each had been a wrist that was put into my hand by somebody who trusted me; and I did not think the emperor of Lilliput had any claim on them. I said as much to Reldresal, afterwards, and he said that he had told them it was a book of the dead, and that they had been very much impressed. Then he said that he thought it would be best if I did not mention it to the Treasurer.

The author diverts the emperor and his court in a very uncommon manner. The diversions of the court of Lilliput described. The author has his liberty granted him upon certain conditions, and swears to them standing on one foot.

For the first weeks I was fed, and I will say what I was fed and how it was settled, because it explains a good deal that came after. It had been laid down in council that I should receive a daily allowance of meat and drink sufficient for the support of one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight of the emperor's subjects; which is the number you get when you divide my height by theirs and cube it, and is very exact. But Reldresal, who was then still a clerk, and was sent by someone to say it, observed in the margin of the Treasury's paper that the persons of that country eat at their own beat, which is to say twelve times as often as I do; that a thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight of them would therefore be, in a day of mine, twenty thousand seven hundred and thirty-six; and that I should starve. The paper went to the High Treasurer, who read it, as I am told, twice, and said that it was a refinement which the Treasury could not afford. The allowance stood. I was hungry in that country from the first week to the last, and I never complained of it, because I was told what it had cost to settle.

The High Treasurer was named Flimnap. I should say something of him, since I shall have to say a good deal. He was by general consent the greatest dancer upon the rope in the whole of the Reach, and was therefore, after the emperor, the most considerable person in it; for in that country the offices of state are given, and confirmed from year to year, upon the rope. There is a thread, a little thicker than a common thread, stretched at about two feet from the ground, and the candidates for an office, or for the keeping of one, dance upon it before the emperor and the court, and he who leaps highest without falling has the place. The prime minister himself must dance, they told me, every year, to show that he has not lost his activity; which, by my own reckoning, was about once a month.

I was shown it on the third week. They set up the thread in the road before the temple, so that I might lie upon my side and see; and I did, and I saw nothing. That is to say, I saw a very small man step upon a thread, and then I saw him on the ground at the other end of it, bowing, and I understood that something had occurred between the two which my eye had not been fast enough to take. They were so kind as to repeat it for me. A person who is ready for it, and who is allowed to lie with his cheek upon the ground, may see, at about the fifth repetition, that the dancer leaps, and turns, and lands, and leaps again, perhaps nine times, upon a thread that is wavering from the first leap; and that he has done it, to him, with the greatest deliberation, in the time that I take to draw one breath. I took the Treasurer's wrist, when the dance was over, by laying the tip of my little finger upon it where he sat; and it was at nine hundred and falling; I judged, from the rate of the falling, that it had been something over eleven. I do not think that I have ever been so frightened for a man who was smiling.

There is a second contest, also before the emperor, for the three silken threads, which are given as honours: blue, red and green. The emperor holds a stick, at a hand's height from the ground, between two pages, and the candidates run up one at a time and either leap over it or creep beneath, as the stick rises and falls; and the three who come off best are given the threads, and wear them girdled twice about the middle. I observed that nearly every great person at the court had one. I asked Reldresal, who by this time sat on my hand for an hour in the afternoon to be taught my language in return, what was said of a person who had none; and he told me that it was said of such a person that he was waiting. I observed, too, that the clever ones had found that creeping paid better than leaping, since the stick, being held by pages, was very seldom as high at the end as at the beginning; and I took it that this was the thing that was properly being tested.

It was not long before I was asked, in my turn, to divert the court; and I will set down what they asked of me, since it was the first service that I did in that country. His majesty desired that I should stand like a Colossus, with my legs as far apart as I could conveniently place them; and he then ordered his general to draw up the troops, three thousand foot and a thousand horse, in close order, and to march them beneath me, with the drums beating and the colours flying and the pikes advanced. I did it. I stood, with my feet apart upon the road before the temple, and I looked straight before me at a hill, as I had been told to do, and I did not look down; and the army went through. I felt it, between my knees, as one feels water. It was very orderly, and took, by my watch, forty-one minutes.

I mention the forty-one. I had not thought it a long time; it is not a long time to stand. It was Reldresal who told me afterwards, when I had come to be told things, that it had been, to the army, the better part of a day: that they had marched, in the order of the review, from the dawn and the first drum to the evening, and that there had been two halts for meat. They had expected me to give out; the great, by what was known of them, could not hold a pose for ten minutes; and I had stood, for the whole of their day, as a mountain stands, with my eyes upon a hill. That was the thing that the emperor had wished to see. It was the first time in my life that I was ever admired for a quality that I could not help; and I will say that I found it a very odd feeling, and rather a pleasant one, and I was uncomfortable with it by the evening.

Within a month the children of the capital had decided that I was a hill. The order forbade it, and was read to them daily; but a child at that beat is not subject to an order that takes ten minutes to say, and they came at the changing of the guard, in twos and threes, and went up my arm. I let them. I lay without moving and counted them, and was sorry that I could not take their wrists, which would have wanted a finger finer than I have. There was one among them, a girl, who could not have been more than three by their reckoning, and who stood each afternoon upon the first joint of my thumb and said to me, with the greatest care, in my own language, which she had got from Reldresal's lessons through a hole in a wall: "Good day, Man-Mountain." She said it very clearly. By their reckoning she was three when I came, and she was twelve when I left; and I have thought since that she was the only person in the Reach who ever greeted me at my own pace.

I should say, too, how I slept. I lay in the temple at night with my feet outside the door, and the watch went by in the road with their lanterns, over my toes; and I slept, as I have always done, in about four hours, which to them was two days. It was told me afterwards that I snored. I had not known it. It appears that a snore, at the pace at which I breathe, comes to them as the one sound of mine that they can hear properly, being slow; and the people on the west side of the city, who were within hearing of the temple, took to setting their day by it. They said that it was like having a very large and patient clock in the next room. The old ones said that they slept better. I have been given to understand, by persons I trust, that when I was gone the west side was a long time getting used to the quiet.

I come now to the matter of my liberty, which was settled in the second month. I had begged it on all occasions, humbly, upon my knees, and I had been told on each that it was not to be done, but that I should be well treated; and I had begun to think that it never would be done. But the emperor, who had had a great many hours to think of it, and a great many to be told what I cost, had the council sit upon it, and the council prepared a paper, which was brought to me by Reldresal. He had been promoted for it, I believe, for he now wore a thread. I was to be given my liberty upon certain conditions; and they came in a very long document, from which I shall give only the sense.

I was not to depart the Reach without his majesty's licence under the great seal. I was not to come into the metropolis without express order; at which times the inhabitants should have two hours' warning, to keep within their doors, which was ten minutes of mine, and which I thought, upon the whole, long. I was to confine my walking to the principal roads, and not to lie down in a meadow or a field of corn; and in walking I was to take the utmost care not to trample upon the bodies of any of his loving subjects, nor upon their horses or carriages, nor to take any subject into my hands without his own consent. If an express required extraordinary dispatch, I was to carry in my pocket the messenger and his horse a six days' journey, once every moon, and return the said messenger, if so required, safe to the imperial presence. I was to be the ally of the emperor against his enemies in the island of Blefuscu. I was, at my leisure, to be aiding and assisting to his workmen, in raising certain great stones; and I was to make, within two moons, an exact survey of the circumference of his dominions, by computation of my own paces round the coast.

And I was never to raise my beat above one hundred. That article came near the end of the paper. I had thought, until I heard it read, that it was an odd provision; and then I saw what it was. It stated that the said Man-Mountain should at no time quicken himself, nor lower his beat below forty, on pain of being held an enemy to the Reach; and that, in token thereof, he should hold out his wrist, once in each day, to be taken by an officer of the Treasury. They had thought of what I might be if I were to run up to their own. A man of my size who had come to seven hundred and twenty would have been, to them, a thing that moves before it is seen; and they were right to be afraid of it, and had written it into the paper as plainly as they could. I said that I was content. And it occurred to me, while Reldresal was reading the rest, that it was a very long time since anyone had taken my wrist, and that I should not mind it.

The last article was the allowance, and it was the one that had been settled in the first week, at one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight; and I signed it with a very good grace. The form of the oath, in that country, requires that the person who swears hold his left foot in his right hand, and place the middle finger of his right hand upon the crown of his head, and the thumb upon the tip of his right ear. It is the posture of a man who can do nothing else while he holds it, and I believe that is its purpose. I took it, and the court looked on from the ground, and I swore; and it was a longer oath than I expected. I found, in the middle of it, that I could not feel my own wrist. I had not known till then how often in the day I touched it, nor what I did when I did not; and for the whole length of that oath I did not know my own beat. I found that I minded, a good deal more than I should have thought.

When it was done the chain was struck off. It took them the greater part of an hour, by my watch, to undo the thirty-six padlocks, going from one to the next with a ladder, and each of the persons concerned came down at the end of it and bowed, as if there had been nothing in it but a favour. I heard, as it fell from my ankle, a sound that the people made. It was a shout; but it was in their own register, and came to me as a thing that I felt in my teeth. I stood up. I think that it was the first time since the road that I had stood without something upon my chest, and I put out my hand, to try the air, as one does; and the whole of the front rank, all of them in their best, and all of them quicker than I could follow, were upon their faces in the dust before my hand had gone a foot. I did not move it any farther.

I walked out of the temple that afternoon, upon the road, which was a principal one. It was very strange to be able to go where I liked. I went for about a mile with a hundred thousand persons going before and behind me, at a respectful distance, running; and when I sat down on a bank at the edge of a field, where I was permitted to sit, the whole of them stopped, a long way off, in a line, like a tide. And it was only in the evening, going back to the temple for the night, that I found that I had forgotten something. I had not taken my own beat since the oath. It was the first time in my life that I had been so long without it, and I had not noticed. I laid my wrist against the watch, and it was sixty, and I stood for some time upon the road without being able to tell whether that was good news.

The author sees Mildendo, and looks into the palace from two stools. He is taken daily by an officer of the Treasury. The principal secretary for private affairs tells him, at his pace, of the heels and the eggs and the fleet of Blefuscu; and the author offers his service.

The first thing I asked for, when I had my liberty, was leave to see Mildendo; and the emperor gave it me readily, with a charge that I should do no hurt either to the inhabitants or to their houses. The people had notice of my design by a proclamation. They were given, as the article required, two hours; and I did not understand, until I stood at the western gate with my coat in my hands, what two hours are to a city that is to be walked through. They are a day: time to be told, and to dress, and to compose the face. The city had used it.

The wall that goes round Mildendo is two feet and a half in height and at least eleven inches in breadth, so that a coach and four may be driven along the top of it, and it is strengthened by towers at every ten feet. The city within is a square of five hundred feet to the side, divided into four quarters by two great streets that cross in the middle, and each of these is five feet wide. I stepped over the gate. I had taken off my coat, because the skirts of it would have had the eaves from every house in the street; it took me four minutes to take it off with decency, which was, to those who were waiting at their doors, the better part of an hour; and I went in, as I went everywhere in that country, sideways, in my waistcoat, with my elbows held in against my ribs and my hat in my hand.

I had supposed, from the order, that I should be passing through a city shut up. It was not shut up. It was a city that had been given a day's notice that it was to be looked at, and had dressed. At every door there stood a person in his best clothes, composed, with his hands in front of him; at every window of the five storeys there was a face, and I could see that it had been arranged. There was a man at the corner of the second street with a child on his shoulders who had been told, I think, to be good, and was. There was a woman at a window who had put on, as I judged, everything she owned, and had had time to put it on twice. I have been looked at by a good many persons in my life, and I had not before been looked at by a city that had rehearsed. I understood as I went along that to stand quite still for the ten minutes I took was, for each of them, two hours; that they were doing it for me, in good order, which I had not asked and could not have refused; and I trod with a care that I find I cannot describe, as one does in a house where someone is ill.

The lanes and alleys I could only look into, from above, as a man looks down a well; I saw that they were full, and that the people in them were standing in the same way. And all the while, from behind the doors and the shutters, where the work of the city went on as it always does, there came up to me the noise of it, which I had not expected and did not at first know. It was a hiss, very fine and very even, with a kind of rattle in it. I knew it at last: it was rain working across a deck from the bow. It was five hundred thousand persons speaking at seven hundred and twenty to the minute, and it was the only part of my visit to Mildendo that had not been arranged for me.

The emperor's palace stands in the middle, where the two streets cross, behind a wall of two feet in height, which stands twenty feet off from the buildings round it, so that I could step over the wall with ease. But the outer court was five feet high at the roof, and the walls of it, though of hewn stone and four inches through, would not have borne me, and I could not have gone over without taking some part of it with me. His majesty was very desirous that I should see the magnificence of his palace; and I told him that I could, if I might have three days, which I should spend in his park with my knife. I had my knife: it had been given back to me, with my razors and my case of lancets, on the day of my liberty, the seal being broken in my presence; the pistol and the powder were kept. I do not think that anyone told the emperor what three days came to. They came to thirty-six of his, which is five weeks and a day, and he waited the whole of them without sending to ask how the work did; and I have thought since that it was the best thing I ever saw done by a person at the head of a state.

I cut down with it some of the largest trees in the royal park, which is a hundred yards from the city, and made of them two stools, each three feet high and strong enough to bear me. When the people had had notice a second time, I went through the city with a stool in each hand. At the side of the outer court I stood on one of them, and lifted the other over the roof, and set it down in the space between the first court and the second, which is eight feet wide; and I stepped across to it, and drew the first after me with a hooked stick; and so, as one walks a pair of dividers over a chart, I went over the buildings, and came into the inmost court. There I lay down upon my side, and put my face to the windows of the middle storeys, which had been left open for the purpose.

I saw the most splendid rooms that I have ever looked into; and I will say what splendid is at that size. It is a floor which you could cover with your thumb; hangings of which you cannot see the weave; a lamp that I took at first for a pin with a head to it. I saw the empress and the young princes, each in their several lodgings, with the chief of their attendants about them. And the empress, when she saw my face at her window, did what I had been told that she would not do, and put out her hand to me to be kissed.

I had to think how. A sigh of mine, at that range, would have taken the fan from her other hand and, I believe, a good part of the hair from her head; and the distance between my mouth and her hand was a matter of inches. I stopped my breath, and brought my lips to it as I should have brought a probe to an eye, and I kissed it; and I felt against my lower lip a thing that I can only compare to a moth against the glass of a lantern. It took me, I suppose, twelve seconds. It was not until I was drawing back that I understood what the twelve seconds had been to her: something above two minutes of her time, with her arm held out, in the full light of the window, and the smile on. She had held the whole of it without a tremor. I have seen men on a yard-arm in a gale who could not have kept a face for two minutes, and I bowed as low as the window allowed, which was not far.

I will not go on with the rooms. I am keeping the rest of what I saw in that empire for a larger work, which is now almost ready for the press, and which will contain the history, the laws, the learning, the trees and the animals, and in general everything that I had not the beat to see. [Margin: Mrs. Gulliver's copy has here, in pencil, two words: not sent. No such work has come to the Press, nor, so far as the editor has been able to learn, to any other. R.S.]

Every noon after the day of my liberty an officer of the Treasury came to the temple to take my wrist. It was in the articles, and it was kept to the letter. He was a young man in the grey sash of that office; he came with two men and a ladder, and with a brass instrument in a box no larger than a snuffbox, which had a foot that went upon the plate of the wrist and a thread that shook against a scale. I lay down on the step of the temple with my hand open, and he went up the ladder, and set the foot of the instrument on my wrist, and read the scale with his eye an inch from it. He took it five times and wrote the mean in a ledger. It was a better instrument than any I have owned, and I should have given a good deal to carry one in my case. He did not look up. In the whole of my time in that country I do not think he once looked at my face.

I had supposed, all my life, that my beat was sixty, in the way that one supposes one's name is Gulliver. The young man wrote, in the first fortnight, fifty-nine, sixty-one, sixty, fifty-eight, sixty-two, sixty-one, sixty; and I was surprised how much I varied. I took myself at the watch every evening, as I have always done, and was sixty; I took myself at noon on the sixth day, with a ladder at my arm and a foot upon my wrist and an open ledger and a person who did not look at me, and was sixty-one. I have seen the beat of a patient go up by eleven in the time that it takes to say good morning. I had not known that I was a patient. Beside each number the young man wrote, in a very small hand, what I had been doing, which was sitting, or walking, or eating, or asleep; and I read it upside down, having learned in my profession to read what the physician beside me is writing. I asked him why. He said, to the ledger, that a number by itself was not anything. They were the first words he had said to me, and the only ones; and I found that I agreed with him.

When he had done he shut the book in a small case and locked it, and went down the ladder, and the men took the ladder away. I was told that the book was shown to the High Treasurer on the first of every moon, and that he read it, as he read everything, twice.

About a fortnight after this, Reldresal came to the temple at dusk. He was by this time Principal Secretary for Private Affairs, having gone up three steps in the time that I had been going round the courts; he wore two threads, the blue and the red; and he came attended by one servant only, who was the boy with the drum. The boy had grown. I had not seen him do it. In my first week, at the Slower's elbow, he had been so small that the drum was nearly the size of him; he was now a head taller than it, and carried it as persons carry a thing they have been given charge of. Reldresal ordered his coach to wait at the end of the road, and asked me for an hour's audience, which I readily granted, on account of his quality and of the many good offices he had done me at court. I offered to lie down, that he might the more easily reach my ear; but he chose rather to be held in my hand. I took him up. He sat down on my palm with his legs crossed and one hand upon my thumb, and said a word to the boy, which I heard as a fine quick scratching, like a pen in a hurry; and the boy sat down on the step, and set the drum between his knees, and began to beat it at sixty.

He did not begin at once. He was going under, and I watched him do it. He had no chair, and no cord about the chest; he had my thumb to lean against; and I felt him, through the pad of it, let himself down, hand over hand, like a man lowering a weight on a rope, until it hung level with the drum. It took about four minutes. When he spoke it was in the voice of a person who has the stone in his hand and means to put it down gently; and he said, in his first sentence, that he had been told to say what he had come to say, and that he would say it once, because he did not think that he could do it twice.

He began, as he did everything, with the order of the evils. The Reach, he said, was in a state that appeared very flourishing to strangers, and he did not doubt that it appeared so to me; but it laboured under two diseases, a faction at home and an enemy abroad, and he would take the first first. For some seventy moons the Reach had been two parties, the Tramecksan and the Slamecksan, who told one another apart by the heels of their shoes, the one high and the other low. Seventy moons is something under six months of mine; the parties had been founded, as near as I could make it, about the time that I sailed. The High Heels held that theirs was the heel of the ancient constitution. The Low Heels held the offices. The emperor had resolved to employ none but Low Heels in the government, as I must have remarked, and wore his own a drurr below the lowest at his court; a drurr being the fourteenth part of an inch, which was explained to me as the smallest quantity that a person of that country can feel in his heel by the end of an afternoon. The two parties would not eat together, nor drink, nor talk. To persons who eat twelve times as often as I do that is a great many meals not shared, and I was told that in some quarters the Reach had become very quiet. The High Heels were the more numerous; but the power, he said, was wholly on our side; and I noticed the our. I had not been asked.

He added, in a lower voice, which cost him a good deal, that his imperial highness the heir had, it was feared, some leaning to the High Heels; at least it could plainly be seen that one of his heels was higher than the other, which gave him a hobble in his gait. I had seen the prince, from my second stool. I had taken the hobble for a badly set fracture of the thigh, such as one sees in the forecastle after a fall from the shrouds, the left leg being shorter than the right by, I judged, a drurr and some part of another. I said nothing. It had not been put to me as a symptom.

Here he rested. The drum went on. The sun, which had been upon the roof of the Treasury when he began, had got down to its chimney, and the boy did not look at it. When Reldresal took up again, with the hand upon my thumb beginning to tremble, it was with the second evil: that the Reach was threatened with an invasion from Blefuscu, which was the other great empire of the universe, almost as large and powerful as his majesty's own. As for me, the philosophers were still divided. They did not hold with other countries peopled by creatures of my size; they had worked it out that a hundred of me would eat the Reach down to the roots inside a season, and had concluded that I must have fallen from the moon, or from one of the lesser stars; and their histories, which ran back six thousand moons, knew of no country but the two. Six thousand moons is a little over forty-one years of mine. I was, within a few years, the age of their world, and I did not say so.

The war, he said, had been going on for six-and-thirty moons, and was about eggs. I give it as he gave it, with the whole of his weariness behind each sentence, and I will not say that I understood it better at the end than at the beginning. In the old days an egg was broken, before it was eaten, at its larger end; every one agreed upon that. Then the grandfather of the present emperor, who was a boy at the time, was served an egg so broken, and cut his finger on the shell; and the boy's father, who was then emperor, to spare the Reach any more of it, commanded that every egg in his dominions should be broken at the small end, under heavy penalties. By my reckoning, as I worked it out afterwards, the finger was cut about six years before I sailed. I might have dressed it. The people would not have the law. There were six rebellions on account of it, in which one emperor lost his life and another his crown; and each time that one was put down, the exiles went across the water to Blefuscu, whose emperors had paid for most of them. Eleven thousand persons had chosen to be put to death rather than break their eggs at the smaller end. I asked him whether that was for the egg. He said that it was for the end.

The question had been argued, he said, in some hundreds of large volumes, of which those of the Big-endians, as the party of the large end was called, had long been forbidden; and the Big-endians by law could hold no office. The emperors of Blefuscu, whose people were all of that party, had written more than once to complain that it was a schism in religion, and an offence against the fifty-fourth chapter of the Blundecral, which is their scripture, wherein the prophet Lustrog commands all true believers to break their eggs at the convenient end. Reldresal thought it a strain upon the text, since the text did not say which end was the convenient one; and he said, with a little of the dryness that I had begun to associate with the second thread, that he supposed it was left to every man's conscience, or to the chief magistrate's, and that the whole difficulty lay in telling which.

In six-and-thirty moons of war the Reach had lost forty ships of the line, and a great many smaller vessels, with thirty thousand of its best seamen and soldiers; the enemy's loss was thought to be somewhat greater. It had begun, by my calendar, about a fortnight before I came ashore. I had arrived in it as a man arrives in the middle of a sentence. Thirty thousand is a number that I can say. I have only seen twelve; I took their beats in their last hour, and I remember what it is to hold a wrist and feel it go down. I did not try to think of thirty thousand.

They had now, he said, equipped a numerous fleet, and were on the point of a descent upon the Reach; and his imperial majesty, placing great confidence in my courage and strength, had commanded him to lay the whole account before me. That was all of it. He had said it in an hour and ten minutes by my watch, with two rests; and he sat in my hand with his two threads, the sun gone from the chimney and the first lamps lit along the road and the drum still going, and said nothing more.

I said what I could, and I said it slowly, by the drum, since I had no wish to cost him more than I must. I said that it would not become a stranger to meddle with parties; that I did not know the question; that if I were asked which was the convenient end of an egg I should break it at whichever end the person across the table broke his, so as not to begin a conversation. But I could see a fleet. I said that I would do what I was able, against persons who were coming to kill those among whom I had been set down, and that I would do it at the hazard of my life. I meant the road, and the girl on my thumb; but I said it to the Principal Secretary as a point of state, and he took it as one, and bowed to me from my palm as far as a man can bow who is sitting on one.

He asked to be put down. I put him on the step, and he stood there a moment, as the Slowers do when they come up, with his hands open at his sides, shaking; and then he said, in my voice, at my pace, the last thing he had to say, which was: I have never said so much at once. It was the first sentence of the evening that sounded like himself. Then he said something in his own, which I did not catch, to the boy; and went down the road to the coach at a speed I could not follow, and was gone while I was still looking at where he had been.

The boy stayed. He had been told, I suppose, to bring the drum, and no one had said what was to be done with it after. He sat on the step with it between his knees and beat sixty, quietly, to nobody; and I did not tell him to stop. It was a quarter of an hour by my watch, which was three hours for him, and he did not once lose the time. I sat in the dusk outside the temple, and listened. It was the first occasion since the road on which anyone had kept my time for me, and I let him.

The author, by an unusual stratagem, prevents an invasion. He is made a nardac, and is taken at the wrist before the court. He will not make a province of Blefuscu. Ambassadors arrive, and he is invited to visit.

I had not yet seen Blefuscu, and I meant that it should not see me. It is an island to the north-east of the Reach, parted from it by a channel eight hundred yards across; all traffic between the two empires had been forbidden since the war began, on pain of death, and our emperor had laid an embargo on every vessel that floated. I kept away from that side of the coast, for I did not wish the enemy's ships to carry home word of what had come ashore on the other. And meanwhile I turned over in my mind what I had been told, and came to a project, which I laid before his majesty: it was to take the fleet. The scouts reported it at anchor in the harbour, ready to sail on the first fair wind. I asked the oldest seamen about the channel, which they had often sounded, and they told me that in the middle, at high water, it came to about six feet of my measure, and elsewhere to a good deal less.

I walked to the north-east shore and lay down behind a hillock, and took out my pocket perspective glass. I had it, and a pair of spectacles with it, in a private pocket of the jerkin, beside the book of wrists, where, as I have said, the searchers were afraid to look. I saw the harbour of Blefuscu, and in it about fifty men of war and a great number of transports; and I saw it as one sees a basin of water that has been struck, which is to say that I saw it shiver. There were crews on every deck, and the place was at its work; but the work was at seven hundred and twenty, and the glass could not hold it. I could make out the masts, like a stand of reeds, and a quivering over them, and nothing else. I came away with the shiver still in my eyes.

I gave orders, for which I had a warrant, for the strongest cable that the Reach could make, and for a great quantity of bars of iron. I gave them at noon on the temple step, to a clerk who wrote them down, and I did not think of them again until I came out the next morning and found the heap. It stood as high as my knee. The cable was about as thick as packthread, and the bars the length and size of a knitting-needle, and there was more of both than I had asked for; and I learned afterwards that the rope-walks of the Reach had been going for what was to them a month, and that the smiths had not slept. I had given an order in a sentence. I had not understood that when the Man-Mountain asks for rope, a nation runs. I have been careful since about what I ask for, though in my own country no one has run.

I trebled the cable, to make it stronger, and for the same reason I twisted three of the iron bars together and bent the ends into a hook; and having thus made fifty hooks and fifty cables I carried them to the north-east coast over my shoulder. My fingers were too large for the work, and I did it by feel, as one makes a knot in the dark, with my tongue between my teeth, and it took me the rest of that day.

On the day after, I went down to the water about half an hour before high tide, and put off my coat, my shoes and my stockings, and walked into the sea in my leather jerkin. I waded as fast as I could, and in the middle I swam about thirty yards, until I felt ground again. It took me less than half an hour. I should say what that was to the shore ahead of me. It was six hours. It is time enough for a garrison to be roused, and fed, and drawn up; and the Blefuscudians had it. They had six hours in which to see a mountain walk out into their channel, at the pace of a man who is wading, and they had been very sensible about it.

When I came up out of the water into the harbour the ships were empty. The crews had gone over the sides in the first hour, I was told, and ashore, with their officers; they had been standing on the beach ever since, in order, looking at me: some thirty thousand, I should think. I had been given that number in the temple, and had not tried to think of it. It was standing on a beach, alive, and it was looking at me. They had taken their time. I stood among the masts, in the water to my waist, and I saw that one man had been left aboard each ship to keep the anchor-watch, and that every one of them was standing in the bow with his hand upon the cable, like a person guarding a thing already lost. I did not look at them for long.

I took my tackle, and made a hook fast in the hole at the prow of each ship, and tied all the cords together at the end. While I was at it the enemy shot at me from the beach. They shot several thousand arrows, and they shot them at twelve to my one, so that for every breath I took there was a volley in the air; and a great many stuck in my hands and face. It was not that they hurt, though they smarted. It was that I could not see them come. They arrived like a change in the weather. My great fear was for my eyes, which I should certainly have lost if I had not thought of an expedient. I took out the spectacles, and fastened them upon my nose as strongly as I could; and thus armed I went on with my work, and the arrows that came at my face struck the glasses with a sound like hail on a window, and did them no harm, beyond knocking them a little crooked.

When I had made all the hooks fast I took the knot in my hand and began to pull, and not a ship would stir; they were all held by their anchors. This was the boldest part of my enterprise, and I had not known that it was there. I let go the cord, and, leaving the hooks where they were, I took my knife to the cables of the anchors, one after the other. I will say that before I cut each I waited until the man in the bow had gone over the side, which he did without being asked, as soon as he saw the knife, and I counted fifty heads in the water. I took two hundred shots in the face and hands in doing it. Then I took up the knotted end of my own cables, and drew after me, with a great deal of ease, fifty of the largest ships of war of the empire of Blefuscu.

They saw it done. For a moment they did not understand: they had seen me cut the cables, and thought that I meant only to let the ships drift and fall foul of one another; and then they saw the whole fleet move, in order, with me at the head of it. And then they made a sound. It came off the beach as a single note, very high and very long, and I felt it in my teeth. I had felt it once before, on the day that my chain was struck off; and I want to say that I could not tell the two apart. I should not have known which it was if I had not been the cause.

When I was out of danger I stopped, and picked the arrows out of my hands and face. I took out two hundred and six, since I could not help counting; and I washed the places in the sea, which stung, and had to be content. Then I waited an hour for the tide to fall a little, and waded through the middle with my cargo behind me, and so came back to the royal port of the Reach.

The emperor and his whole court were on the shore. They had been there, I learned afterwards, since I went in, which was by their reckoning more than a day. Chairs had been brought, and food, and they had slept in turns; the emperor had not sat down. The last six hours of the waiting had been spent in watching the ships come on in a great half-moon, with no sign of me, and in believing that I was drowned and that what they saw was the enemy coming for them. When I came into hearing in the shallows I held up the end of the cable, and cried out in a loud voice, Long live the most puissant emperor of Lilliput. It is a sentence that takes me about four seconds. It took them, I think, forty-eight seconds; and I am told that in the course of them the face of the emperor was seen to do a thing which no one at court could afterwards describe.

He received me at the landing with every compliment, and created me a nardac upon the spot, which is the highest title of honour in that country. The form of it is that the person so created is taken at the wrist, before the court, and the number read out, so that all may know at what pitch he was when he was honoured. The young man with the ladder was sent for, from wherever he had been kept waiting for more than a day, and he went up it and set the foot of his instrument on my wrist and read the scale aloud. It was seventy-nine. It was the highest that the book had yet had from me. He did not look up; and the emperor said, Let it be written. Then I was permitted, which I had not expected, to lay the tip of my smallest finger on the wrist of the emperor, where he sat, and tell the court what I found. It was seven hundred and ten. I had not touched it before. It was perfectly steady, as a stone is steady that has been warmed in the hand, and I said the number, and the court wrote that down also.

Two days later his majesty desired that I would take some other opportunity of bringing the rest of the enemy's ships into his ports. He desired it himself. He spoke to me at my pace, which I had been told he could not do; I believe that he had practised it, in some room of the palace where no one was to see; and it cost him something, and he did not let it show, but I noticed that he used very few words, and that each was a stone. He said that the fifty were very well. He wanted the rest, and Blefuscu with them: he would have it made a province, and governed by a viceroy; he would have the Big-endian exiles who had fled there delivered up; and he would have the people compelled to break their eggs at the smaller end. Then, he said, the Reach would have one emperor and one end, and he would be the sole monarch of the whole world. I took the last for a figure of speech. I laughed, a little, in the way that one does; and the emperor did not; and I understood that it was not a figure.

I said that I could not. I tried to say why, and I said it as I said everything, at my own pace, so that it took about as long as his patience. I said that I had taken the fleet because it was coming to kill the persons among whom I had been put down; that I had done it gladly; but that I would never be the instrument of bringing a free and courageous people into slavery. I am told that it was well put. I have thought since that it was the shortest speech I made in that country, and the only one that cost me anything. He said nothing at all. I thought of his wrist, as I had had it under my finger on the shore, and I believed that it was seven hundred and ten still.

He raised the matter, in his artful way, at the council, where I was told that some of the wisest appeared by their silence to be of my opinion; and silence in that country is a considerable thing, since they eat and sleep and talk at such a rate that a person who says nothing for as long as I take to draw a breath has said nothing twelve times. Others, who were my enemies in secret, could not forbear expressions which touched me by a side-wind. This was the beginning of an intrigue between his majesty and a handful of ministers, maliciously bent against me, which broke out in less than two months, and had like to have ended in my destruction. I did not know it then.

About three weeks after the exploit a solemn embassy arrived from Blefuscu, with humble offers of a peace, which was soon concluded, upon terms very advantageous to our emperor, and which I shall not trouble the reader with. Three weeks of mine is eight months of theirs, and that is long enough to learn to ask. There were six ambassadors, with a train of about five hundred persons, and their entry was very magnificent, suitable to the grandeur of their master and the importance of their business. They had brought three Slowers with them, who had been trained upon the road, and whom I met with the particular respect that one pays to persons who have done a thing they were not made for.

When the treaty was finished, in which I did them several good offices by the credit that I had, or appeared to have, at court, their excellencies, who had been privately told how much I had been their friend, made me a visit in form. They began with compliments upon my valour and generosity, invited me to their kingdom in the name of the emperor their master, and desired that I would show them some proof of the great strength of which they had heard so many wonders. I was glad to oblige them. I took up the six of them together, with their coach, in one hand, and held them at the level of my face, and walked once round the square; and I set the coach down again, with the horses beside it, exactly where it had stood. I will not trouble the reader with the rest.

The eldest of them asked me when it was over, with a great deal of courtesy, and through a Slower who had a cold, whether it was true that I had in me a beat of a hundred. I said that it was in the articles that I should not go above it. He said that in Blefuscu a visitor was bound by no article but his own. I said that I would remember that. He seemed to think that I had said something else, and I let him.

I asked leave of the emperor to accept the invitation, and he gave it very graciously, but with a coldness that I could not account for. I did not think that it was about the leave. I took it for the weather. It was at the noon of that day that I noticed that the officer who came to take my wrist was not the young man; I think that it had been so for some days. He was an older man, in a heavier sash, and he looked at my face the whole time that the foot of the instrument was upon the plate, as one looks at a thing one has been told about. I did not ask what had become of the young one.

The empress's apartment is on fire, and the author is instrumental in saving the rest of the palace, by a method which is not forgiven. A word on how he lived, and on the persons of the Reach: their laws, and the manner of educating their children.

The next noon the older officer wrote down the number, and then, without lifting his eyes from the ledger, he spoke. He spoke in the voice of a person who has practised a single sentence, slowly, in a stairwell, and it cracked at the end of every word. The Treasurer and the Admiral, he said, say that you spoke too long with the ambassadors. They were the first words he had said to me. I asked him how long was too long. He said that it was longer than I would think, for a man who talks slowly. Then he put the instrument in its box and the box in its case, and went down the ladder; and I understood, from the care with which he did not look at me as he went, that he had done something, and had not meant me to know it.

I should say who they were. The Treasurer I have described; he paid for me, and had not forgiven the allowance, nor, I believe, the fifty hooks. The Admiral was a person named Bolgolam, a thin dark man with a great reputation for caution, who had lost forty ships to Blefuscu in three months of mine, and had then had fifty of the enemy's brought into his harbour in half an hour by a stranger who was not a sailor. I do not say that he was wrong to dislike me. I say that I had not thought, when I was doing it, what it would be to be the Admiral.

It was not long after this that I did the emperor, as I then thought, a very signal service. I was waked at midnight by a noise at the door of the temple, such as I had never heard there: a high thin note, like a great number of kettles, which went on, and neither rose nor fell. I lay some time without understanding it. It was the cry of many hundred persons, and they were all crying one word. The word was Burglum. It is the eleventh of the words for haste in that language, and the last; it means a haste with a fire in it; and it is hardly a word at all, since no one who uses it has the time to finish it, so that what I heard, at my pace, was the first third of it said some thousands of times. I was told afterwards that it had taken them eleven minutes of mine to wake me, which is above two hours of theirs; and that to the court, by the time I came, the fire had been a long night's work.

Four of the court, who had come through the crowd to my ear in the dark, told me, each in fewer words than the last, that I was to come to the palace at once; that the apartment of her imperial majesty was on fire; and that a maid of honour had fallen asleep over a romance. I was on my feet before the fourth had done. Orders had been given to clear the way, and the moon was up; and I came to the palace through the sleeping town without treading on anyone, by holding each foot in the air until I could see where it was to come down. They had set ladders against the walls of the apartment, and had a line of buckets that ran away into the dark toward the water; and the buckets were about the size of large thimbles. I stood and watched them go up the ladders, hand to hand, shining in the glare, a great many, very fast, and it was like watching a person breathe upon a coal. I might easily have smothered the fire with my coat. I had left my coat behind me in my haste, and had come in my jerkin.

I had drunk plentifully the evening before of a wine called glimigrim (the Blefuscudians call it flunec, but ours is the better sort), at a supper given for the ambassadors; and I note for the profession that it is very diuretic. By a piece of luck that I could not have contrived, I had discharged none of it. The heat that I took in coming near the flames, and in labouring at the buckets, set it to work.

I will not dwell upon the manner. I did it with all the decency the case allowed. I gave warning, as loudly as I could, to those upon the ladders, and waited until they were down: it was a matter of seconds with me, though I understood that it was minutes with them. Then I applied what I had, in the proper places; and in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished, and the rest of that noble pile, which had cost so many ages in erecting, was saved. I have been told that to those who stood in the courts below, with the shutters closed and their hats pulled down, it was a rain of thirty-six minutes; and that they took it as persons take a long rain, and that no one complained.

It was day when I had done, and I went back to the temple without waiting to be thanked, because I could not tell how his majesty would take the manner of the service. By the fundamental laws of the realm it is capital in any person, of whatever quality, to make water within the precincts of the palace. I was a little comforted, towards noon, by a message from the emperor that he would give orders to the grand justiciary for my pardon to be passed in form. It was not passed. I was privately told that the empress had conceived the greatest abhorrence of what I had done, and had removed to the farthest side of the court, resolved that the burnt wing should never be repaired for her use; and that in the presence of her chief confidants she had been heard to vow revenge. I thought of the window, and her hand held out for two minutes of her time, and the smile that she had not let fall. I should not have said it then; I will say it now: she was a person who held things.

When the older officer put the foot of his instrument to my wrist that noon, he said the number aloud, which the young man had done only the once, on the shore. Seventy-four, he said. He wrote it; and beside it, in the second column, he wrote four words, which were not about the noon: Palace. Night. Making water. I did not have to read them upside down. He held the page so that I could.

In the weeks that followed I lived as I had lived; and I should say how, since the reader has had so much of the Reach and so little of its guest. Three hundred tailors were employed to make me a suit of the country's clothes. They began upon a Monday, and it came to me on the Friday, and I was told, with an apology, that it had been five months in the making. It had been cut to the shape of sleeve that was in fashion when they began; by the time it reached me the sleeve had gone out, and come in, and gone out again. I put it on. I was told that it looked, upon the whole, very well, in the tone that one uses to a man who has been a long time at sea.

My dinner was dressed by three hundred cooks, who lived with their families in little huts built about the temple for the purpose, and who worked, as I understood, in relays, so that the meal I sat down to had been begun, by their reckoning, the season before. I took up twenty waiters in my hand and set them upon the table; a hundred more attended on the ground, some with dishes of meat and some with barrels of wine slung upon their shoulders; and those above drew up whatever I wanted by ropes and pulleys, as we draw a bucket in a well. A dish of theirs was a mouthful, and a barrel a draught; I ate a joint of mutton in two bites. The meals were good. I never sat down to one that was not, to the persons who had made it, a matter of some months; and I ate them, I think, with a gravity that they felt.

I have said that I mean to keep the description of that empire for the larger work, and I do mean to; but in the meantime I am content to give the curious reader a few general ideas. The persons of the Reach see with great exactness, but at no great distance, and they see a good deal in a moment. I watched a cook pluck a lark that was not so large as a common fly. I counted her at it. She plucked forty in the time that it takes to say good morning. I watched a young girl thread a needle that I could not see with a silk that I could not see; and what I saw was the girl, who bent over her hands for about a breath, and then looked up, with the face of a person who has done a thing in private.

They bury their dead with the head downward, because they hold that in eleven thousand moons all will rise again, and that in that time the earth, which they conceive to be flat, will turn upside down, and they will be found standing on their feet. The learned confess that this is absurd, but the practice continues, in compliance with the vulgar. Eleven thousand moons is seventy-six years of mine. I told Reldresal, who was sitting on my knee that afternoon, that in my country nobody was told when. He said that he had always thought we were a patient people.

There are laws in that country that I should like to see in my own, if only they were as well kept there as I am told they are in the Reach. The first relates to informers. A person who accuses another of a crime against the state does it at his own hazard. If the accused clears himself upon his trial, the accuser is put immediately to an ignominious death; the innocent person is paid fourfold out of the accuser's goods and lands, or, if those fall short, out of the crown's, for his time, his danger, his imprisonment and the cost of his defence; and the emperor gives him some public mark of favour, and his innocence is proclaimed through the whole city. I thought this a very good law. I told Reldresal so, as he sat on my knee. He said that it was very good. He said it twice, the second time more slowly, as if the first had not been heard; and then that it was not often needed, because accusations were seldom made in the Reach by persons who were not sure of them.

They think fraud a greater crime than theft, and punish it with death; for they say that a man of common understanding, with care, may keep his goods from a thief, but that honesty has no defence against superior cunning. They reward as they punish. Whoever can show that he has kept the law for seventy-three moons has a claim on the crown for a title, which is snilpall, and means legal, and a share of the revenue. I was told that it was a most generous provision, and that no one had ever claimed it, seventy-three moons being six months of mine, and nobody in the Reach having gone so long without a lapse of something. And ingratitude is a capital crime. They reason that whoever makes ill returns to his benefactor must be a common enemy to the rest of mankind, from whom he has received no obligation, and is therefore not fit to live. I did not remark upon that at the time.

In the education of their children they differ from every country I have heard of. They hold that the parents are the last persons who should be trusted with it. Every child, except those of cottagers and labourers, who keep theirs at home, their business being only to till the ground, is taken at twenty moons of age, which is about seven weeks of mine, to a public nursery of its sex and condition, and is brought up there until it is of age, which they reckon at thirteen of their years, or a little over a year of mine. A child, at that beat, is made in what is for us a season; and it is said that a father who has his affairs to attend to has not got a season to give; the labourers keep theirs, there being nothing in a plough that cannot be learned in the field.

Parents are allowed to see their children twice in the year, for an hour at a time. Twice in their year is twice in my month, and an hour of theirs is five minutes of mine. I saw one of these visits, from the terrace above the second nursery, on an afternoon when I was permitted to look in. A man and a woman, in the clothes that one puts on for a thing that matters, were let in at the gate by a mistress with a bunch of keys, and a boy of about six was brought to them; and they did not say anything that I could hear. The mother took one of his wrists and the father the other; and they stood so, the three of them, with their heads a little bent, for the whole of the hour, which I judged by my watch to be five minutes and some seconds; and at the end of it the mistress touched the woman's sleeve.

I had not seen anyone take a wrist for no purpose. I thought of my own boy, who was six when I sailed, and whose wrist I had taken on the Bristol Stairs, with the crew's bags at my feet and Mary pretending not to look. It had been sixty-eight. I had not thought it worth writing down. I did not go to the nursery again. I went back to the temple, where at noon a man with a ladder and a book was waiting to take my wrist, and to write down what I was doing.

The Treasurer complains of the cost of the author, and a great lady is vindicated. The author, informed that he is to be accused of high treason on the evidence of the Treasury's book, escapes to Blefuscu. His reception there.

I should have said, before the fire, that the emperor dined with me. He desired it himself, with the empress and the young princes, and I set them in chairs of state upon my table, over against me, with their guards about them; and the Treasurer came too, with his white staff, and stood behind his master's chair. They dined at their own beat. They had eaten, I suppose, six courses by the time I had cut up my meat, and they sat looking at me for the remainder with the exquisite courtesy of persons who have finished and are too well bred to say so. I observed that Flimnap looked upon me with a sour countenance, which I would not seem to regard; I ate more than usual, in honour of my country, and to fill the court with admiration.

I have reason to believe that this visit gave him an opportunity of doing me ill offices to his master. He had always been my secret enemy, though outwardly he caressed me more than was usual to the moroseness of his nature. He represented to the emperor the low condition of the treasury; that he was forced to take up money at a great discount; that I had cost his majesty above a million and a half of sprugs, which is their greatest coin of gold, about the bigness of a spangle; and that it would be advisable to take the first fair occasion of dismissing me. He had worked it out by the day. I do not doubt that it was a good deal.

I am obliged here to vindicate the reputation of an excellent lady, who was an innocent sufferer on my account. The Treasurer had taken a fancy to be jealous of his wife, on the word of some evil tongues who told him that her grace had conceived a violent affection for my person, and had once come privately to my lodging. This I declare to be a most infamous falsehood. She came often to the temple, but always publicly, and never without three more in the coach, who were her sister and her young daughter and some particular acquaintance; and there is no such thing as a short visit to the Man-Mountain, since a lady who sits an hour with me has sat twelve, and would have been missed at home before the second. When the guard at the door gave me notice I went out, and after paying my respects took up the coach and its two horses very carefully in my hand (for if there were six horses the postillion always unharnessed four) and set them down on a table where I had fixed a movable rim of five inches, to prevent accidents. I have had four coaches on that table at once, full of company, while I sat with my face leaned toward them and the coachmen drove gently round. I passed many an afternoon so very agreeably; and to them, I believe, it was a good deal of a season.

But I defy the Treasurer, or his two informers (I will name them, and let them make the best of it), Clustril and Drunlo, to prove that any lady ever came to me otherwise than in the open day. I should not have dwelt so long upon this if the reputation of a great lady were not so nearly concerned, to say nothing of my own; though I was then a nardac, which the Treasurer himself is not; for he is only a glumglum, a title inferior by one degree, as a marquis is to a duke in England. I allow that he went before me, by right of his post, through every door. These false informations made him show his lady for some time an ill countenance, and me a worse; and although he was at last undeceived and reconciled to her, I lost all credit with him, and found my interest decline very fast with the emperor himself, who was, indeed, too much governed by that favourite.

Before I give an account of my leaving that country I must tell the reader of an intrigue that had been two months forming against me, which in the Reach, I was afterwards told, is a long conspiracy, being two years. I had been all my life a stranger to courts, being unqualified for them by the meanness of my condition. I had read of them. I had not expected to find one in so remote a place, governed, as I thought, by such different maxims from ours; but I should have remembered that the offices of that country were given to the persons who were best at not falling off a string.

I was making ready to go and pay my respects to the emperor of Blefuscu when, one night, a closed chair was set down at the door of the temple, and a person in it asked for me without sending his name. The chairmen were dismissed. It was Reldresal. He had brought the boy with the drum; and he got out of the chair and stood on the step in the dark, with the boy beside him, and looked up at me, and did not go under. He did not speak at all. I understood it afterwards: a person who speaks at my pace in the stillness of a temple at night can be heard at a great distance, for a great while, and he had not come to be heard. I took him up in my hand, with the chair, and set them on the table, as was my custom, and lit a candle; and the boy sat down on the floor with the drum between his knees, and did not strike it; and Reldresal gave me a paper.

It was written from the top of the page to the bottom, in the hand like the track of a cricket, and it was a copy. I read it by the candle, with the spectacles that had stopped the arrows and my pocket glass held over the line, one column at a time, as a man reads a will. It was headed, Articles of Impeachment against Quinbus Flestrin, the Man-Mountain.

Article the first. Whereas by a statute made in the reign of his imperial majesty Calin Deffar Plune it is enacted that whoever shall make water within the precincts of the royal palace shall be liable to the pains and penalties of high treason; notwithstanding which the said Quinbus Flestrin, in open breach of the said law, under colour of extinguishing the fire kindled in the apartment of his majesty's most dear imperial consort, did maliciously, traitorously and devilishly, by discharge of his urine, put out the said fire; his beat at the noon following, as appears by the book of the Treasury, being seventy-four.

Article the second. That the said Flestrin, having brought the fleet of Blefuscu into the royal port, and being afterwards commanded by his imperial majesty to seize all the other ships of that empire, and reduce it to a province, and put to death all the Big-endian exiles and all the people who would not forsake the Big-endian heresy, did, like a false traitor, petition to be excused from the said service, upon pretence of unwillingness to force the consciences, or destroy the liberties and lives, of an innocent people; his beat on the four noons following, as appears by the said book, being fifty-one, whereby it is plain that he did it in cold blood.

Article the third. That whereas certain ambassadors arrived from the court of Blefuscu to sue for peace, he, the said Flestrin, did aid, abet, comfort and divert the said ambassadors, although he knew them to be servants to a prince lately in open war against his imperial majesty; and that in their company his beat was ninety-seven, which is within three of the limit set upon him in the articles of his liberty.

Article the fourth. That the said Flestrin, contrary to the duty of a faithful subject, is now preparing to make a voyage to the court of Blefuscu, for which he has received only verbal licence; and under colour of the said licence does falsely and traitorously intend to take the said voyage, and thereby to aid, comfort and abet the emperor of Blefuscu, so lately an enemy.

Article the fifth. That by the book of the Treasury, which is kept by sworn officers and admits of no dispute, the said Flestrin is a person who varies his beat at will, from fifty-one to ninety-seven in the space of a month, and from fifty-eight to seventy-nine in the space of a day; and that a person who has been seen to vary his beat by forty-six has shown that he can vary it by forty-one, which is all that is wanted to carry him from his common sixty beyond the hundred that by his oath he is forbidden to pass.

I read them twice. It was the fifty-one that stopped me. I had thought myself anxious in the days after the refusal; I had been told so by my own body, as I supposed, in the usual way, and I would have said ninety; and the book said fifty-one. I do not know to this day which of us was right. I had never before had to set my account of myself beside another's that had been written down.

To the articles was annexed, in another hand, a minute of the council; and it was this that Reldresal had risked his head to copy. I will give the sense of it. The Treasurer and the Admiral had asked for the most painful death that could be arranged: the temple to be fired at night, with the General standing by, and twenty thousand men, and poisoned arrows for my face and hands; and some of my servants to be given private orders about my shirts and sheets, which were to be dressed with a juice that would make me tear my own flesh. I worked out afterwards that twenty thousand archers at their pace could have emptied their quivers before I had lifted a hand to my face, and I found that it did not comfort me to know that the method had been chosen with care. For a long time there was a majority for it. The emperor, resolved if it were possible to spare my life, brought off the chamberlain at last.

Then Reldresal, commanded to give his opinion, gave it. He said that my crimes were great, but that there was room for mercy, which is the most commendable virtue in a prince; that his friendship with me was so well known that the board might think him partial; and that if his majesty would spare my life and only put out my eyes, justice would in some measure be satisfied, and all the world would applaud the lenity of the emperor and the fair proceedings of his counsellors. My strength would be none the worse. Blindness is an addition to courage, since it conceals dangers from us; the fear I had had for my eyes had been the greatest difficulty in taking the fleet; and it would be enough for me to see by the eyes of the ministers, as the greatest princes do. I read this with the author of it sitting two feet from me on the table, with his hands in his lap. I did not look at him.

The board would have none of it. The Admiral said that the services I had done were, by all true reasons of state, the aggravation of my crimes: a man who could put out a fire by that means in the empress's apartment (which he mentioned with horror) might at another time raise a flood by the same, and drown the palace; the strength that had brought the fleet over could carry it back on the first discontent; he had good reason to think me a Big-endian in my heart; and treason begins in the heart before it appears in deeds. The Treasurer said that the charge of keeping me would soon be insupportable, and that blinding would not mend it, since fowls that are blinded feed the faster and fatten sooner; and that the council, who were my judges, were already convinced in their consciences of my guilt, which was argument enough, without the formal proofs that the strict letter of the law requires.

The emperor, fully determined against a capital punishment, said that since the council thought the loss of my eyes too easy a censure, some other way might be added hereafter. And Reldresal, humbly desiring to be heard again, answered the Treasurer upon the cost. His excellency, who had the sole disposal of the revenue, could easily provide against that evil by lessening my establishment, gradually; so that for want of food I should grow weak and faint, and lose my appetite, and decay, and be consumed in a few months, which is five weeks of mine; after which, when the carcass was more than half diminished, the stench would be no danger, and five or six thousand of his majesty's subjects might in two or three days cut the flesh from the bones, and carry it off in carts to be buried in distant parts, leaving the skeleton as a monument for posterity.

Thus, by the friendship of the secretary, the affair was compromised. The project of starving me by degrees was strictly enjoined to be a secret; the sentence of putting out my eyes was entered on the books, none dissenting but the Admiral, who, being a creature of the empress, was perpetually instigated by her majesty to insist on my death. In three days, the paper said, the Principal Secretary would be directed to come to the temple and read the articles before me, and then to signify the great lenity and favour of his majesty and council, whereby I was condemned only to the loss of my eyes, which his majesty did not question that I would gratefully and humbly submit to; and twenty of his majesty's surgeons would attend, to see the operation well performed, by discharging very sharp-pointed arrows into the balls of my eyes as I lay on the ground. I am myself a surgeon. I noted that it was a competent operation. I noted the word lenity.

When I had finished I put the paper down on the table, and for some time I sat and looked at the candle. Then Reldresal put his hand upon my thumb, and went under. It took him four minutes, without the drum, and I felt every one of them through the pad of it. When he spoke it was three sentences, each of them a stone. I said it twice, he said. Do you remember. And then: They have put their names to it. You know the law. I said that I knew the law. He said, Then you know what they cannot allow. And he took his hand away, and his hand was shaking so that he held it in the other; and I understood what I had been told.

It had become the practice of this prince and his ministry (very different, I have been assured, from the practice of former times) that after the court had decreed any cruel execution, whether to gratify the monarch's resentment or the malice of a favourite, the emperor should make a speech to the whole council on his own lenity and tenderness, as qualities known and confessed by all the world; and the speech was at once published through the kingdom. Nothing frightened the people so much as those praises of his mercy, for it had been observed that the more they were enlarged upon, the more inhuman was the punishment, and the more innocent the sufferer. Yet I must confess that I, who was never designed for a courtier, was so ill a judge of things that I could not discover the lenity and favour of this sentence, but conceived it, perhaps erroneously, to be rather rigorous than gentle.

I sometimes thought of standing my trial; for although I could not deny the facts alleged in the articles, I hoped they might admit of some extenuation. But I had read many state trials, which I had always observed to end as the judges thought fit to direct, and I durst not rely on so dangerous a decision against such powerful enemies; and the book would be in the court, and the book would be read aloud. Once I was strongly bent on resistance. While I had my liberty the whole strength of that empire could hardly have subdued me, and I might easily with stones have pelted the metropolis to pieces. But a mountain at war is a very slow thing; I should have been a long time about it, and they a very short one; and I soon rejected the project with horror, remembering the oath I had made to the emperor, the favours I had received from him, and the high title of nardac that he had conferred on me. Neither had I so soon learned the gratitude of courtiers as to persuade myself that his majesty's present severities acquitted me of all my past obligations.

At last I fixed upon a resolution, and I do not say that I chose well. I have since seen how princes and ministers treat criminals less obnoxious than I was, and I think that if I had known it then I should have submitted with great alacrity to so easy a punishment, and kept my liberty, such as it is, in the dark; I owe my eyes to my own rashness and want of experience. But I had the emperor's licence to wait upon the emperor of Blefuscu, and before the three days were out I took the opportunity. I wrote a note to Reldresal, in letters a hand high on a sheet of the Treasury's paper, so that he would have to walk along the lines, saying that I was setting out that morning for Blefuscu, pursuant to the leave I had got; and without waiting for an answer I went down to the side of the island where our fleet lay.

I had looked for the girl as I came out of the temple, but there was no one on the step. She was twelve. They marry at that age in the Reach, and I had not been told whether she had, and had not asked, thinking, I suppose, that I should be told. I chose the largest man of war. I called to the watch, as I had learned to, and they went over the side. I tied a cable to the prow and lifted the anchors, and I stripped myself and put my clothes into the vessel with my coverlet, which I had carried under my arm; and drawing it after me, between wading and swimming, I came to the royal port of Blefuscu, where the people had long expected me.

They lent me two guides to direct me to the capital, which is of the same name as the island. I held them in my hands until I was within two hundred yards of the gate, and desired them to signify my arrival to one of the secretaries, and let him know that I waited there his majesty's command. I had my answer in about an hour: that his majesty, attended by the royal family and the great officers of the court, was coming out to receive me. An hour of mine is twelve of theirs, and I saw when they came out that they had used it. The emperor and his train got down from their horses, and the empress and the ladies from their coaches, all of them in their best, all of them composed; and I did not perceive that they were in any fright. I lay on the ground to kiss his majesty's and the empress's hands.

I told his majesty that I was come according to my promise, and with the licence of the emperor my master, to have the honour of seeing so mighty a monarch, and to offer him any service in my power consistent with my duty to my own prince. I said nothing of my disgrace. I had no regular information of it, and could suppose myself wholly ignorant of any such design; neither could I reasonably conceive that the emperor of the Reach would discover the secret while I was out of his power. In that, however, it soon appeared that I was deceived.

I shall not trouble the reader with the particulars of my reception, which was suitable to the generosity of so great a prince, nor with the difficulty I was in for want of a house and a bed. They gave me a field outside the gate, and a great deal of kindness, which I received sitting up; and at night I lay on the ground, wrapped in my coverlet, and slept. It was the first night since I came ashore that no one was listening to me sleep.

At noon nobody came. I had been awake for some hours before I understood what I was waiting for. I laid two fingers upon the plate of my wrist, as I have always done. It was sixty-three. There was nobody to write it down, and I did not know what to do with it; and I lay in the field for some time, holding it.

The author, in a field of Blefuscu, quickens for the first time. The young officer of the Treasury arrives with his instrument. The author finds a boat; an envoy comes from the Reach; and the emperor of Blefuscu, after thirty-six of his days, declines.

On the second day the emperor of Blefuscu sent to ask whether I wanted for anything, and I said that I wanted for nothing, which was not true; I wanted a house, and a bed, and a person with a ladder. I did not say so. I sat in the field outside the gate with my back against a hillock, in the sun, while the city went on at its work behind its wall with the sound of rain; and I thought of what the eldest ambassador had said, that in Blefuscu a visitor was bound by no article but his own. I had not forgotten it. I had been very carefully not thinking of it for a day and a half.

I had never tried. A man of my profession takes the beat that he finds; it is not his business to make it. I had never in my life asked mine to be other than it was, and I should not have known that I could, if the Treasury had not told me, in the fifth article, that I could; and I had spent eight months being forbidden to find out. At dusk of that second day, in the field, with the gate shut and the lamps coming out along the wall, I lay down on my back and laid two fingers on the plate of my wrist, and tried.

I do not know how to say how it is done. One holds the attention on the plate, and thinks of something quick: a wren on a rail; the street at Redriff on a fair-day; the hand of a person counting money. One does not will the beat. One asks it, as one asks a horse that has never been asked. For a long time it did nothing. It was sixty-four, and sixty-six. Then it went: seventy, and seventy-eight; and I felt it come up under my fingers like a thing coming up through water. At ninety I was afraid. At ninety-eight I stopped, for the length of two breaths, with my fingers on the plate and the articles of my liberty in my head, and the officer in his grey sash going up his ladder; and then I passed it, as one passes the door of a tavern that one has promised not to enter.

At a hundred and twelve the city came apart. I mean it as plainly as that. It had been all that time a shimmer with a hiss in it; and between one breath and the next, which was by now a long time, the shimmer settled, as sediment settles in a glass, and it was persons. There was a woman at a window of the third storey, leaning on her elbows with her chin in her hands. There was a mason on a scaffold with a stone in the air, not moving, and then moving, so that I could watch it go to its place. There was a child on a roof, running along the ridge with a kite. They were not still. They moved; but it was a movement that I could follow, as I follow my own, and I saw that they were not small, or not only. I saw that they were not hurried. That was what I had not understood in eight months. They were not a hurried people. It was I who was the slow thing in the world, and all that I had taken for haste had been ordinary life.

And the hiss had words in it. I heard, as one hears a conversation in the next room with one's head against the wall, a man at a stall say that the price of fish was a scandal; a woman say, quite cheerfully, that she would not be told; a child ask where its mother was. They were not speaking about me. Not one of them, in the whole length of what I heard, was speaking about me. I do not know what I had thought. I had thought, I suppose, that the noise of a city was a noise about the Man-Mountain.

It lasted, I think, for forty seconds. Then I came down all at once, as a bucket comes down a well when the rope is let go, and was sixty-nine, and sixty-two, and lay on my face in the grass and was sick. The shimmer was back on the wall. I lay there with my cheek on the ground. I had no right to be glad, and I was; and I was something else beside, which I did not at first know the name of, and which was that the Treasury had been right. The fifth article had said that a person who had been seen to vary his beat by forty-six could vary it by forty-one. I had varied mine by fifty-two, on my back in a field, in the dark. They had been right about what I could do. They had been wrong only about what I would.

At noon the next day a boy came across the field with a ladder on his shoulder. I saw him from a long way off, the field being open, and for some time I did not understand what I was looking at; and then I did, and I sat up with my heart going in a manner that I could have put a number to. He was a Blefuscudian boy of ten or eleven. And behind him, a little way, walking as persons walk who are afraid of being too fast, came a man in a grey sash with a small box in both arms.

It was the young man. I knew him by the box. I knew him, also, by his not looking up; he walked across the field with his eyes upon his feet, as he had gone up his ladder for four months; and he stopped beside my hand, which I had put out upon the grass without thinking, palm up, as I had always done at noon, and said something to the boy, who set the ladder against my wrist.

He went up. He set the foot of the instrument upon the plate and read the scale with his eye an inch from it; and when he had read it he did something that I had not seen him do. He looked up. He looked at my face for about as long as it takes to say a name, and I saw that he was twenty or so by their count, and that he had not slept, and that he was afraid of me, and that he had come anyway. Sixty-three, he said, in my language, in the voice of a person who has practised it on the way.

I was told to take it at noon, he said. Nobody told me to stop. And then, as I did not speak: they took me off the book the day after the ambassadors. On the day of the ambassadors I took you at eighty-one, and I wrote eighty-one. I saw the book afterwards. It says ninety-seven in the same place, and the ink is not mine. I said so, and they took the book from me, and the Principal Secretary got me across the water. I wrote what the instrument said. That was what I was told to do. I do not know who is told to write what it did not. He stopped. I did not know what it was for, he said, until the fifth article. I should like you to know that I did not know.

I did not tell him that it did not matter. It did not matter to the articles, which were not written by what was true; it mattered to me. I said that I knew. He took out a small book, of the Treasury's paper, that he had sewn together himself, and he wrote in it the number, sixty-three; and beside it, in the second column, in his very small hand, he wrote four words, which I could read, because he held the page so that I could, as the other had done: Lying in a field. And after a moment he added a fifth. Awake.

I asked him for news. He gave it in the order in which he had it, as he would have read a column. Reldresal had my note; he had walked it, the whole length of it, along the floor of his office, and when he came to the end he had sat down on the last letter. The boy still drummed in the evenings, at sixty, on the roof of the Secretary's house, to no one, and the Secretary said nothing about it. The emperor had made his speech on lenity to the council in the full dress of the Reach, and it had been published the day after I left, and the city was very quiet. And the girl who said Good day had been on the step on the fourth morning, he said, and had said it, and had been told that I was gone; and she had said it again, to the step. He told me this in the voice in which he read the scale.

Three days after my arrival I walked out along the north-east shore, for no better reason than that it was a place where I was not looked at, and saw half a league out something dark on the water that was not a rock. It turned as the tide took it. I pulled off my shoes and stockings and waded out two or three hundred yards, and found that it was coming in to meet me; and it was a boat, a real one, overturned, such as might have been blown from some ship in a tempest and carried here on the tide.

I went back and asked the emperor for twenty of the tallest vessels he had left after the loss of his fleet, and three thousand seamen under his vice-admiral; and with them, and a great deal of swimming behind it and pushing, until the water was no higher than my armpits, and then cables, and then two thousand men with ropes and engines on the sand, I got it ashore and turned it on its bottom and found it little damaged. Ten days of paddling brought it to the royal port, where the people came out in a mighty concourse to see so prodigious a vessel. I told the emperor that my good fortune had thrown it in my way, to carry me where I might find a road home, and begged his orders for materials and his licence to depart; and after some kind expostulations he gave both.

I wondered, in all this time, that no word came from the Reach. I learned afterwards the reason. The emperor, supposing that I had no notice of his designs, had taken me to be at Blefuscu in performance of my promise, and expected me back within a few days, when the ceremony was ended; but he grew uneasy at my staying, and after consulting the Treasurer and the rest of that cabal he sent a person of quality with a copy of the articles.

The envoy had it from his master to represent to the monarch of Blefuscu the great lenity with which I was to be treated, which was no further than the loss of my eyes; that I had fled from justice; and that if I did not return in two hours I should be deprived of the title of nardac and declared a traitor. Two hours, in the manner of the Reach, is ten minutes of mine. I could just have done it, if I had set out at once and run. He added that, to preserve the peace and amity of the two empires, his master expected his brother of Blefuscu to send me back bound hand and foot, to be punished as a traitor.

The emperor of Blefuscu took three days to consult, which is thirty-six of his, and I do not think I have ever seen a refusal so well prepared. His answer was many civilities and excuses: that as for sending me bound, his brother knew it to be impossible; that although I had taken his fleet he owed me obligations for the peace; and that both their majesties would soon be easy, since I had found a vessel able to carry me to sea, which he had given orders to fit up under my own direction, and he hoped that in a few weeks both empires would be rid of so insupportable an encumbrance.

He told me all this himself; and then, under the strictest confidence, he offered me his gracious protection if I would stay in his service. I think he meant it. But I had resolved to put no more confidence in princes or ministers than I could help, and I begged to be excused, saying that since fortune had thrown a vessel in my way I would venture the ocean rather than be a cause of difference between two such monarchs. He was not displeased. I found out, by an accident, that he was very glad of it, and so were most of his ministers.

I hastened, and the court, being impatient, helped. Five hundred workmen quilted thirteen folds of their strongest linen into two sails, to my directions. I twisted ten, twenty or thirty of their thickest cables into one rope. A great stone that I found after a long search on the shore served for an anchor, and the tallow of three hundred cows greased the boat. I cut my own oars and masts, and the emperor's carpenters, who smoothed them after me, were so quick about it that I never once saw them do it.

And every day at noon the young man came across the field, with the boy and the ladder and the box. He went up, and set the foot to my wrist, and read the scale; and he looked at my face, now, when he did it, for as long as it took him to see that it was a face; and he wrote the number in his small book, and beside it what I was doing, which was, in the order of the weeks, felling a mast, and twisting a cable, and sewing, with a needle the size of a boat-hook, a seam in a sail. It was the first time in my life that I had been written down by someone who wished to know.

The young officer will not come, and gives the author his instrument. The author sails, is taken up by an English ship, and has his wrist taken by its captain. He comes home with his cattle, and takes his son's wrist, and writes it down.

On the last noon but one the young man took my wrist, and wrote the number, and did not go down the ladder. He sat down upon my wrist with his legs over the side of it, as Reldresal used to sit upon my knee, and said that he had made up his mind about a thing, and wished to say it before I asked.

I had meant to ask him. I had thought that I could not go without asking; I had turned over a good many reasons, and chosen one, which was that he was the only person who had written me down who wished to know. He said that he would not come. He gave his reason kindly, and he had worked it out, as he worked out everything, in columns. A voyage of six months was six years. He should be old before we sighted the Cape. In my country he should live a season, in a hold or in a drawer, among persons who would take him for a toy, and he should be dead before I had unpacked; and he had rather be the man who kept the noon in a field in Blefuscu, where a day was a day.

He gave me the small book that he had sewn, and the box. The box was the Treasury's, he said; he had taken it when he went; it was the only instrument in the Reach that was right, and I was to have it. I said that I could not. He said that he had thought of that, and that I was not to take it for a present. I had told him, one noon, about my son's wrist on the Bristol Stairs, because he was the only person I knew who would not think it odd that I remembered the number. Take it again, he said. Write it down. And he did not wish the instrument to be put in a drawer.

He had one message more, from the Principal Secretary, on a slip of paper as thin as a thread, which I read with the glass: that the Reach would be told the boat was seen to founder, and that nobody there would look for me; and underneath, in a smaller hand, that the boy had been told to stop drumming on the roof, and had not.

On the last noon I took his wrist. I did it with the tip of my smallest finger, as I had done the emperor's, and it was the first wrist of that country I had taken but the one; in all those months he had taken mine near two hundred times, and I had not once asked what his was. It was seven hundred and thirty-one, and it jumped. I said so. He said that it always did when it was being taken. I said the number aloud, and he wrote it in the small book, under mine, and shut the book and gave it to me. He asked me then to write his name on the first page, since the Treasury's book had not had it. It is a name of eleven syllables and a pause; I had it from him twice, and wrote it in the letters of my own country as near as I could, and it looks there like a short sentence.

In about a month, when all was prepared, I sent to receive his majesty's commands and to take my leave. The emperor and the royal family came out of the palace, and I lay down on my face to kiss his hand, which he very graciously gave me; so did the empress and the young princes. His majesty presented me with fifty purses of two hundred sprugs apiece, and with his portrait at full length, which was about the length of my hand, and which I put at once into one of my gloves to keep it from harm. The ceremonies at my departure were too many to trouble the reader with. The emperor told me, with great feeling, that I should be remembered in Blefuscu for a long time; which in his country, I calculated afterwards, was until about Christmas.

I stored the boat with the carcasses of a hundred oxen and three hundred sheep, with bread and drink in proportion, and as much meat ready dressed as four hundred cooks could provide. I took six cows and two bulls alive, with as many ewes and rams, meaning to carry them into my own country and propagate the breed; and for their feeding on board I had a good bundle of hay and a bag of corn. I would have taken a dozen of the people, but the emperor would by no means permit it, and besides a diligent search of my pockets he engaged my honour not to carry away any of his subjects, although with their own consent and desire. I did not tell him that I had asked one, and been refused. It is a pleasure to be able to keep a promise that costs one nothing.

I set sail on the twenty-fourth of September, at six in the morning. I looked back once. There was a ladder standing in the field, and beside it a man with a box in his arms, and the Blefuscudian boy. He did not wave. A man who takes the wrist does not wave; it is thought to disturb the reading. At noon of that day, there being no one to do it, I laid two fingers upon my own. It was sixty-two. I wrote it in the small book, under his last line, and beside it, in the second column, in the hand I had learned in the field, I wrote what I was doing. Sailing.

When I had gone about four leagues to the northward, with the wind at south-east, I descried at six in the evening a small island, and cast anchor on the lee side of it, and slept. I woke in the night and lay listening to a very large and patient clock in the next room, which was myself; and no one on the west side of any city was setting a day by it. The next day I steered the same course by my pocket compass, my intention being to reach, if possible, one of those islands which I had reason to believe lay to the north-east of Van Diemen's Land. I saw nothing all that day; but on the next, about three in the afternoon, by my computation twenty-four leagues from Blefuscu, I saw a sail steering to the south-east. My course was due east. I hailed her, but could get no answer; yet I found I gained upon her, for the wind slackened. In half an hour she spied me, and hung out her ensign, and fired a gun.

I cannot easily say what I felt, at the unexpected hope of seeing my own country again, and the dear pledges I had left in it. I came up with her between five and six in the evening, on the twenty-sixth of September, and my heart leaped to see her English colours. I put my cows and sheep into my coat pockets, and got on board with all my little cargo of provisions. The vessel was an English merchantman, returning from Japan by the north and south seas; the captain, Mr. John Biddel, of Deptford, a very civil man and an excellent sailor.

We were in the latitude of thirty degrees south; there were about fifty men in the ship, and here I met an old comrade of mine, one Peter Williams, who gave me a good character to the captain. The captain treated me with kindness, and desired to know where I came from last and whither I was bound. But before he heard a word he took my wrist, as is done, in the waist of the ship, in front of the men, and held it a good while. Sixty-four, he said. I said that it was sixty. He said, kindly, that I had been a good while gone. I had written sixty-two in my own book at noon. I did not argue; there was no one to settle it. I have thought since that it was a different thing, to be taken by a man who would not write it down; and I could not have said which I preferred.

I told him in a few words where I had been, and he thought that I was raving, and that the dangers I had undergone had disturbed my head. But his hand was still upon my wrist, and it was steady; and I took my black cattle and sheep out of my pocket, and the astonishment settled it. I showed him the gold the emperor of Blefuscu had given me, with his majesty's picture at full length, and some other rarities of that country. I gave him two purses of two hundred sprugs each, and promised, when we arrived in England, to make him a present of a cow and a sheep big with young.

By the evening half the watch had come to have their wrists taken by the man who had been in the Reach, and I took them, one after another, on the hatch, with the brass box. The men said that it was cold.

The voyage was very prosperous for the most part, and I shall not trouble the reader with it, except for the cattle. The captain allowed me some of his best biscuit, which I rubbed to powder and mingled with water, and which was their constant food; and I did not understand until the third week what it was that I was feeding. In a month of mine the herd had a year. The cows had calved by the Cape, and the heifers by the line, and the ewes had lambed, and their lambs; so that when the rats on board carried off one of my sheep, and I found her bones in a hole, picked clean, I could not have told you which of the family she was. I had ruled a third column in the small book for them: calved, lambed, died; and the last was fuller than the first. By the Downs I had sixty-one, of whom not one had seen the Reach. I did not mention it to the gentlemen who paid to look at them.

We arrived in the Downs on the thirteenth of April. I set the cattle grazing on a bowling-green at Greenwich, where the fineness of the grass made them feed very heartily, though I had always feared the contrary; and in the short time I continued in England I made a considerable profit by showing them to many persons of quality and others, and before I began my second voyage I sold them for six hundred credits. A lady who came to see them on a Monday, and again on the Saturday, said that I had changed the cows. I said that I had not. She did not believe me, and was right, in a way.

I came to Redriff on the Thursday. My wife was at the door of the house before the boat had touched the stairs; I do not know who had told her. She took my wrist, which is what is done, and held it for a long time, and said that I had gone up, and that I was late; and then she put her face against my coat, and I could not tell which of us was holding which. She said that I smelt of tallow, and asked what ship I had come in, and I said that it was a boat of my own making; and she said that that was what the smell had told her. Johnny, who was eight, stood in the passage in his shirt, and would not come nearer than the door. Betty, who had been in arms when I sailed, was walking, and had views.

That night, when the children had been got to bed and had got out of it again, I took out the brass box. Johnny was standing in the doorway, very still, looking at my face. I laid the foot of the instrument on his wrist, and read the scale. It was sixty-eight. It had been sixty-eight on the Stairs, and I had not thought it worth writing down. I wrote it down. Beside it, in the second column, in the small hand I had learned in a field, I wrote what he was doing, which was standing very still, looking at my face. [Margin: Mr. John Gulliver, now of Greenwich, to whom the passage was shown, says that he remembers the box, and that it was cold. R.S.]

By the end of the week the neighbours had heard of the box, and came to the door in ones and twos, with their wrists out, to be told their numbers, as others go to be told their fortunes. I took them, because it is my trade; and each of them asked me what it meant; and I said that a number by itself was not anything; and they did not like it.

I stayed but two months with my wife and family, for my insatiable desire of seeing foreign countries would suffer me to continue no longer. I left fifteen hundred credits with my wife, and fixed her in a good house at Redriff. My remaining stock I carried with me, part in money and part in goods, in hopes to improve my fortunes. My uncle John had left me a small estate, and I had the lease of an inn, which yielded as much again; so that I was in no danger of leaving my family upon the parish. My son Johnny, named so after his uncle, was at the grammar school, and a towardly child. My daughter Betty (who is now well married, and has children) was then at her needlework. I took leave of my wife, and boy and girl, with tears on both sides, and went on board the Adventure, a merchant ship of three hundred tons, bound for Surat, Captain John Nicholas, of Liverpool, commander. But my account of this voyage must be referred to the second part of my travels.

At noon of that day, on the deck, there being no one to do it, I laid two fingers upon my wrist. It was sixty-one. I wrote it in the small book, under the others, and beside it, in the second column, what I was doing; and I looked at it for some time, and let it stand. Leaving.

A great storm is described; the long-boat is sent for water, and the author goes with it to discover the country. He is left on shore, takes a man for weather, and is picked up by a farmer who has to wait for him to stand still. He goes under to the pulse in the farmer's thumb. His reception in the farmhouse, and a battle in the dark.

I was sixty-one when the Downs went down behind us, and I was sixty-one, or thereabouts, at the Cape; there is nothing to say of the beat of a ship's surgeon on a prosperous passage except that it holds. We had a very good gale until we came to the Cape of Good Hope, where we landed for water; but a leak was found, and we unshipped our goods and wintered there, the captain falling sick of an ague, so that we could not leave until the end of March. I kept the small book through the winter. It is not a thing I should have shown anyone. It has in the second column, for the whole of that season, the one word, waiting.

From the Cape we had a good voyage as far as the Straits of Madagascar; and then the westerly gale that has no business in those seas at that season came, and blew for twenty days, so that by the second of May our captain's observation put us a little east of the Molucca Islands, and three degrees north of the line. Then it fell to a perfect calm, at which I was not a little rejoiced; and the captain, who knew those seas, bade us prepare for a storm; and it came the day after, with the southern monsoon.

We took in the sprit-sail and stood by to hand the fore-sail; we looked to the guns and handed the mizen; we reefed, and set, and hauled aft, and belayed, and so on, for the better part of a page. [Margin: The first edition keeps the page. Mrs. Gulliver's copy has it crossed through with a single stroke, and in the margin, in pencil, the words he does know the names of things. R.S.] It was a very fierce storm, and the sea broke strange and dangerous. When it was over we had been carried, by my computation, five hundred leagues to the east, until the oldest sailor on board could not tell in what part of the world we were. We had provisions, a staunch ship and a healthy crew. We had not water.

On the sixteenth of June, a year all but four days from my sailing, a boy on the topmast saw land; and on the seventeenth we came in full view of a great island, or it might have been a continent, with a small neck of land running out into the sea on the south side, and behind it a creek too shallow for a ship of above a hundred tons. We anchored within a league, and the captain sent a dozen men in the long-boat, well armed, with vessels for water. I asked his leave to go with them, to see the country.

We found no river or spring and no sign of people. The men straggled along the shore looking for fresh water near the sea; I walked alone for about a mile the other way, over ground all barren and rocky, until I was tired and there was nothing to entertain me, and I turned back down to the creek, and saw our men already in the boat, rowing for the ship as for their lives.

I was going to holla after them, though it would have done no good, when I saw a huge creature walking after them in the sea. I will say what I saw, and not what I came afterwards to think. He waded not much deeper than his knees, and took prodigious strides; and I saw that he took each stride as a bell takes a stroke, once, and then a long time before the next. Our men had the start of him by half a league, and were pulling like madmen, as men pull who think that what is behind them is fast. I was told afterwards, by one who had it from the boat's crew, that he was not trying. The sea thereabouts was full of sharp rocks, and I suppose he stopped as a man stops who has seen that what he was chasing is not worth a wet foot.

I did not stay to see how it ended. I ran back the way I had come and climbed a steep hill, from the top of which I saw that the country was fully cultivated; and the first thing that struck me was the grass, which where it was kept for hay stood twenty feet high. I came into what I took for a high road, though it served the people there only as a footpath through a barley field, and I walked an hour with the corn forty feet over my head on either hand, seeing nothing but stalks and a strip of sky.

At the end of it was a hedge of a hundred and twenty feet, and in the hedge a stile that I could not have climbed in a day: four steps, each as high as a man, and at the top a stone to cross by, twenty feet if it was an inch. I was looking along the hedge for a gap when I saw weather.

I mean that something moved in the field beyond the stile, and I took it at first for the shadow of a cloud, of the kind that crosses a hill, only very low, and very slow, and the wrong colour. It came on at the pace of a thing that has no need of haste. It was a man. He was as tall as a steeple, and took about ten yards at a stride; and the stride, as I counted it on my pulse, took him seven beats. I was struck with the utmost fear and astonishment, and ran to hide myself in the corn, whence I saw him at the top of the stile, looking back into the next field, and heard him call. It was not a voice. It was a bell, struck several times with a long rest between the strokes, and so far above me that I certainly thought at first it was thunder; which came in that country, I found, in separate claps.

Seven more came towards him with reaping-hooks, each hook about the largeness of six scythes, and upon some word of his they went to reap the corn in the field where I lay. I saw a hook go through the barley, and I counted it, and it took eleven seconds, and it was perfectly beautiful, and perfectly certain, like the stroke of a pendulum in a very large clock; and the corn fell before it, forty feet, like a slow breath. I kept from them at as great a distance as I could. But the stalks were sometimes not above a foot apart, so that I could hardly squeeze between them; and I came at last to a part of the field where the corn had been laid by wind and rain, and the stalks were so interwoven that I could not creep through, and the beards of the fallen ears so strong and pointed that they pierced my clothes and my flesh. The reapers were not a hundred yards behind me. I, who could have run a mile in the time of two of their strokes, could not stir a yard.

Quite dispirited with toil, and wholly overcome by grief and despair, I lay down between two ridges, and heartily wished that I might there end my days. I thought of Mary, to whom I had left fifteen hundred credits and a good house; and of the boy in the doorway, standing very still. I lamented my own folly and wilfulness in attempting a second voyage, against the advice of all my friends and relations. I took out the small book, and, since there was no one to do it, I took my wrist. It was ninety-four, which I had not been since the field in Blefuscu. I wrote it down, and in the second column, in the small hand, what I was doing. Lying in the corn. Afraid.

In this terrible agitation I could not forbear thinking of the Reach, where I had been looked upon as the greatest prodigy that ever appeared in the world, and had drawn an imperial fleet after me in one hand; and it was a mortification to find myself as inconsiderable here as one of them would have been among us. I had been told that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison, and had taken it for a proposition in philosophy; I found that it was a field. And the comparison was of time as well as of height: I had been the slowest thing in one country, and I was now, as far as I could tell, the quickest thing in another, and neither was a comfort.

A hook was coming over the ridge. I watched it come, and it was a long time, and then it was nearer than I could bear; and I did what I had never done, which was to scream at the top of my voice. To him, I suppose, it was a gnat. The reaper nearest me stopped, and looked about on the ground for some while, and could not see me; for a creature that is afraid does not keep still, and a thing that does not keep still, to eyes that move as theirs do, is not there. I tried to get up and could not, and stood at last where I was, with my hands on my knees, like a man who has run a mile and found that it was a yard; and in the moment that I stood still, he saw me.

He considered a while, with the caution of a man who means to take a small dangerous animal so that it shall neither scratch nor bite, as I have taken a weasel. Then he took me up behind, between a finger and thumb, and brought me to within three yards of his eye to see what I was. I guessed his meaning. I was sixty feet from the ground, and he pinched my sides, not unkindly, but as a man holds a thing that might go; and I resolved not to struggle in the least, because I understood, with the part of me that is a surgeon, that a thing that struggles in a hand is a thing that is put down hard. And I felt in the finger and thumb that held me a slow and enormous knocking, like a mallet at a distant door; and then a long wait; and then again. I counted it. It was his pulse. It was five to the minute.

I do not know where I got the thought. I have taken the wrists of too many frightened persons not to know that a frightened person will listen to the number before he listens to the words. I put my hands together, and turned my face up to the sun, and went under. I had no chair and no cord and no drum; I had the knock of his thumb, and I made my voice wait for it, as I had seen the Slowers wait for the boy. It took me three of his beats to say one word, and I said it by the clock of his hand. Mer. And the beat. Cy. I do not know what it sounded like to him. I know that I felt the mallet falter.

He put me to his ear, and something came out of him that was a bell. Then he set me on the ground on all fours, and I got up at once and walked slowly backwards and forwards, to show him that I did not mean to run; and the seven reapers sat down in a ring to see what I would do next. I took off my hat and bowed to the farmer. I knelt, and held up my hands, and spoke what I could bear to speak. I took out my purse and offered him the gold; he took it into his palm and brought it to his eye, and turned it over with the point of a pin that he took from his sleeve, and could make nothing of it. I made him lay his palm flat on the ground, and poured the coins into it, six large pieces and some thirty small, and he wet his little finger and lifted one, and then another, and looked at them with the face of a man who has been handed a language. He gave me a sign to put them back; and after offering them to him twice more, I put them back.

By this time he was satisfied that I was a rational creature. He folded me into his handkerchief and carried me home; and when his wife was shown me she screamed and ran back, as women do at a toad or a spider. The scream reached me as a great slow chord, one note at a time. But when she had watched me a while, and seen how well I understood the signs her husband made, she became by degrees extremely tender of me.

The dinner was one dish of meat, as befits a husbandman, in a dish four-and-twenty feet across, and the family were the farmer, his wife, three children and an old grandmother. They set me on the table, thirty feet from the floor, and I kept to the middle of it for fear of the edge. The wife minced a morsel of meat and crumbled some bread on a trencher for me; I bowed, and took out my knife and fork; and they were so delighted that for a moment nobody ate.

I had finished mine, and was sitting with my hands in my lap, before she had raised her own to her mouth; and she, supposing that I was waiting for more, sent for another bit. The family's dinner took, by my watch, an hour and three quarters, and I sat through the whole of it on the table and was looked at. I was much admired for my appetite. What struck them, I gathered from their signs, was not my size, or my clothes, but that I was a person who finished.

The youngest of them, a boy of a year old, in a nurse's lap, took a fancy to me, and he was the only person in that house who could have caught me. In the time it took the others to turn their heads he had me by the legs and in his mouth. I roared so loud that he dropped me, and I should have broken my neck if his mother had not held out her apron. The nurse tried a rattle, which was a hollow vessel filled with great stones and tied to the child's waist by a cable; and when that did no good she had recourse to the last remedy.

The master's cat came in and leaped into the maid's lap, and I knew it by the noise: it was as big as three oxen. I stood quite still, and held out my hands, and did not move them. The cat, which in that country is a creature of a certain quickness, looked at me for nine of my beats, and put out a paw, and I was not there; and then it looked at the farmer, who said something in the tone of a bell, and the cat lay down. Whether it had been told in some way that I was an acquaintance, or only considered the matter and thought it not worth the trouble, I have not been able to learn.

In the afternoon the mistress put me to bed in her own, under a clean white handkerchief that was coarser than the mainsail of a man-of-war, and locked the door. I slept two hours, and dreamed that I was at home with Mary and the children, which made it worse when I woke in a room as wide as a field and as high as a church tower, on a bed twenty yards across and eight yards from the floor. I wanted to relieve myself, and did not dare to call; and if I had called, the kitchen was too far for a voice like mine; and while I was thinking of it two rats came up the curtains and went smelling to and fro across the quilt.

One came almost to my face. I rose in a fright and drew my hanger. They had the boldness to come at me from both sides, and one of them got his forefeet at my collar; but I ripped up his belly before he could do mischief, and he fell dead at my feet, and the other ran, with a good wound across his back that I gave him as he went, and left a trail of blood behind him.

I should say that they were the first creatures in that country that were of my own pace. I had been, all that day, the quickest thing in a world of bells; and now there were two things in the room that were as quick as I, and had teeth. I did not mind them as I should have minded them in England. I knew how they moved. After this exploit I walked gently to and fro on the bed to recover my breath and my spirits, and I took my wrist in the dark, and it was ninety-one, and then seventy, and then, there being no one in that house who could have heard it, I let it fall.

A description of the farmer's daughter, who is the one person in the house who is not slow. The author learns the language, and to be looked at. He is carried to a market town, and then to the metropolis, and is shown ten times a day. The particulars of his journey.

The farmer had a daughter of nine, small for her age, being not above forty feet high, and quick. I mean that she was the one person in that house who was not slow; her mother used to say, in the long way they have of saying anything, that the child had been born in a hurry and had never got over it. She beat eight. They thought it a fault in her, and a kind of fever, and were gentle about it, as one is about a child who is always standing at the window.

She was set to be my nurse. She and her mother fitted up the baby's cradle for me against the night: a small drawer out of a cabinet, with a quilt in it, set on a shelf for fear of the rats, and she slept in a truckle bed beside it. She was very dexterous with her needle. She made me seven shirts out of what she could get, which was coarser than sackcloth, and washed them herself, and I was never a day without a clean one. She dressed me, and undressed me, and held me in her two hands to be looked at by the family, who looked at me, I think, as a family looks at a clock that has been brought into the house and has begun to strike.

I have said that they are slow, and I should say what that is to look at. A face in that country does not change; it develops. I would watch the farmer's wife begin to smile, and go and do some small thing, and come back, and the smile would be arriving. I found that I could not look at a face for long, because I had too much time to read it; and then, having the time, I read it; and it was always kind, or it was always not, and there was no moment in which it was both. I have not been in another country where the faces could be so little relied upon to hide anything. I never saw one of them lie. I think it would have taken too long.

She taught me the language. She pointed to a thing and said its name, and I learned that every name was a bell, and that there was a good deal of time between the bells to learn it in. It has eleven words for the degrees of slowness, as the language of the Reach has for haste, and none at all for what I was; the girl made me one. I had the four hundred words of common use in a week; I think I have never learned anything so fast, or so little disturbed by the teacher. It was the speaking that was hard. To be understood by any of them but the girl I had to go under, and to go under without chair or cord or drum for longer than forty minutes was not a thing that I could do; I should have been taken out of the chair, if there had been a chair, by two others, and rubbed. The girl found me the drum. She was what in the Reach they would have called a Slower, turned round, and what in that country was called, with less respect, a Quicker: she could hear me at my pace and give it to the others at theirs. She held out her wrist, with the pulse upward, and I laid my hand upon it, and spoke to the knock of it: eight to the minute, which was, by their measure, a hurry, and by mine a thing I could stand on.

She called me Grildrig, which was the word she had made for me out of their word for small and their word for what does not keep still, and which, after a time, the whole kingdom used. I called her Glumdalclitch, which is little nurse. I said that she was my guardian angel; and she said, in the voice she used for me, which was her own voice taken up to my pace, so that it came out of her like a bird out of a bush, that she did not know what that was, but that she would be it.

She taught me, also, to be looked at. She sat me on the table in the evenings and made me walk towards her at what she called the pace of manners, which was about a twelfth of what I liked, and told me when I had begun to blur. It was like learning to dance with a person who is dead tired. I could do it for a few minutes together. By the end of the second week I could cross a table so that a farmer could follow me with his eyes, and was told that I had been very good, in the voice in which one praises a dog.

On the fifth night she took my wrist. It cannot be done with a finger, my plate being less than the width of her nail, and she knew it; she took a hair from her own head, a long one, and laid it across the plate and held the end, and felt the tick come up the hair to her fingertip as one feels a fish on a line. I lay on the quilt and let her. She counted aloud. She said twelve, and then a rest, and twelve, and a rest; and at the end of the minute she said that it was sixty, in the word they have for a number that is a clock's, and her mother said from the bed that it was a thing that she should not do to a guest. I thought it the most courteous thing that had been done to me since a ladder was set against my arm.

From that night she counted me to sleep. She did it aloud, at her own pace, one word to each twelve of mine; and I lay in the drawer and heard the numbers arrive, each a bell, with the long rests between; and I did not, I think, in all the weeks I was in that house, once reach the end of her count before I was asleep.

I was soon the talk of the village. A neighbour of the farmer's, a shrewd man with a reputation for being fortunate, came to see me, and was shown me on the table, and I did my exercises; I bowed, and said what I could to the pulse of the farmer's thumb, and drew my hanger, and walked the length of the board. He looked at me for a long time. When I had done he said that it was a waste. He meant that I should be seen by more. He advised the farmer to show me at the next market town, which was two-and-twenty miles off, on a market day.

The farmer was a slow man, even for that country, and it took him eleven days to see what was in it. In that time the girl cried more than I had ever seen her cry, for she had guessed what was being settled before I had; and at the end of it she told me, with her face against the drawer, that she was afraid of what would be done to me by the children, who would squeeze me, and pinch, and drop me, as they did the young of cats. I said that I was not afraid. It was not true. I had seen the children of that country, who were slow, but whose hands were large.

We set out on a day of the following week, I in a box, with a cradle-quilt and air-holes, on the girl's lap, and she on a pillion behind her father; and the jolting of the horse, which in that country is a creature of very great gravity, was like a long swell. The box had been made large enough for me to lie in and a little too small for me to stand, and had a hinged lid, and a door which she could open at the back. She opened it every half hour of her time and put in her fingertip, to see that I was there. I was there. I had nowhere else to be.

On the road I was taken out at night, at the inns where the girl could manage it, and set on her knee in the dark with the box open. She asked me about my country in the voice she used for me. She asked if I had a wife. I said that I had. She asked if my wife counted me; and I said that she took my wrist when I came in at the door, and held it a long time. She said that that was right, and went on stroking the lid of the box with one finger, so slowly that I could have walked from one end of the stroke to the other and back before it came to the corner.

At the market town I was shown at an inn, in the great room, on a table. I was to be seen by thirty at a time, and was given for the purpose a space on a board with a rail round it, and a little stage of the girl's arranging, and the farmer's rod, which was a straw. The audience came in by the dozen, with the long unhurried tread of a congregation. And I discovered, in the first quarter of an hour, what it was that they had paid for.

They could not see me move. I do not say that they saw me badly. I mean that I walked from the end of the board to the middle in about three of my seconds, which was the time that it took a spectator to draw a breath, and that to the eye of a giant I was a smear, and then I was a mannikin standing in the middle of the board, bowing. They cried out. It was the arrival that was the show. The stillness was the part they could see, and the going from one stillness to another was the part they paid for, and could not; and it was found, by the second day, that I did best by moving as quickly as I liked and then standing, quite still, with my hands at my sides, for a count of eight.

I drew my hanger, and flourished it, as the girl had instructed; I saluted; I walked about; I spoke, by the pulse of the farmer's thumb, a sentence which I had learned, which was a greeting; and I was cheered, as persons cheer a conjuror, with a deep roll like surf. I was shown ten times a day. Between the shows they kept me in the box in the corner, with the lid up, so that the next audience might see the mannikin sleeping; and I am not so vain as to say that the audience did not enjoy that more.

It was a rule of the girl's that nobody was to touch me. She enforced it with her whole person, and with her voice, which in the passage of that inn was heard to go up an octave and come out of her like a pin. She stood at the rail with her hands on it and her chin on her hands, a child of nine in a bonnet, looking at each of them in turn, until they stopped. I saw a man of fifty, a butcher, I believe, put his hand out towards my board and take it back; and I understood that I was being kept by a nine-year-old, as one keeps a bird, on the strength of her not caring who she offended.

A very old woman came once, alone, and stood for the whole of a show at the rail without a word; and when the count of eight came round she said, to nobody, in the slow tone of her country, He is cold. She took a flask from her sleeve, and a thimble of it, which to me was a cup, and set it on the board. The girl was displeased. I drank it.

The farmer saw the profit of it, and it did not take him eleven days. He took me through eighteen towns and villages, for the most part at ten shows a day, and I grew thin. He kept a tally, as the poor do, a notch on a stick for every spectator, and by the end of the eighteenth town the stick was the thickness of a mast, and the girl would not carry it. In one town I was shown in the nave of a church, between services, and the sexton, who had not been told, took me for a relic; a woman knelt, and the farmer took her money all the same. I should not like to give the figure. I kept a column for it in the small book, which I ruled for the purpose, beside the other two: so many persons in the room; so many in the next; and it is, as I find, the most truthful column I have ever kept. My beat in those weeks went down, into the fifties, and I put it down to the going under. It was the stillness. A thing that moves as I do cannot stand for a count of eight, ten times a day, for eight weeks, among persons who move as they do, without being altered by it.

After ten weeks, on the eighteenth of August, we arrived at the metropolis, which in their language is called Lorbrulgrud, the Pride of the Universe. The farmer took a lodging in the principal street, not far from the palace, and put up bills describing me. He hired a room about three hundred feet across, with a table sixty feet in diameter for me to act on, and a rail round it three feet from the edge, to prevent my falling. I was shown ten times a day, to the great contentment of the people and of the farmer.

By then I could understand every word that was said to me, and could say, with a Quicker's help, whatever I wanted; and I had been so long used to the pulse of a thumb that I could not hear a speech without feeling for it. But none of the persons who came to the room asked me what my own beat was; and it was only the girl, at night, in the drawer, with the hair across my wrist, who counted. She said sixty, always. I had taken it myself that noon, at the rail, and it was fifty-four. I never corrected her. I did not know, any longer, which of us was right.

The author is sent for to court. The queen buys him of the farmer, and takes the girl too. Three great scholars take his wrist with a hair and a water-clock, and find him a clock; the king is not satisfied. An apartment at court is provided for the author, who is in high favour with the queen.

The farmer saw it before I did. I had lost my stomach, and was almost reduced to a skeleton; I put down the day's figure in the third column and did not look at the other. The more he got by me the more insatiable he grew, and when he had observed that I was failing he concluded that I should soon die, and resolved to make as good a hand of me as he could. While he was reasoning so with himself, a sardral, or gentleman-usher, came from court, commanding him to bring me there immediately for the diversion of the queen and her ladies.

Some of the ladies had already been to see me, and had reported strange things of my beauty, my behaviour and my good sense. The sardral came on a horse, and stood through the whole of a show with his arms folded, as one stands who has been told that there will be something to see; and when I had done my count of eight he was the first person in that country who clapped at the right moment. I took it for a good sign, and was wrong, or right, as one is about such things. He asked me afterwards, through the girl, how long I had been doing it; and when I said since the beginning of June he said that it was a great deal, and I did not know whether he meant the time or the number.

The girl carried me into the palace in the box on her lap, and I was set on a table, and the queen came to look. I fell on my knees, and begged the honour of kissing her foot; and she, who is a person of infinite wit and humour, held out her little finger towards me, which I embraced in both my arms, and put the tip of it with the utmost respect to my lip. It had a pulse. I had not expected that, and I stood holding it, in both arms, for the length of two beats, which was a good deal longer than the ceremony called for. Five to the minute, and as steady as a church. She was so kind as to let me.

She asked me some general questions about my country and my travels, which the girl gave her, and which I answered as distinctly as I could, holding my voice to the pulse in her finger. She asked whether I could be content to live at court. I bowed to the board of the table, and said that I was my master's property; but that if I were my own I should be proud to devote my life to her service.

She asked my master whether he was willing to sell me at a good price. He, who believed that I could not live a month, was ready enough, and asked a thousand pieces of gold, which were counted out on the spot; and I have since worked it out that this was, in that country, about the price of a small farm. It was what I was worth to a man who thought I was dying. I said to the queen that since I was now her majesty's most humble creature, I must beg the favour that Glumdalclitch, who had always tended me with so much care, and understood so well how to do it, might be admitted into her service, and continue to be my nurse and instructor.

Her majesty agreed, and easily got the farmer's consent, who was glad enough to have his daughter preferred at court; and the poor girl herself was not able to hide her joy. My late master withdrew, saying that he had left me in a good service. I replied not a word, but made him a slight bow. He left the stick in the passage. When the girl went back for it she looked at it for some time, and then she put it in the fire, and stood and watched it burn, a child of nine, with her hands behind her.

The queen had noticed my coldness, and when he had gone she asked me the reason. I made bold to tell her majesty that I owed that man nothing but his not having dashed out my brains in his field; that he had been amply recompensed in the gain he had made in showing me through half the kingdom and in the price he had now sold me for; that the life I had led since was enough to kill an animal of ten times my strength; and that if he had not thought my life in danger her majesty would not have had so cheap a bargain. This was delivered with great hesitation, and the last part of it, in praise of her majesty as the ornament of nature and the phoenix of the creation, I had learned from Glumdalclitch in the coach, and I am told that I used the word for phoenix in the sense of cook.

The queen, giving great allowance for my defects of speech, was surprised at so much wit and good sense in so diminutive an animal. She took me in her own hand and carried me to the king, who was then retired to his cabinet. His majesty was a prince of much gravity and austere countenance, and I watched his face take in what was in his wife's hand. It took three of his minutes to arrive at cold. He asked the queen, in the tone of a man mentioning the weather, how long it was since she had grown fond of a splacnuck; which is a creature of that country, about six feet long, and much kept by ladies.

The queen set me gently on my feet on his scrutoire and bade me give his majesty an account of myself, which I did in a few words; and Glumdalclitch, who was waiting at the door of the cabinet and could not bear me out of her sight, was let in, and confirmed all I had said. But the king, who is as learned a person as any in his dominions, and was educated in philosophy, and particularly in mathematics, had observed my shape, and seen me walk erect, before I began to speak, and had conceived, since I moved in what to him were ticks, that I might be a piece of clockwork, which is in that country arrived to a very great perfection, contrived by some ingenious artist.

When he heard my voice, and found what I delivered to be regular and rational, he could not conceal his astonishment. He did not believe my account of how I had come. He thought it a story got up between the girl and her father, who had taught me a set of words to make me fetch a better price; and on that supposition he asked me several other questions, and still had rational answers, spoiled only by a foreign accent, an imperfect knowledge of the language, and some rustic phrases that I had learned at the farm, and that did not suit the polite style of a court.

His majesty sent for three great scholars, who were then in their weekly waiting, according to the custom in that country. They examined my shape with much nicety, and one of them, who was a student of clocks, took my wrist with a hair, having heard that the farmer's child did it that way and thinking it very ingenious, while the second set up a water-clock on the table: a glass vessel from which a drop fell every twelve seconds, as it were a pulse for the room. They counted. Sixty, they said, to the minute; and it was found to be a number that belongs to clocks, and to no creature in the world.

The first scholar said that I had no business to have such a number. He set out his proposition: that a mannikin that goes at sixty is a clock, and a mannikin that speaks is a clock with a voice. The royal clockmaker was sent for. He examined me for the winding-hole with a glass, in some detail, and was not able to find it, and went away much offended. It is a thing I have noticed since in persons of that art, who do not forgive an absence of this kind.

The second scholar, who was a naturalist, had a better opinion. He had viewed my teeth with great exactness, and observed that I was a carnivorous animal; yet most quadrupeds being an overmatch for me, and field mice and some others too nimble, he could not imagine how I should be able to support myself, unless I fed on snails and other insects, which he offered by many learned arguments to prove I could not possibly do. The three of them agreed that I could not be produced according to the regular laws of nature, since I was not framed with a capacity of preserving my life, either by swiftness, or by climbing trees, or by digging holes in the earth. They were wrong as to the swiftness; I was, by a good deal, the swiftest object in the room. But they could not see it, and a thing that cannot be seen to be swift is not, in natural philosophy, swift.

The third scholar thought that I might be an embryo, or abortive birth; but this the other two rejected, since they observed my limbs to be perfect and finished, and that I had lived several years, as was manifest from my beard, the stumps of which they discovered plainly through a magnifying glass. They would not allow me to be a dwarf, because my littleness was beyond all degrees of comparison; for the queen's favourite dwarf, the smallest ever known in that kingdom, was near thirty feet high. After much debate they concluded unanimously that I was only relplum scalcath, which is interpreted literally a freak of nature; a determination which has since been much admired by the learned of Europe, who have been using it in other connections for years.

I asked to be heard a word or two, and answered them by the drops of their own water-clock, which they had brought to show that I was one, and which served me for a drum. I told his majesty that I came from a country that abounded with several millions of both sexes, of my own size, where the animals and trees and houses were all in proportion, and where I might be as able to defend myself and find my living as any of his subjects here; which I took for a full answer. They replied with a smile of contempt, and said that the farmer had taught me my lesson very well.

The king, who had a better understanding, dismissed his learned men, and sent for the farmer, who by good fortune had not yet left the town. He examined him alone, and then set him in front of me and the girl together, and I watched his face begin to think that it might be true. It took eleven minutes. He told the queen that I was to have particular care, and that the girl was to go on tending me, since he observed that we were fond of one another.

A room was found for her at court, with a governess to see to her education, a maid to dress her, and two servants for the rough work; but the care of me was left wholly to herself. The queen's own cabinet-maker built me a bedchamber to the girl's directions and mine: sixteen feet square and twelve high, with sash-windows, a door, and two closets, for all the world like a bedchamber in London, but for the ceiling, which was a lid on two hinges, so that a bed might be lowered in ready made by the queen's upholsterer. The girl aired the bed daily and made it with her own hands, and at night let down the lid and locked it over me. He had finished it in three weeks, by my clock, and told me, with some pride, that by his it had been under two days.

I asked for a lock to keep out the rats, and the smith, after several attempts, made the smallest that was ever seen in that country, and I kept the key myself, for fear the girl should lose it. The room was quilted on all sides against jolts; and the queen had the thinnest silks that could be got made into clothes for me, not much thicker than an English blanket, which were very cumbersome till I was used to them, and a grave and decent habit.

The queen became so fond of my company that she could not dine without me. I had a table placed at her left elbow, and a chair to sit on, and the girl stood on a stool near by to assist me. I had an entire set of silver dishes and plates, which in proportion to the queen's were not much bigger than what I have seen in a London toy-shop for the furniture of a baby-house, and these my little nurse kept in a silver box in her pocket, and gave me as I wanted them, always cleaning them herself. The queen's diversion was to see me eat in miniature. She ate as she did everything, at five. The wing of a lark was a thing she approached over the course of half a minute, and bit through, bones and all, between two of her own pulses; and I finished my dinner, and a pudding, and was waiting, with the small book open on my knee, before she had got the first lark to her mouth. She thought I was drawing.

That night I lay in the box, with the key in my pocket and the roof let down, and took my wrist, and it was fifty-two. In the room beyond the wall a child of nine was learning the habits of a court, and had a governess, and a maid; and at the hour when she should have been asleep I heard through the wainscot, very faint, a bell, and a long rest, and a bell. She was counting. She had no hair, and no wrist to put it on. She was counting what she could not feel, to keep the time for me, and I lay and listened, and let her.

The queen's dwarf, who has been the quickest thing in the palace for thirty years, finds that he is not. The marrow-bone and the cream. The flies and the wasps. The country described, and the metropolis seen from a tower.

Nothing angered and mortified me so much as the queen's dwarf. He was the smallest person ever known in that kingdom, being not full thirty feet high; and being so small he beat ten. I was told that he had been the quickest thing in the palace for the thirty years that he had served in it, and that the court had been amused by it, as a court is amused by whatever is at the edge of what it can follow. The dwarf was a person who ran across a room and, before the room had turned its head, was in the doorway, laughing at it.

I must say what it was to see him. He and I were the only two persons at that court who could see each other move. The court saw the dwarf as a flick and me as a smear; and he and I, who had both learned to hold still to be looked at, stood across the antechamber from one another with the expression of two persons who are the only ones in a company who speak the same language, and who have not been introduced. He had been the quickest thing in the room for thirty years. He had been replaced in a week by a thing the size of a pie that was six times quicker. It was a company of a kind, to be seen once a day by the one person who could see that one was moving; and neither of us, I think, wished for it.

He swaggered. When he passed me in the antechamber, where I stood on some table talking with the lords and ladies, he would make himself as large as thirty feet allowed, and say a smart word or two, at the pace of the court, so that all might hear, on my littleness; and I could only answer him by calling him brother, and offering to wrestle him, which was the whole of my wit in that language. It was what I would have said to my own brother at his age. He knew it. That, I think, was what he could not forgive.

Once only did he speak to me as one person to another. It was in the antechamber on a morning when the court was at its prayers, and there was nobody in it but the two of us and a page asleep against the wainscot. He came over, and sat down on the edge of the table where I stood, and said, at the pace at which I speak, so that I understood him without the girl and without going under, how long I supposed they would go on looking. I said that I did not know. They looked for nine months with me, he said, and then they were amused, which is not the same. I said that I was sorry for it. You are sorry for it, he said, in my own voice, quite accurately; and he got down, and did not speak to me again.

At dinner one day the queen had a marrow-bone on her plate, and after knocking out the marrow she set the bone upright in the dish; and the dwarf, watching his opportunity while the girl was gone to the sideboard, climbed on the stool she stood on, took me up in both hands, and squeezing my legs together wedged them into the bone above my waist, where I stuck, and made a very ridiculous figure. I saw him come. I was too much surprised to do anything but watch; it was the first time that anyone in that country had done a thing to me that I could follow from beginning to end, and I found, absurdly, that I was interested. It was near a minute before anyone knew what was become of me, for I thought it below me to cry out. But princes seldom get their meat hot, so that my legs were not scalded, only my stockings and breeches in a sad condition. The queen was heartily vexed, though she laughed, and would have turned him off on the spot if I had not interceded. At my entreaty he had no other punishment than a sound whipping.

The cream was another matter. One day at dinner, nettled at something I had said, he raised himself upon the frame of her majesty's chair and took me up by the middle, as I was sitting down, and let me drop into a large silver bowl of cream, and was gone before the bowl had stopped moving. I went in over head and ears. It is a thick and not unpleasant thing to drown in; a man does not sink in it, he is gently refused. I swam, being a good swimmer, and had swallowed above a quart before the girl, who happened to be at the other end of the room, came running, at the pace of a child who is not slow, and took me out. The queen was in such a fright that she wanted presence of mind. Everyone else in the room was still looking at the place where I had been.

I was put to bed, and lost a suit of clothes, which was utterly spoiled. The dwarf was soundly whipped, and, as a further punishment, forced to drink up the bowl of cream into which he had thrown me. He did it quickly, as he did everything. Neither was he ever restored to favour; for soon after the queen bestowed him on a lady of high quality, so that I saw him no more. I was told by a page that in the house where he was given there was a long gallery, and that he ran in it every evening from one end to the other; and that nobody had yet been found who could tell him how long it took.

It was the flies that showed me what I was good for in that country. The kingdom is much pestered with flies in summer, each as big as a lark, and they are of my pace. They go about at fifty, sixty; they alighted upon my victuals, and left what they leave, which to me was very visible and to the natives not, their eyes being too large for such matters. The dwarf's practice had been to catch a number in his hand, as schoolboys do among us, and let them go suddenly under my nose, to frighten me and divert the queen; and he could catch them. He was the only one at court who could. I cut them in pieces in the air with my knife as they flew, and I was much admired for it. I was the only person in the palace who could hit a fly, and I think the dwarf knew it was the end of him.

One morning the girl set me in my box upon a window to take the air, and when I had lifted up a sash and sat down to a piece of sweet cake for my breakfast, above twenty wasps, allured by the smell, came flying into the room, humming louder than the drones of as many bagpipes. Some of them seized my cake and carried it off piecemeal; others flew about my head and face, confounding me with the noise, and putting me in the utmost terror of their stings. But I had the courage to rise and draw my hanger and attack them in the air. I killed four, in the middle of the room, each as big as a partridge, and the rest got away, and I shut the window. The queen said that it was the first time in the history of the palace that anyone had hit one.

I took out their stings, and found them an inch and a half long, and as sharp as needles. I preserved them all; and having since shown them, with some other curiosities, in several parts of Europe, I gave three of them, upon my return to England, to Gresham College, and kept the fourth for myself. It is by me as I write. I have laid my wrist upon it, on nights when I could not sleep, and have found nothing there, and have gone on laying it.

Of the country I saw not above two thousand miles round the metropolis, the queen never going farther when the king made his progresses, and staying where she was till he returned from viewing his frontiers. The whole extent of his dominions reaches about six thousand miles in length, and three to five in breadth; whence I cannot but conclude that our geographers of Europe are in a great error in supposing nothing but sea between Japan and California; for it was ever my opinion that there must be a balance of earth to counterpoise the great continent of Tartary. They ought to correct their maps and charts by joining this vast tract to the north-west parts of America, and I am ready to lend them my assistance.

The kingdom is a peninsula, closed on the north-east by a ridge of mountains thirty miles high, impassable for the volcanoes on their tops, and on the three other sides by the sea. There is not a seaport in the whole kingdom, the coasts being so full of pointed rocks, and the sea so rough, that there is no venturing the smallest of their boats; so that the people are wholly excluded from any commerce with the rest of the world. I never heard one of them say that he wished it otherwise. A country that moves at five has no reason to hurry out to meet the rest. I should add that there are no two clocks in the peninsula that agree. Each town strikes its bell when its sexton has finished his breakfast.

The metropolis, which is called Lorbrulgrud, stands almost equally on both sides of a river. It contains above eighty thousand houses, and about six hundred thousand inhabitants; and I measured it myself, in a royal map which the king had laid on the floor of a gallery for my use, a hundred feet in length. I paced the diameter and the circumference several times barefoot, and computed by the scale: it is three glomglungs long, which make about fifty-four English miles, and two and a half broad. I crossed it in the gallery in about the time it takes the court to dress a princess; and it came to me that I was the only person in the kingdom who had ever walked the whole of Lorbrulgrud in an afternoon.

The king's palace is no regular edifice, but a heap of buildings about seven miles round, and the chief rooms are generally two hundred and forty feet high, and broad and long in proportion. A coach was allowed to the girl and me, in which her governess took her out to see the town and go among the shops, and I was of the party in my box; though the girl, at my desire, would often take me out and hold me in her hand, that I might more conveniently see the houses and the people as we passed.

One day the governess bade the coachman stop at several shops, where the beggars, watching their opportunity, crowded to the sides of the coach, and gave me the most horrible spectacle that ever a European eye beheld. There was a woman with a cancer in her breast, swelled to a monstrous size, full of holes; there was a fellow with a wen on his neck larger than five wool-packs; and another with two wooden legs, each about twenty feet high. But the most hateful sight of all was the lice crawling on their clothes. I could see the limbs of these vermin with my naked eye, much better than those of a European louse through a microscope, and the snouts with which they rooted like swine. They were of my pace. I watched one cross a sleeve in the time that a man crosses a room, and the beggar who wore it did not know that it was there, and I did, and could not have told him. It was the only speed in that street, apart from the girl's and my own; and it was eating.

The queen ordered a smaller box to be made for me, for travelling, of about twelve feet square and ten high, with a window in the middle of three of the sides, each latticed with iron wire, and on the fourth two strong staples, through which the person who carried me, when I had a mind to be on horseback, put a leathern belt and buckled it about his waist. This was always the office of some grave trusty servant. A horse in that country walks at the pace of a psalm, a stride for every verse; I could have said the whole of the hundred and nineteenth by the swell of it, and I did not discompose myself, having been long used to sea-voyages.

I was very desirous to see the chief temple, and particularly the tower belonging to it, which is reckoned the highest in the kingdom. The girl carried me thither, and I came back, I must say, disappointed; for the height is not above three thousand feet, which, allowing for the size of the people, is no great matter for admiration, nor at all equal in proportion to Salisbury steeple. But from the window at the top I saw the city as a thing in the act of happening. I watched a funeral cross a square, and it took, by my pulse, the better part of an hour. A coach crossed a street while I counted a hundred. A bell at my elbow was struck, and the tower hummed for a time that I could not bear to put a number to; and I understood that the city was telling the time to nobody, because nobody was in a hurry.

Whatever the tower wanted in height was made up in beauty and strength, the walls being near a hundred feet thick, of hewn stone, each block about forty feet square, and adorned on all sides with statues of gods and emperors, larger than life, placed in their niches. I measured a little finger which had fallen from one of them and lay unperceived among some rubbish, and found it exactly four feet and an inch in length. I put my ear to it, out of habit. There was nothing. I do not know what I expected. Glumdalclitch wrapped it in her handkerchief, and carried it home in her pocket to keep among her trinkets, of which she was very fond; and in the evening I found it on her shelf, between a thimble and a doll's shoe, and it was warm, because she had been holding it.

Several adventures that happened to the author, nearly all of them with things of his own pace. The hail, the spaniel, the kite and an execution. The boat in the trough, the pin, the frog and the monkey. The king rallies him upon it.

I should have lived happy enough in that country if my littleness had not exposed me to a number of ridiculous and troublesome accidents; and I noticed, in the course of them, that it was never the people. The people were slow, and I could go round any one of them as one goes round a statue. What hurt me was whatever in that country was of my own pace, or near it, and a great deal larger. I will relate some of the accidents. The girl, who could not keep one from the queen, related the rest.

One day, left on a smooth grass-plot to amuse myself, I was caught by hail. The stones struck me to the ground and went on striking me, like tennis-balls, until I had crept on all fours into the lee of a border of thyme, and lay there flat on my face, so bruised from head to foot that I could not go abroad for ten days. A hailstone in that country is near eighteen hundred times the size of one in Europe, which I can assert, having weighed and measured them when I was able to stand. But what struck me, between the blows, was that it came down at the common speed. Hail does not fall in bells. The weather in that country was not slow; I had been expecting everything to be slow, and it was only the persons.

A worse thing happened in the same garden when the girl, believing she had put me in a safe place, and having left my box at home to spare herself the carrying, went off with her governess to the other end. A small white spaniel belonging to one of the gardeners got in by accident, and smelt me, and came straight up and took me into his mouth; and trotted with me to his master, wagging, and put me gently down. He was so well taught that he did not tear my coat. A spaniel in that country goes at about my pace. I was not astonished that he took me; I was astonished that I could not prevent it. The gardener, who knew me, took me up in both hands in a terrible fright and asked how I did, and I could not answer, having no breath.

The girl, when she came back and found the place empty, and I did not answer her calling, was in cruel agonies; and she was afterwards severe with the gardener about his dog. But the thing was hushed up, for fear of the queen's anger, and, I will confess, for the sake of my reputation. After this the girl would never let me out of her sight, and I, who had long dreaded the resolution, kept from her a number of small adventures that had happened when I was alone: that a kite hovering over the garden had stooped at me, and that I had saved myself only by drawing my hanger and running under a thick espalier (it was the one thing in that sky that came down at my speed, and I knew its shadow before I knew what it was); that I had fallen to my neck in a fresh mole-hill, and had coined a lie, not worth remembering, to account for my clothes; and that I had broken my shin on a snail's shell, walking alone and thinking on poor England.

The maids of honour had a way of asking the girl to bring me, to have the pleasure of seeing and touching me. They did not use ceremony with me. They treated me as a creature of no consequence: I was set on the toilet-table, and they dressed before me; and at five to the minute a lady's dressing is a long affair, so that I read, in the time that one took to put on a stocking, two pages of a book I had in my pocket. Their skins appeared so coarse and so variously coloured, seen near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, that I begged the girl to find some excuse for not going again. I conceived that my sense of smell was more acute in proportion to my littleness. I found their natural smell much more supportable than their perfumes, under which I swooned away.

One day a young gentleman, nephew to the girl's governess, came and pressed them both to see an execution. It was of a man who had murdered a friend of his. The girl went very much against her inclination, being tender-hearted by nature; and I, though I abhorred such spectacles, went to see something that I supposed must be extraordinary.

The man was fixed in a chair on a scaffold, and his head was to be taken off at one blow by a sword about forty feet long. We stood half an English mile off, in the girl's hand, and I counted him. I could not take his wrist, but I could take the throat, and the sword went up so slowly that I thought at each moment it would be stayed, and he had four beats of it. I have counted a good many, in my profession. I do not know that I was ever sorrier for any man's last four. Then the blood went up higher than I should have believed, and the head, when it fell on the scaffold floor, gave such a bounce that I started, though I was at least half a mile away.

The queen, who took every occasion to divert me when I was melancholy, asked whether a little rowing might not be good for my health. I said that I understood the oar very well, a ship's surgeon being obliged, upon a pinch, to work like a common mariner; but I could not see how it might be done in a country where the smallest wherry was a first-rate man of war. Her majesty said that if I would contrive a boat her own joiner would make it, and she would provide a place to sail in. In ten days he had finished a pleasure-boat able to hold eight Europeans, and the queen ran with it in her lap to the king, who had it put into a cistern with me in it, where I had no room for the sculls; so she had made for me instead a wooden trough three hundred feet long and fifty broad, well pitched, laid along the wall of an outer room.

I rowed in it for my own diversion and that of the queen and her ladies. Sometimes I put up my sail and only steered, while the ladies gave me a gale with their fans, and when they were weary the pages blew; and a page's breath in that country is a long one. I had time to make a tack, and take my wrist, and make another, before it was spent.

Once, when a page had put the boat in the trough, the governess officiously took me up to place me in it, and I slipped through her fingers, and should infallibly have fallen forty feet to the floor but that a corking-pin in the good gentlewoman's stomacher passed between my shirt and the waistband of my breeches, and I hung by the middle in the air till the girl came running. It was the slowest fall I have had. I saw the pin; I saw her fingers open; I saw the floor; and I had time to think, in this order, of my wife, of the boy in the doorway, and of whether the pin was clean.

Another time a servant who filled my trough every third day with fresh water let a great frog slip out of his pail unnoticed, and it lay hid till I was in my boat; then, seeing a resting-place, it climbed in, and made the boat lean so that I had to balance it with all my weight on the other side. It hopped half the length of the boat and then over my head, back and forth, daubing my face and clothes with slime. It was of my pace, or a little below, and I did not mind it as I minded the monkey. I asked the girl to let me deal with it alone, and banged it with a scull a good while until it leapt out.

The greatest danger I underwent in that kingdom was a monkey, one belonging to a clerk of the kitchen. The girl had gone out and locked me in her closet; it was warm, and she had left open the window, and the window and door of my bigger box, where I lived by day for the room. I sat meditating at my table when I heard something come in at the window and go bounding about. I looked out, not stirring from my seat, and saw a frolicsome animal leaping up and down the room until it came to my box and examined it with great pleasure, peeping in at each window. I should have hid under the bed, and I did not; I retreated to the farthest corner and stood there. A monkey in that country goes at three times the pace of the palace and a quarter of mine, and in a room as large as a field I might have kept away from him half a day. I was in a box.

He found me. He put a paw in at the door as a cat does to a mouse, and I shifted about the box and kept out of it for what seemed a long time, until he caught the lappet of my coat, which was of that country's silk, thick and strong, and drew me out. He took me up in his right forefoot and held me as a nurse holds a child she is about to suckle, as I have seen his kind hold a kitten; and when I tried to struggle he squeezed so hard that I thought it wiser to submit. I believe he took me for a young one of his own species; he kept stroking my face, very gently, with the other paw. The gentleness was the worst of it. I took my wrist, in his palm, and it was ninety-six.

A noise at the closet door interrupted our diversions, and he leapt up to the window by which he had come, and out on the leads and gutters on three legs, carrying me in the fourth, and clambered to a roof next ours. I heard the girl shriek as I was carried out. That quarter of the palace was all in an uproar, and servants ran for ladders; and I am told that it took them the better part of an afternoon to get one to the roof. The monkey had done all he meant to in about nine minutes. Nobody in the palace could have caught him, he being three times their pace; and the order which was made afterwards, that no such animal should be kept, was made by persons who had been three hours getting a ladder to a roof.

Hundreds in the court saw him sitting on the ridge of a building holding me like a baby in one forepaw and feeding me with the other, out of the bag in his cheek, and patting me when I would not eat; and many of the rabble below could not forbear laughing, and the laughter came up to me at five, a roll of bells, and I sat in his lap while it came. I do not think they ought to be blamed; the sight was ridiculous to everyone but me. Some threw stones to drive him down, which was strictly forbidden, or very probably my brains had been dashed out.

The ladders were applied, and mounted by several men, which the monkey observing, and finding himself nearly surrounded, and not able to make speed enough on three legs, let me drop on a ridge-tile and made his escape. I sat there three hundred feet from the ground, expecting to be blown down by the wind or to fall by my own giddiness, till an honest lad, one of the girl's footmen, climbed up, and put me in his breeches pocket, and brought me down safe. His pulse through the seam was five.

I was almost choked with the filthy stuff the monkey had crammed into my throat; the girl picked it out of my mouth with a small needle, and then I vomited, which relieved me. I was so weak and bruised in the sides by the squeezing of this odious animal that I was forced to keep my bed a fortnight, which by their reckoning was two days; and the king and queen and all the court sent every day to inquire after me, which by their reckoning was twice. The monkey was killed.

When I went to thank the king for his favours after my recovery he was pleased to rally me a good deal on the subject. His questions arrived in the manner of that country, each about the length of a psalm, so that I had a great deal of time to prepare. He asked what my thoughts and speculations had been while I lay in the monkey's paw; how I liked the victuals, and his manner of feeding; and whether the fresh air on the roof had sharpened my stomach. He desired to know what I would have done in such a case in my own country.

I replied that in Europe we had no monkeys, except such as are brought for curiosity from other places, and those so small that I could deal with a dozen of them at once; and that as to that monstrous animal, if my fears had suffered me to think so far as to make use of my hanger (here I looked fiercely, and clapped my hand to the hilt), when he poked his paw into my chamber, I might have given him such a wound as would have made him glad to withdraw it with more haste than he put it in. I delivered this in a firm voice, like a man jealous lest his courage should be called in question. It produced a loud laughter, which all the respect due to his majesty could not make those about him contain. It began, as laughter does in that country, at one end of the room, and reached the other when I had half forgotten what I had said. And I reflected how vain it is to try to do oneself honour among those who are out of all comparison with one; and that I have seen the moral of my own behaviour very frequent in England, since my return.

I furnished the court every day with some ridiculous story; and the girl, though she loved me to excess, was arch enough to tell the queen whenever I did anything that she thought would divert her. She was the quickest teller in the palace, being the only one who could say a thing before it was over. Once, when she had been out of order, her governess took her thirty miles out of town to take the air; and they alighted from the coach near a footpath in a field, and she set down my box, and I went out of it to walk. There was a cow-dung in the path, and I must needs try my activity by leaping it. I took a run, and unfortunately jumped short, and found myself in the middle of it up to my knees. A footman wiped me as clean as he could; the girl confined me to my box till we came home; and the queen was informed, and the footmen spread it about the court, so that all the mirth for some days was at my expense. I found, which I had not looked for, that I minded it less than I should have minded it from persons who were in a hurry.

The author shows his skill in music, played at two speeds. He gives the king an account of England, and the king gives his judgment of it. The girl, who has had the hair across his wrist throughout, has counted him.

I attended the king's levee once or twice a week, and had often seen him under the barber's hand, which was at first very terrible to behold, for the razor was almost twice as long as an ordinary scythe, and passed over his face in about the time it takes me to say the Lord's Prayer. His majesty was shaved twice a week. I once prevailed on the barber to give me some of the lather, out of which I picked forty or fifty of the strongest stumps of hair, and with these I made, in a piece of fine wood, a very tolerable comb, mine being so much broken in the teeth as to be almost useless; neither did I know an artist in that country so nice and exact as to undertake another.

The king, who delighted in music, had frequent concerts at court, to which I was sometimes carried, and set in my box on a table; but the noise was so great that I could hardly distinguish the tunes, and I did as I do in a gale, and shut the doors and windows of the box and drew the curtains, and after that I found their music not disagreeable. It was at five. A slow dance, in that country, is a thing for which one makes an appointment.

I had learned in my youth to play a little upon the spinet, and the girl kept one in her chamber, near sixty feet long, each key almost a foot wide, so that with my arms extended I could not reach above five keys, and to press one down required a good smart stroke of the fist. A fancy came into my head that I would entertain the king and queen with an English tune. I prepared two round sticks about the bigness of cudgels, thicker at one end than the other, and covered the thicker ends with pieces of a mouse's skin, that I might neither damage the keys nor interrupt the sound; and a bench was placed about four feet below the keys, and I was put upon the bench, and ran sideling upon it, this way and that, as fast as I could, banging the proper keys, and made a shift to play a jig. It was the most violent exercise I ever underwent, and I could not strike above sixteen keys, nor consequently play the bass and treble together, as other artists do.

It took about a quarter of a minute. To the court it was a noise like a spoon tapped upon a glass. The queen said that it was very short, and asked for it again; and I played it the second time at a twelfth of the speed, one stroke to the beat of the girl's wrist, which took me eleven minutes, and was by the end of it a dirge. They liked that very much. They said it was very fine, and very sad, and the queen asked what it was called, and I said that it was called the Irish Washerwoman, and she asked the girl to ask me what a washerwoman was.

The king, who was a prince of excellent understanding, would frequently order that I should be brought in my box and set upon the table of his closet; he would then command me to bring one of my chairs out of the box and sit within three yards of him, upon the top of the cabinet, which brought me almost to a level with his face. In this manner I had several conversations with him. I took the freedom to tell his majesty, one day, that the contempt he discovered towards Europe, and the rest of the world, did not seem answerable to those excellent qualities of mind that he was master of; that reason did not extend itself with the bulk of the body, but that on the contrary we observed in our country that the tallest persons were usually the least provided with it; that among other animals bees and ants had the reputation of more industry, art and sagacity than many of the larger kinds; and that, as inconsiderable as he took me to be, I hoped I might live to do his majesty some signal service.

The king heard me with attention, and began to conceive a better opinion of me than he had ever before. He desired I would give him as exact an account of the government of England as I possibly could; because, as fond as princes commonly are of their own customs, he should be glad to hear of anything that might deserve imitation. And I wished, courteous reader, as I have never wished before or since, for the tongue of Demosthenes or Cicero, that I might celebrate the praise of my own dear native country in a style equal to its merits and felicity.

The girl stood at the foot of the cabinet, as she always did when I was with the king, and gave him my words at his pace and him to me at mine. I did not know that she had my wrist. She had brought the hair in her pocket, that first day, without being asked; and she laid it across the plate while I was settling my chair, and held the end of it through the whole of the audience, a child of nine in a bonnet, looking at the floor, and I did not know.

I told him of our two islands, which make three kingdoms under one sovereign, beside the plantations; of our soil and climate; of the parliament, with its House of Peers, persons of the noblest blood and ample patrimonies, educated in arts and arms to be counsellors of the king and champions of the country, and its bishops, sought out through the whole nation for the sanctity of their lives and the depth of their erudition; of the Commons, all principal gentlemen freely culled by the people for their abilities and love of their country; of the judges, those venerable sages; of the prudent management of the treasury, and the valour of our forces by sea and land. I computed the people by reckoning how many millions there might be of each sect or party. I did not omit our sports. And I finished with a brief history of the last hundred years.

A speech that I could give in four minutes took the girl, who gave it again, and the king, who answered, three quarters of an hour; and this was not ended under five audiences, each of several hours. The king heard the whole with great attention, frequently taking notes of what I spoke, as well as memorandums of the questions he intended to ask. His pen was a quill the length of a mast, and the sound of it on the paper went on for some time after I had stopped.

In a sixth audience, consulting his notes, he proposed many doubts, queries and objections upon every article, each question about the length of a psalm. He asked what was done to cultivate the minds and bodies of our young nobility; what made a new lord, and whether the humour of the prince, or a sum of money to a court lady, or a design of strengthening a party against the public interest, ever came into it; what these lords knew of the laws by which they decided their fellow-subjects' properties in the last resort; whether a bribe could find no place among them; and whether the holy lords I spoke of had never been compliers with the times while they were common priests, or the slavish chaplains of some nobleman whose opinions they continued servilely to follow after they were admitted into that assembly.

He asked by what arts the commoners were elected, and whether a stranger with a strong purse might not buy the voters before their own landlord; and how it came about that they were so violently set upon a place which I allowed to be a great trouble and expense, often the ruin of their families, without salary or pension: it seemed so exalted a strain of public spirit that his majesty doubted it could always be sincere. Of the courts of justice he asked how long it took to determine between right and wrong, and at what expense; whether advocates might plead causes known to be unjust or oppressive; whether they had ever pleaded for and against the same cause at different times, citing precedents to prove contrary opinions. I answered this the better for having been once almost ruined by a long suit in chancery, which was decreed for me with costs.

On the treasury he thought my memory had failed me, for I had computed our taxes at five or six millions a year, and the issues were sometimes more than double; his notes were very particular on this point, since he hoped that the knowledge of our conduct might be useful to him. But if what I told him were true, he was still at a loss how a kingdom could run out of its estate like a private man. He wondered at our expensive wars; we must be a quarrelsome people, or live among very bad neighbours, and our generals must be richer than our kings. Above all he was amazed at a standing army of hired men, in the midst of peace, among a free people. If we were governed by our own consent, in the persons of our representatives, of whom were we afraid, and against whom were we to fight? Might not a private man's house be better defended by himself, his children and his family, than by half a dozen rascals picked up in the streets for small wages, who might get a hundred times as much by cutting his throat?

He laughed at my arithmetic of the sects. He knew no reason why those who held opinions prejudicial to the public should be obliged to change them, or should not be obliged to conceal them; for it was tyranny in any government to require the first, and weakness not to enforce the second; a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to vend them about for cordials. And of the history I had given him of the last century he said that it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions and banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice and ambition could produce.

In another audience his majesty was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken, comparing the questions he made with the answers I had given. Then, taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, he delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in. He spoke them at five. It took him, I suppose, twenty-two minutes, and the last word arrived after I had forgotten the first, so that I had it from the girl in a hurry, afterwards, and heard it as one hears a thing in a dream, in the voice of a child.

My little friend Grildrig, he said, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country. You have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness and vice are the proper ingredients for a legislator, and that laws are best explained and applied by those whose interest lies in perverting and eluding them. I see among you some lines of an institution which in its origin might have been tolerable; but these are half erased, and the rest wholly blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, that any one perfection is required for any one station among you; not that men are ennobled for their virtue, nor priests advanced for their piety, nor soldiers for their conduct, nor judges for their integrity. As for yourself, who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am disposed to hope that you have escaped many vices of your country. But from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

I was not angry. I should like to be able to say that I was. I had been called worse, at greater speed, in coffee-houses, and had come away warm, and certain; and it had never once made me look at myself. A man cannot say a thing like that at five in anger. It takes too long; by the end of it he is only telling you. I stood on the cabinet with my hat in my hand, and the king stroked me, very gently, with one finger, and I understood that I was being comforted.

That night, in the drawer, the girl said that she had counted me. She said it with her back to me, at the table, and I think she had thought about it for some time. She said that at the Lords I had been at seventy-two, and at the bishops seventy, and at the commons sixty-eight; that at the treasury I had been at sixty-four, which was nearer to me; and that by the end of the fifth audience my mean had been sixty-eight. She said that I had said it faster when it was not so. I did not ask her what she meant by so. She had the hair in her hand still, and was winding it round her finger, which she did when she was not going to cry.

Nothing but an extreme love of truth could have hindered me from concealing this part of my story, and I find that it is a love I have about me, to my surprise, and not very comfortable to carry. I did, as I have always said, artfully elude many of his questions, and gave to every point a more favourable turn, by many degrees, than the strictness of truth would allow. I know the degrees. They are in the fourth column of the small book, in the girl's number, which is eleven.

She went on saying sixty. She had said it through the days I was fifty-four and through the night I was seventy-two, at the table, and the next night through the wainscot, in the voice she kept for it; and I understood at last that she was not measuring me. I do not know what she was doing. I lay in the box with the key in my pocket, and heard the bells arrive, one after another, with the long rests between, and let her do it.

The author offers the king the powder, which the king refuses. The king's views of government; the learning, laws, army and parties of that country. The girl does not count.

I wished, God forgive me, to oblige him. In hopes to ingratiate myself further into his majesty's favour I told him of an invention that had been discovered in my country between three and four hundred years ago. It was a certain powder, of cheap and common ingredients, which I knew very well: a heap of it, if the smallest spark fell on it, would kindle all at once, though it were as big as a mountain, and fly up in the air together with a noise and agitation greater than thunder. Rammed into a hollow tube of brass or iron, according to its bigness, it would drive a ball of iron or lead with such violence and speed that nothing could sustain its force.

I told him that the largest balls thus discharged would not only destroy whole ranks of an army at once, but batter the strongest walls to the ground, sink ships with a thousand men in each to the bottom of the sea, and, when linked together by a chain, cut through masts and rigging, divide hundreds of bodies in the middle, and lay all waste before them. That we often put the powder in large hollow balls of iron, and discharged them by an engine into some city we were besieging, which would rip up the pavements, tear the houses to pieces, burst and throw splinters on every side, dashing out the brains of all who came near. That I could direct his workmen how to make such tubes, of a size proportionable to all other things in his kingdom, and the largest need not be above a hundred feet long; that twenty or thirty of them, charged with the proper powder and balls, would batter down the walls of the strongest town in his dominions in a few hours, or destroy the whole metropolis, if ever it should pretend to dispute his absolute commands. This I humbly offered as a small tribute of acknowledgment for so many marks of his royal favour.

I should say who said it. I spoke it at my pace, in a plain voice, and the girl gave it to the king at his, a sentence at a time, standing at the foot of the cabinet with her eyes shut and her hands behind her. It had to be given in the manner of that country, which does not skip, so that the king had it whole: the ball, and the walls, and the ships sunk with a thousand men in each, and the pavements ripped up, and the houses torn to pieces, and the brains of all who came near. She was nine. I did not look at her. I was looking at the king.

The king was struck with horror. He was amazed, he said, and I have it as he said it from the girl, how so impotent and grovelling an insect as I could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation which I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines; whereof some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver. As for himself, he protested that although few things delighted him so much as new discoveries in art or in nature, he would rather lose half his kingdom than be privy to such a secret; which he commanded me, as I valued my life, never to mention any more.

He said one thing besides, which I did not follow then. He said that of all that I had told him of my country it was the only thing that had not seemed to him to be of a size. A people who took eleven seconds to swing a hook, he said, had never been obliged to think what it would be to be struck by a thing that did not wait for them. I was offering a slow people the one fast death there was, and he would not have it said of him that he had taken it. He asked the girl whether she had understood. She said that she had.

I thought it then a strange effect of narrow principles and views that a prince possessed of every quality which procures veneration, love and esteem, of strong parts, great wisdom and profound learning, almost adored by his subjects, should from a nice unnecessary scruple, whereof in Europe we can have no conception, let slip an opportunity that would have made him absolute master of the lives, the liberties and the fortunes of his people. Neither did I say this with the least intention to detract from the many virtues of that excellent king, whose character I was sensible would on this account be very much lessened in the opinion of an English reader. I took the defect to have risen from their ignorance, by not having hitherto reduced politics into a science, as the more acute wits of Europe have done. I set down what I thought.

I remember very well, in a discourse one day with the king, when I happened to say that there were several thousand books among us written upon the art of government, it gave him, directly contrary to my intention, a very mean opinion of our understandings. He professed both to abominate and despise all mystery, refinement and intrigue, either in a prince or a minister. He could not tell what I meant by secrets of state, where an enemy or some rival nation was not in the case. He confined the knowledge of governing within very narrow bounds, to common sense and reason, to justice and lenity, to the speedy determination of civil and criminal causes, which he reckoned at about eleven days; with some other obvious topics which are not worth considering. And he gave it for his opinion that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.

The learning of this people is of four sorts, morality, history, poetry and mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel; and the last is wholly applied to what may be useful in life, to the improvement of agriculture and all the mechanical arts, so that among us it would be little esteemed. They do not take to abstractions. I once tried to explain to the three scholars what an entity was. It took forty minutes by the water-clock. At the end of it the second scholar asked whether it could be eaten, and the first whether it could be wound.

No law in that country may exceed in words the number of letters in their alphabet, which consists of only two and twenty; and few of them extend so far. They are expressed in the most plain and simple terms, in which those people are not mercurial enough to discover more than one interpretation; and to write a comment upon any law is a capital crime. Where a sentence takes eleven seconds, brevity is not a virtue but a necessity: a law of twenty-two words is a law that can be said at five in about the time that anybody can be expected to stand and listen.

They have had the art of printing, as well as the Chinese, time out of mind; but their libraries are not large, for the king's, which is reckoned the largest, does not amount to above a thousand volumes, in a gallery twelve hundred feet long, whence I had liberty to borrow what books I pleased. To read, I walked. The queen's joiner had made for me, in one of the girl's rooms, a kind of wooden machine twenty-five feet high, formed like a standing ladder, the steps each fifty feet long. The book I wished to read was set up leaning against the wall; I mounted to the upper step, and began at the head of the page, and so walking to the right and left, about eight or ten paces according to the length of the lines, descended gradually to the bottom; and then mounted again, and began the other page in the same manner, and turned over the leaf with both hands, for it was as thick and stiff as pasteboard. A page took me eleven minutes at a brisk walk, and a chapter an afternoon. I was the only person in that kingdom to whom a book was a distance.

Their style is clear, masculine and smooth, but not florid, for they avoid nothing more than multiplying unnecessary words or using various expressions; and I think it is the pace. A writer who must be said aloud at five does not squander. I perused many of their books, especially those in history and morality, as it were on foot.

Among the rest I was much diverted with a little old treatise that always lay in the girl's bedchamber, and belonged to her governess, a grave elderly gentlewoman who dealt in writings of morality and devotion. The book treats of the weakness of humankind, and is in little esteem, except among the women and the vulgar. It went through all the usual topics of the European moralists, showing how diminutive, contemptible and helpless an animal man was in his own nature; how unable to defend himself from the inclemencies of the air or the fury of wild beasts; how much he was excelled by one creature in strength, by another in speed, by a third in foresight, by a fourth in industry. It added that nature was degenerated in these latter declining ages, and could now produce only small abortive births in comparison with those of ancient times; and it was very reasonable to think, not only that the species of men were originally much larger, but that there must have been giants in former ages, confirmed by huge bones and skulls casually dug up in several parts of the kingdom.

And the proof of the falling-off, said the book, was the hurry. In the time of the writer's grandfather, it said, the young of men had been born at four, and borne it; now they were born at seven or eight, and fretted; the race was growing quick, and quickness was the first sign of a decline; and it cited, as a thing that everyone knew, children who could not sit still. The governess had put a pin in that page. I found it. I did not tell the girl, and I have wondered since whether she had read it.

From this way of reasoning the author drew several moral applications, useful in the conduct of life, but needless here to repeat. For my own part, I could not avoid reflecting how universally this talent was spread, of drawing lectures in morality, or indeed rather matter of discontent and repining, from the quarrels we raise with nature; and I believe that upon a strict inquiry those quarrels might be shown as ill-grounded among us as they are among that people.

As to their military affairs, they boast that the king's army consists of a hundred and seventy-six thousand foot and thirty-two thousand horse, if that may be called an army which is made up of tradesmen in the several cities and farmers in the country, whose commanders are only the nobility and gentry without pay or reward. They are perfect enough in their exercises, and under very good discipline, wherein I saw no great merit; for how should it be otherwise where every farmer is under the command of his own landlord, and every citizen under that of the principal men of his city, chosen after the manner of Venice by ballot?

I have often seen the militia of Lorbrulgrud drawn out to exercise in a great field near the city, twenty miles square. A cavalier on a large steed might be ninety feet high. I have seen this whole body of horse, upon a word of command, draw their swords at once and brandish them in the air. The word took eleven seconds to say and the swords forty to come out, so that the light went across that field from one side to the other like a cloud turning over; it looked as if ten thousand flashes of lightning were darting from every quarter of the sky, very slowly, and each of them stayed. I understood that that country could not be hurried to a war, and had not often had one.

I was curious to know how this prince, to whose dominions there is no access from any other country, came to think of armies; and I was soon informed, both by conversation and by reading their histories, that in the course of many ages they have been troubled with the same disease to which the whole race of mankind is subject, the nobility often contending for power, the people for liberty, and the king for absolute dominion. All which, however happily tempered by the laws of that kingdom, have been sometimes violated by each of the three parties, and have more than once occasioned civil wars, the last whereof was happily put an end to by this prince's grandfather in a general composition; and the militia then settled with common consent has been ever since kept in the strictest duty.

I have left to the last the night after the powder. Through the wainscot there was no count. I lay in the box with the key in my pocket and listened to the wall, and for the first time since the palace the wall said nothing. I took my wrist, which I did not need to do. It was fifty-two. It was the lowest I had had in that country; I had just described to a king, in a plain voice, how a city is taken, and I was calmer than I had been about the Lords.

In the morning she came for me as usual, a little red about the eyes, and did my shirt, and put me in her pocket for breakfast, and said nothing. The count was there again the next night, and the night after, at sixty, through the wall. I never asked, and she never said. But I knew by the silence that it was not a thing she did without choosing, and that on one night she had not chosen it; and that was the first time I understood that she had been choosing all along.

The king and queen make a progress to the coast, and the author attends them. The girl takes his wrist for the last time. He is carried off by an eagle, dropped into the sea, and taken up by an English ship. He returns to England, and finds that he speaks like a bell.

I had always a strong feeling that I should some time recover my liberty, though I could not conjecture how. The ship that brought me was the first ever driven within sight of that coast, and the king had given strict orders that any other that appeared should be taken ashore, with all its crew and passengers, and brought to Lorbrulgrud in a tumbril. He meant, besides, to find me a woman of my own size, that I might propagate the breed. I think I should rather have died than leave a posterity to be kept in cages like canary-birds and sold in time about the kingdom to persons of quality for curiosities; and it occurred to me, God forgive me, how quick that posterity would be, and how long it would take to be looked at.

I was treated with great kindness. I was the favourite of a great king and queen and the delight of the court; but it was on a footing that ill became the dignity of humankind, and I could not forget the pledges I had left at home. I wanted to be among people with whom I could talk on even terms: to be spoken to at my own pace, without a drum or a hair, and to walk about the streets without the fear of being trodden to death like a frog or a puppy. My deliverance came sooner than I expected, and in a manner not very common.

I had been two years in that country when, at the beginning of the third, the girl and I went with the king and queen on a progress to the south coast. I travelled in my closet, which had a hammock hung from silk ropes at the four corners to take out the jolts when a servant carried me before him on horseback, and in its roof a hole a foot square, with a sliding board, for air in hot weather. We came to a palace the king has near Flanflasnic, eighteen English miles from the sea. We were both tired. I had a small cold; but the girl was so ill that she was confined to her chamber. I longed to see the ocean, which must be the only scene of my escape if ever it came; and I pretended to be worse than I was, and asked leave to take the sea air with a page I was fond of, who had sometimes been trusted with me.

I went to ask her in her chamber. She was in the bed, in a room with the shutters half closed, and she beat eleven, which in that country is a fever, and was ashamed of it; I could tell by the way she kept her wrist under the quilt. I said what I had come to say. I shall never forget with what unwillingness she consented, nor the strict charge she gave the page to be careful of me, in a voice she kept very level. Then she said, Wait. She took the hair from under her pillow. I put out my wrist upon the quilt, as I had put it out a good many hundred nights, and she laid the hair across the plate, and held the end, and counted.

She counted twelve, and a rest, and twelve, and a rest. I watched her face while she did it, which I could do in that country, faces there taking their time, and I watched the number arrive in it. I knew before she said it. She said, Fifty-four. It was the first time she had said a number that was mine. She looked at it, where it lay in the air between us, for the length of a breath. Then she took the hair, and instead of taking it away she wound it twice about my wrist, over the plate, and bit the end off with her teeth, and said, Sixty. And she burst into tears, as if she had some foreboding of what was to happen. A tear in that country takes about a breath to cross a face; I had time to watch it start, and to watch it arrive.

The page took me in my box about half an hour's walk from the palace, towards the rocks on the shore, and set me down at my orders; and I lifted a sash, and looked, for a long time, at the sea. I told him that I was not well and would like to sleep in my hammock, which I hoped would do me good; he shut the window close against the cold, and I was soon asleep. I conjecture that while I slept the page, thinking no danger could happen, went among the rocks to look for birds' eggs, for I had seen him from the window picking up one or two in the clefts. I hope that he broke them at whichever end he pleased.

I woke with a violent pull on the ring at the top of my box, and found it raised very high and borne forward with prodigious speed. The first jolt almost threw me from the hammock; after that the motion was easy. I called as loud as I could, to no purpose. From my windows I saw nothing but cloud and sky, and heard over my head a clapping, like wings; and I understood that an eagle had the ring in its beak, meaning to let the box fall on a rock, like a tortoise, and pick out what was inside. I noticed, with the part of me that is a surgeon, that it was the first thing in that country that had ever carried me anywhere at a speed that was nobody's choice.

The noise of the wings increased very fast and the box was tossed like a tavern sign in a wind. I heard bangs, which I took for blows given to the eagle by others, and then I felt myself falling straight down for above a minute, with a swiftness that took away my breath; and the fall was stopped by a squash louder in my ears than Niagara, and I was in the dark for another minute, and then the box began to rise, until I could see light at the tops of the windows. I was fallen into the sea. The box, with the weight of my body and my goods and the broad iron plates at its corners, floated about five feet deep. The plates had kept it level in the fall; every joint was grooved, and the door ran up and down like a sash, so that very little water came in. I drew back the slip-board in the roof for air, and was nearly stifled before I did.

How often did I then wish myself with my dear Glumdalclitch, from whom one single hour had so far divided me! I lamented the grief she would suffer for my loss, and the queen's displeasure, and the ruin of her fortune. A single pane of glass broken would have been immediate death; nothing but the iron lattice had saved the windows. I could not lift the roof of my closet and sit on it, which would at least have kept me alive some hours longer than being shut up in the hold of my own box. I was four hours so, expecting and wishing every moment to be my last. I put my wrist to the hair, where it lay twice round, and it was seventy-eight; and I thought that she would have said sixty.

Then I thought I heard a grating noise on the side where the staples were, and soon I felt the box pulled along the sea, with now and then a tug that raised the waves to the tops of my windows. I unscrewed a chair from the floor, and screwed it down again under the slipping-board, and mounted it, and called for help through the hole in every language I knew, and waved my handkerchief on a stick. For an hour I saw no effect; then the staple side struck something hard, and I heard a cable grating through the ring, and was hoisted by degrees; and a great shout answered me, repeated three times, which gave me such transports of joy as only those who feel them can conceive.

A trampling over my head; and a man calling through the hole, in the English tongue, If there be anybody below, let them speak. He said it at my own pace. I had not been spoken to at my own pace for two years except by myself, and it came down the hole like a handful of small shot; and I found that I was weeping, and did not know why until I knew that it was because it was quick.

I answered that I was an Englishman, drawn by ill fortune into the greatest calamity that ever any creature underwent. The voice said that the carpenter would saw a hole in the cover large enough to pull me out; I said that that was needless and would take too long, and that one of the crew had only to put his finger in the ring and lift the box out of the sea and into the captain's cabin. Hearing me talk so wildly, some thought me mad and others laughed; for it never came into my head that I was now among people of my own stature and strength.

The carpenter cut a passage four feet square and let down a small ladder, and I climbed it, and was taken aboard in a very weak condition. The sailors were all amazement and asked me a thousand questions, which I did not wish to answer. I was equally confounded at the sight of so many pigmies, for so I took them, after so long accustoming my eyes to the monstrous objects I had left; and they moved, I observed, like sparrows. The captain, Mr. Thomas Wilcocks, an honest Shropshire man, seeing me ready to faint, took my wrist, as is done, and held it, and said seventy-one; and took me into his cabin, gave me a cordial, and made me lie down on his own bed. He saw the black cord twice round my wrist, and the way I held that arm. He asked nothing about it.

Before I slept I begged him to have my closet brought into his cabin, for I had in it, I said, a fine hammock, a field bed, two chairs, a table and a cabinet, all quilted with silk and cotton. Hearing these absurdities he concluded that I was raving, but promised, I suppose to pacify me; and his men went below and stripped the quilting, tore up the furniture that was screwed to the floor, knocked off boards for the ship's use, and let the hull drop into the sea, where it sank at once. I was glad not to be a spectator. I am confident it would have brought former passages into my mind which I would rather have forgot.

I slept some hours, but perpetually disturbed with dreams of the place I had left. In the night I woke and lay for some time listening for the count, and there was nothing through the wainscot but the sea; and I took my wrist, and it was fifty-six, and I said sixty, aloud, in the dark, to the cabin, at about the pace of a bell.

At supper the captain, thinking I had fasted too long, entertained me with great kindness, and when we were alone asked how I came to be adrift in that monstrous wooden chest. He had taken it, through his glass, for a sail; his men had sworn they saw a swimming house; he had rowed round me several times and towed me in by the staples. He reckoned us a hundred leagues from land. I told him he was out by almost half, for I had not left the country above two hours before I dropped into the sea; and at that he began again to think my brain disturbed, and asked me freely whether I had been put to sea in a chest by some prince, for some enormous crime, as great criminals have been in other countries. I begged his patience, and told him the whole story from the day I left England; and, as truth always forces its way into rational minds, he was convinced of my candour.

To confirm it I opened my cabinet before him, and showed him the small collection of rarities I had made in the country from which I had been so strangely delivered: the comb made of the stumps of the king's beard, and another of the same materials set in a paring of her majesty's thumb-nail for a back; needles and pins from a foot to half a yard long; four wasp stings like joiners' tacks; some combings of the queen's hair; and a gold ring that she had given me one day, taking it off her little finger and throwing it over my head like a collar. It had been warm from the finger. I had held it to my wrist a great many times, and it kept nothing. I begged the captain to accept it, which he absolutely refused. I showed him a corn that I had cut with my own hand from a maid of honour's toe, as big as a Kentish pippin, and so hardened that when I came to England I had it hollowed into a cup and set in silver; and the breeches I then wore, which were made of a mouse's skin. I could force nothing on him but a footman's tooth, which he examined with great curiosity; it had been drawn in a mistake by an unskilful surgeon, was sound, and was about a foot long and four inches thick.

The captain, well satisfied with this plain relation, said he hoped that when we returned to England I would oblige the world by putting it on paper. I answered that we were overstocked with books of travels, and that I doubted some authors consulted their own vanity, or interest, or the diversion of ignorant readers, more than truth. I promised to take it into my thoughts.

He wondered to hear me speak so loud, and asked whether the king and queen of that country were thick of hearing. I told him it was what I had been used to for above two years, and that I wondered as much at him and his men, who seemed only to whisper, and yet I could hear them well enough; and that, when I first came into the ship, I thought the sailors the most little contemptible creatures I had ever seen. He had observed me look at everything at supper with a sort of wonder; I answered that I wondered how I could forbear, when I saw his dishes the size of a silver threepence, a leg of pork hardly a mouthful, and a cup not so big as a nutshell. He replied, with the old proverb, that my eyes were bigger than my belly, since he did not observe my stomach so good.

The voyage was very prosperous, and I shall not trouble the reader with a journal of it. I never went out of the ship until we came into the Downs, about nine months after my escape. The captain would not receive one farthing of my freight. We took a kind leave of each other, and I made him promise to see me at Redriff; and I hired a horse and a guide for five shillings, which I borrowed of him.

On the road, observing the littleness of the houses, the trees, the cattle and the people, I began to think myself in the Reach. I was afraid of trampling on every traveller I met, and called aloud to have them stand out of the way, so that I had like to have got one or two broken heads for my impertinence. And everyone I met spoke like a kettle. I had been used to listening for a word to arrive, and these arrived before I had finished waiting for them; so that I answered each a little late, and they took me for a man who had been struck on the head.

When I came to my own house, for which I was forced to inquire, one of the servants opened the door, and I bent down to go in, like a goose under a gate, for fear of striking my head. My wife ran out to embrace me, but I stooped lower than her knees, thinking she could otherwise never reach my mouth. My daughter kneeled to ask my blessing, and I could not see her till she rose, having been so long used to keep my head and eyes erect to above sixty feet; and then I went to take her up with one hand by the waist. I looked down upon the servants, and one or two friends in the house, as if they had been pigmies and I a giant. I told my wife that she had been too thrifty, for I found she had starved herself and her daughter to nothing. In short I behaved so unaccountably that they were all of the captain's opinion when he first saw me, and concluded I had lost my wits. This I mention as an instance of the great power of habit and prejudice.

She took my wrist at the door, which is what is done, and held it, and said fifty-one. I said sixty. She said fifty-one, and that she would not argue with me. I spoke to her, I am told, for the first week, at the pace of a bell, with a rest between the words, so that the sentences took a long time to come, and she learned to wait for them, with her hands in her apron, at the foot of the stairs, as persons wait for something they have a right to. She saw the black cord on my wrist, twice round. She did not ask. She looked at it as one looks over someone's shoulder at somebody else's leaving.

In a little time my family, my friends and I came to a right understanding; but my wife protested that I should never go to sea again, although my evil destiny so ordered it that she had not the power to hinder me, as the reader may know hereafter. In the mean time I here conclude the second part of my unfortunate voyages. [Margin: Among the papers in the linen-chest, in a wooden bowl, lay a black cord of nineteen feet, coiled, which the editor took at first for a bell-pull. Mrs. Gulliver, asked, said that it was a hair, and would not say whose. R.S.]

The author is counted ten days at home, and sets out on his third voyage. Is taken by pirates. The malice of a Dutchman, and a word that is not translated. He counts himself on a rock, and is taken up into a flying island.

I had not been at home above ten days. My wife took my wrist at noon on each of them, at the table, with two fingers, as she had taken it at the door, and wrote the number on the back of the almanac in pencil, under the tides: fifty-one, fifty, fifty-four, fifty-one, fifty-three, fifty-six, fifty-two, fifty-eight, fifty-five. After the fourth day she stopped reading them out to me. I read them upside down across the table, which she knew, and let me.

On the tenth day, at noon, Captain William Robinson, a Cornish man, commander of the Hope-well, a stout ship of three hundred tons, came to my house and found her with my wrist in her hand. It was sixty. She wrote it down. He was kind enough to look at the window.

I had formerly been surgeon of another ship where he was master, and a fourth part owner, in a voyage to the Levant. He had always treated me more like a brother than an inferior officer; he took the surgeon's wrist at noon as readily as the sailmaker's, and wrote the two in the one book, in the one hand. His first visit passed nothing but what is usual after long absences. He came again, and again; he was glad to find me in good health; he asked whether I were now settled for life; he mentioned that he intended a voyage to the East Indies in two months. At last he plainly invited me, though with some apologies, to be surgeon of his ship: I should have another surgeon under me, beside his two mates; my salary should be double the usual pay; and having experienced my knowledge of sea-affairs to be at least equal to his own, he would follow my advice as if I had shared in the command. He was so honest a man that I knew the apologies were not for the proposal. They were for the almanac, which lay on the table all that month, and which he never once looked at.

The only difficulty was my wife. She said nothing for a night. In the morning she took my wrist, which is not the hour for it, and held it a long while, and asked what double the usual pay would come to in a year. I told her. She did the sum on the almanac, under the numbers, and said that the children would be provided for. That was her consent. I took it, and I knew what I was taking. I will make no defence. I record that on the tenth day I was counted at sixty, that I had not been counted at sixty since the Adventure, that I was glad of it, and that she saw I was glad.

We set out on the 5th day of August, 1706. Captain Robinson took my wrist at noon on the first day, and I his, and he wrote us both in the log, as before. Mine was fifty-eight; by the Line it was sixty-one, and there it stayed, so that when we came to Fort St. George on the 11th of April, 1707, I was by the book a man who had never left off being sixty. We staid three weeks to refresh the crew, many of whom were sick. In that time I took three hundred wrists, which I note as the most I ever took in one place; one of them, a Welsh boy's, was so slow that I called the mate to see whether he was dead, and he asked for water.

From thence we went to Tonquin, where the captain resolved to stay some time, because many of the goods he meant to buy were not ready, nor could he expect to be dispatched in several months. To defray some of the charge he bought a sloop, loaded her with what the Tonquinese usually trade to the neighbouring islands, put fourteen men aboard, three of them of the country, and made me master of her, with power to traffic while he saw to his affairs ashore. He took my wrist on the quay, as he always did, and held it a moment longer than the number needed, and said, "Sixty-one. You'll do." It was the last time for some months that anyone counted me who meant me well, and I did not know it.

We had not sailed above three days when a great storm drove us five days to the north-north-east, and then to the east; after which we had fair weather, with a pretty strong gale from the west. On the tenth day we were chased by two pirates, who soon overtook us, for my sloop was laden so deep that she sailed at the pace of her cargo, which was mostly rice, and rice has no hurry in it. Neither were we in a condition to defend ourselves.

They boarded us together, both ships at once, furiously, at the head of their men; but finding us all prostrate upon our faces (for so I had given the order) they pinioned us with strong ropes, set a guard upon us, and went to search the sloop. I lay with my cheek on the planks and watched the first of them come over the rail. I had the surgeon's habit of looking at the neck, and in his it was running past a hundred. I had given the order because men who come aboard at that pace want a reason to stop, and a row of faces on a deck is a reason.

There was a Dutchman among them who seemed to be of some authority, though he commanded neither ship. He went down the line of us as a purser goes down a row of casks, taking each wrist and saying the number aloud, in their language, to the men at his heels; when he came to mine he held it longer, and said it in Dutch, for my benefit, vierennegentig, and laughed. He knew us by our faces for Englishmen. Jabbering to us in his own tongue, he swore that we should be tied back to back and thrown into the sea.

I spoke Dutch tolerably well. I told him who we were, and begged him, as a Christian and a Protestant of a neighbouring country in strict alliance, to move the captains to some pity. This inflamed him. He repeated his threats, and turning to his companions spoke with great vehemence in Japanese, as I supposed, using the word Christianos very often.

The larger of the two ships was commanded by a Japanese captain, who spoke a little Dutch, very imperfectly. He came to me and put several questions, which I answered in great humility, and then he said that we should not die. I made him a very low bow; and turning to the Dutchman, I said that I was sorry to find more mercy in a heathen than in a brother Christian. I had soon reason to repent those foolish words.

The Dutchman, having tried in vain to persuade both captains that I might be thrown into the sea (which they would not yield to, after the promise made to me), prevailed so far as to have a punishment laid on me that was worse, in all human appearance, than death itself. My men were sent by an equal division into the two pirate ships, and my sloop was manned afresh. They did not look at me as they went; I do not blame them; a man who has been made to lie on his face for another man's reasons does not look at him afterwards. As for myself, it was determined that I should be set adrift in a small canoe, with paddles, a sail, and four days' provisions, which the Japanese captain was so kind as to double out of his own stores, and that no man should search me.

I went down into the canoe. As I went, the Dutchman leaned out and took hold of the black cord that was wound twice about my wrist, either to prove my pulse once more or because he took it for something of value, and he had begun to unwind it when the Japanese captain, behind him, said a single word. I wrote it down afterwards by its sound, as I wrote down every word I did not understand: katami. The Dutchman let go. I never learned what he had been told. He stood on the deck and loaded me, as I pulled off, with all the curses and injurious terms his language could afford, and it afforded him a great number. [Margin: The editor has put this word to two gentlemen of the East India House, who gave him two meanings, and he has not thought it right to print either. Mrs. Gulliver has written beside it in pencil, "Ask." R.S.]

About an hour before the pirates came in sight I had taken an observation, and found us in latitude 46 north, longitude 183; I held on to the figures, being the one useful thing I had. When I was some distance from them I discovered by my pocket-glass several islands to the south-east. The wind was fair. I set up my sail and reached the nearest in about three hours. It was all rock. There were birds' eggs on it, which I roasted over a fire of heath and dry sea-weed struck with my flint, and ate for my supper, being resolved to spare my provisions; and I passed the night under the shelter of a rock, on heath, and slept pretty well.

A man cannot count himself honestly, and I set this down for the use of anyone who hopes to. I had my watch on my knee and two fingers on the plate, and I found that the number leans toward whichever of the two, the counter or the counted, is the more afraid; in that canoe both were. At the first noon I had eighty-nine, at the second eighty-two, at the third seventy-one, at the fourth sixty-four. I did not trust one of them. I trusted only that they went down, and I knew already that what goes down in a man with nobody to count him is not always fear.

The next day I sailed to another island, and thence to a third and a fourth, sometimes by my sail and sometimes by my paddles; I will not trouble the reader with a particular account of my distresses, but only say that on the fifth day I came to the last island in my sight, south-south-east of the others. It lay at a greater distance than I had judged, and I was five hours reaching it, and went almost round it before I found a place to land, which was a creek about three times the width of my canoe. The island was all rock, with a few tufts of grass and sweet-smelling herbs, and a great number of caves. I put the remainder of my provisions in one of them, gathered plenty of eggs from the rocks, with a quantity of dry sea-weed and parched grass which I meant to kindle next day, having my flint, steel, match and burning-glass about me, and lay down in the cave upon the same grass and weed that I had set by for fuel.

I slept very little. I reckoned how impossible it was to preserve my life in so desolate a place, and how miserable my end must be; and I found myself so listless that I had not the heart to rise, and before I could get spirits enough to creep out of the cave the day was far advanced. In the dark I had put two fingers under the cord, on the plate, because they were there, and it had said forty-nine. I had never been counted so low. I counted again to be sure, and it said forty-nine, and I understood that the number had stopped leaning because the one who counted had stopped being afraid and had not yet found what to be instead. I put the wrist away. I did not look at the cord.

I walked awhile among the rocks. The sky was perfectly clear and the sun so hot that I was forced to turn my face from it, when all on a sudden it went out; not as it goes behind a cloud, with an edge and a gathering, but as a candle goes out under a hat. I turned round and perceived a vast opaque body between me and the sun, moving towards the island. It seemed to be about two miles high, and hid the sun for six or seven minutes; but I did not find the air much colder, or the sky much darker, than if I had stood in the shade of a mountain.

As it came nearer over the place where I was, it showed itself a firm substance, the bottom flat and smooth and shining very bright with the reflection of the sea below. I stood upon a height about two hundred yards from the shore, and saw it descend almost to a parallel with me, at less than an English mile's distance. I took out my pocket-perspective and could plainly discover numbers of people moving up and down its sides, which appeared to slope; what they were doing I could not distinguish.

I could distinguish this, and I set it down because it was new. I had been in two countries where the people were not of my pace, and I had learned to read pace at a distance, as a farrier reads a horse in a field. These people, who by their size were of my own make, had no pace that I could read. Some of the men on the galleries moved very much as I do. Some did not move, and had not moved between one sweep of the glass and the next, and I took them for statues until one of them, after what I put at a quarter of an hour, finished the step he had begun. In the lowest gallery some men were fishing with long rods, and the rods did not stir, and I put this down to the art of fishing.

The natural love of life gave me some inward motion of joy, and I was ready to hope that this adventure might somehow deliver me from the place and condition I was in. But the reader can hardly conceive my astonishment at an island in the air, inhabited by men who could, as it should seem, raise it or sink it or put it into progressive motion as they pleased. I was in no state for philosophy. I chose rather to observe what course it would take, for it seemed for a while to stand still; and then it advanced nearer, and I could see its sides encompassed with several galleries, and stairs at intervals to descend from one to the other.

I waved my cap and my handkerchief and shouted with all the strength of my voice. A crowd gathered at the side nearest me; I could see by their pointing, at me and at each other, that they plainly discovered me, though they made no return to my shouting. But four or five men ran in great haste up the stairs to the top of the island, and disappeared; they ran like men, at a pace, two stairs at a time, and they were the only persons I had yet seen there of whom I could have said so. I rightly conjectured that they were sent for orders to some person in authority.

The crowd increased, and in less than half an hour the island was moved and raised so that the lowest gallery stood less than a hundred yards from the height where I was. I put myself in the most supplicating posture and spoke in the humblest accent, and received no answer. Those who stood nearest seemed persons of distinction by their habit. They conferred earnestly with each other, looking often at me. At length one of them called out in a clear, polite, smooth dialect, not unlike Italian in sound, and I answered in that language, hoping the cadence might be more agreeable to his ears. We understood nothing of one another, but my meaning was easily known, for they saw the distress I was in. He spoke a word at a time, as to a child or a deaf man, laying each down and waiting; but the waiting was uneven, and was not for me. I took it for courtesy.

They made signs for me to come down from the rock and go towards the shore, which I did; and the flying island being raised to a convenient height, the verge directly over me, a chain was let down from the lowest gallery with a seat fastened to the bottom, to which I fixed myself, and was drawn up by pulleys. Six men worked them, and heaved together, and rested together, and I counted their heaves because it was a thing to count: they were at sixty, to the half-second, which I had not met in any person since the quay at Tonquin. I thought that these were the ones who were in time. I was right, and it was the whole of the matter, and I did not know it for a week. Somewhere on that rock there are still two days' rice that a Japanese captain doubled out of his own stores, and I have been sorry on his account that I did not go back for it.

The humours and dispositions of the Laputians described: how they go, and who fetches them back. Of the king, who answers a question with eleven days. The author is dined, taught and measured; and a night in which the floor beats once to the minute.

At my alighting I was surrounded by a crowd, those who stood nearest being of better quality. They looked at me with every mark and circumstance of wonder, and I was not much in their debt, never having seen a race so singular in their shapes, habits and countenances. Their heads were all inclined, either to the right or to the left; and of their eyes, one was turned inward and the other directly up to the zenith. Their outer garments were worked with suns, moons and stars, interwoven with fiddles, flutes, harps, trumpets, guitars, harpsichords, and many other instruments of music unknown in Europe. I tried them for pace, as I had learned to try everyone, and could not make them out. Of the first hundred I looked at, some had a pace and some had had one a moment before. There is a difference, and until that morning I had not known that it could be seen.

I observed, here and there, men in the habit of servants, each carrying a blown bladder fastened like a flail to the end of a stick; in each bladder was a small quantity of dried peas or little pebbles, as I was afterwards informed. With these they now and then flapped the mouths and ears of those who stood near them, and of the meaning of this I could not at the time form the least conception.

I will give the reader the explanation now, for without it he would be at the same loss as I was in all that follows. The people of this island, when they think, go. I do not mean that they grow absent, as a scholar does over his book. I mean that the body goes with the thought, at the pace of the thing thought of, and that the beat which a surgeon takes at the plate goes out of the wrist as the tide goes out of a creek. A gentleman who is thinking of the moon moves as the moon moves; one who has gone as far as Saturn may be a month finishing a step. While he is away he can neither speak, nor attend to what is said to him, nor tell a precipice from a floor. To fetch him back there is the flapper (the original is climenole), who strikes with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right ear of him to whom the speaker addresses himself; and the peas give the common count, which is sixty, and the gentleman finds it as a swimmer finds the bottom. Those who can afford it keep a flapper in the family, and never walk abroad or make a visit without him; in the street he gives his master a soft flap on the eyes as well, because a man who has gone is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice, of bouncing his head against every post, and of justling others, or being justled himself into the kennel.

They conducted me up the stairs to the top of the island, and from thence to the royal palace, and I understood the stairs better than I understood anything else, because I could see it happen. The gentlemen who led me went up in a body; at the fourth landing one of them went, in the middle of a sentence to me, with a foot in the air; and the rest, as though the foot had been a signal, went one after another, so that I stood on a stair among eight persons in the postures of a procession, while their flappers worked along the row like men ringing a peal. Each came back in the word he had left, and finished it. I learned to say nothing on those stairs, which is the better part of conversation in that country. They appeared altogether unmoved by the sight of my foreign habit and countenance, and by the shouts of the vulgar, whose thoughts were more disengaged.

At last we entered the palace, and proceeded into the chamber of presence, where I saw the king seated on his throne, attended on each side by persons of prime quality. Before the throne stood a large table filled with globes and spheres and mathematical instruments of all kinds. His majesty took not the least notice of us, although our entrance was not without sufficient noise, from the concourse of all the court. He was deep in a problem, and we attended at least an hour before he could solve it. There stood by him, on each side, a young page with a flap, and when they saw he was at leisure one gently struck his mouth and the other his right ear; at which he started like one awakened on the sudden, and said, "Eleven days." I took this for the length of his absence. I learned afterwards that it was the answer.

Then he looked towards me and the company I was in, and recollected the occasion of our coming, of which he had been informed beforehand. He spoke some words, whereupon a young man with a flap came to my side and flapped me gently on the right ear; but I made signs, as well as I could, that I had no occasion for such an instrument. This, as I afterwards found, gave his majesty and the whole court a very mean opinion of my understanding. Their reasoning was exact. A man who needs no one to fetch him back has plainly been nowhere to be fetched from.

The king, so far as I could conjecture, asked me several questions, and I addressed myself to him in all the languages I had. When it was found that I could neither understand nor be understood, I was conducted by his order to an apartment in his palace (this prince being distinguished above all his predecessors for his hospitality to strangers), where two servants were appointed to attend me. The elder was a man of about sixty named Tarvo, a flapper by trade for thirty-eight years, with a forearm like a drover's; the younger was his apprentice, a boy of twelve whom he was teaching to strike on the beat and not on the thought.

My dinner was brought, and four persons of quality, whom I remembered to have seen very near the king's person, did me the honour to dine with me, each with his flapper at his elbow. There were two courses of three dishes each. In the first, a shoulder of mutton had been cut into an equilateral triangle, a piece of beef into a rhomboides, and a pudding into a cycloid. The second was two ducks trussed up in the form of fiddles, sausages and puddings resembling flutes and hautboys, and a breast of veal in the shape of a harp. The servants cut our bread into cones, cylinders, parallelograms, and several other mathematical figures. The meal went forward like a clock in which every tooth must be struck separately, and lasted, by my watch, three hours and ten minutes, of which I should say that twenty were eating.

While we dined I made bold to ask the names of several things in their language, and those noble persons, by the assistance of their flappers, delighted to give me answers, hoping to raise my admiration of their great abilities if I could be brought to converse with them. I was soon able to call for bread and drink, or whatever else I wanted. I remarked that every answer came in the second after a blow, and was clear and complete and brief, and that the gentleman in the second before it had been somewhere else. I began to think the blows a courtesy to me as much as to them.

After dinner my company withdrew, and a person was sent to me by the king's order, attended by a flapper, with pen, ink, paper and three or four books, giving me to understand by signs that he was sent to teach me the language. We sat together four hours, and in that time he was struck eleven times, and came back each time in the middle of the word, and finished it. I concluded that a Laputan lesson is a series of short lessons, and that what is taught in the second after a blow is better taught than what is taught at length. I wrote down a great number of words in columns, with the translations over against them, and made a shift to learn several short sentences, for my tutor would order one of my servants to fetch something, to turn about, to make a bow, to sit, to stand, or to walk, and I took the sentence down; so that I owe my first sentence in that language to the boy's legs. He showed me also, in one of his books, the figures of the sun, moon and stars, the names of many planes and solids, and the names and terms of art of all the musical instruments. When he had left me I put my words in alphabetical order; and thus, in a few days, by the help of a very faithful memory, I got some insight into their language.

I should say what I learned the first night, since it was the first thing I had of that country that nobody taught me. I lay awake in the apartment, and about every minute the floor lifted under me and let me down again, by the width of a hair; a slow, enormous, level thing, such as one feels in a house with a mill in the next room. I counted it by my watch for an hour, and it did not vary by a second. It was one to the minute. I had lain in a giant's house, where the household beat five; I had not before lain in a place that beat one. I understood in the second week that what I was feeling was the island's wrist.

The word which I interpret the flying or floating island is in the original Laputa, of which I could never learn the true etymology. Lap, in the old obsolete language, signifies high, and untuh a governor; from which they say, by corruption, was derived Laputa, from Lapuntuh. I did not approve this derivation, which seemed to me a little strained; but when I heard untuh I wrote governor in my margin, unasked, and underlined it, for it is the word the surgeons use for what lies under the beat and keeps it. My tutor, who had been struck a moment before, said that the island was kept by a stone. I ventured to offer to the learned a conjecture of my own, that Laputa was quasi lap outed, lap signifying properly the dancing of the sunbeams in the sea, and outed a wing; they thanked me as one thanks a child for a drawing.

In the second week I could follow Tarvo, who spoke the language of the lessons slowly, one word at a time, and, unlike the gentlemen, waited for me. He told me that I had done well not to be struck. "They think you stupid, sir," he said. "It is the best that can be thought of anyone here. No one will ask you where you have been." He told me the whole art of his trade in a quarter of an hour, which he said was longer than it took to learn: that one strikes on the beat, and not on the thought; that a flapper who strikes on the thought wakes his man in the wrong place, in the middle of Saturn, and the man comes back with Saturn on him and cannot speak for a week; and that sixty is the only count, being the count they all had before they went.

I asked him whether he had ever gone himself. He said no, never, in thirty-eight years; it was the price of the trade, for a man cannot go and also fetch. He said that he thought he should like to see Saturn, from what he had seen of the faces coming back. There was a look on a gentleman who had been to the sun for nine days, as there is on a man who has been long at sea, a loosening about the mouth; and he had watched it come back into the face, at the blow, some six thousand times, and was always sorry. He supposed I had been farther than any of them, and had never needed a flapper to do it. I said that I had had a good deal of help.

He looked at my wrist then, at the cord that lay twice round it and the plate under the cord, and then at the window, as the captain had looked at it. "That is a flapper's work, sir," he said. "Somebody has kept you." I said that it was a hair. He said that in his trade that came to the same, and went to see about the boy.

Those to whom the king had entrusted me, observing how ill I was clad, ordered a tailor to come next morning and take measure for a suit of clothes. This operator did his office after a different manner from those of his trade in Europe. He took my wrist with a pendulum, a lead ball on a thread, and wrote down the figure; he took my altitude by a quadrant; and then, with a rule and compasses, he described the dimensions and outlines of my whole body, working the one figure against the other, as a man may describe a ship from the note of her bell, and entered all upon paper. In six days he brought my clothes, very ill made and quite out of shape, having mistaken one figure in the calculation, a three for an eight, I think, so that I was for some days a man of a different build from my own, with one arm a fiddle-bow too long. But my comfort was that I observed such accidents to be very frequent, and little regarded.

His majesty had given orders that the island should move north-east and by east to the vertical point over Lagado, the metropolis of the whole kingdom below upon the firm earth, about ninety leagues distant; and our voyage lasted four days and a half. I was not in the least sensible of the progressive motion made in the air. I lay with my palm on the floor the first night to feel it, and the floor said what it had always said, one, and one, and one, and in the morning we were thirty miles from where we had been.

The music of the Laputians is described, with their petitions, their houses, their minds, their fears for the sun, and the manner in which their ladies are lonely. The author is struck once, at his own request; and the king asks about ratios.

On the second morning, about eleven o'clock, the king himself, attended by his nobility, courtiers and officers, having prepared all their instruments, played on them for three hours without intermission, and I was quite stunned with the noise, and could not guess the meaning until my tutor informed me. It was a good while before I understood that the noise was not the music. Once to the minute the floor lifted, and at the lift the whole court struck one chord, together, to the hair; and then every man sat with his instrument in his lap for fifty-nine seconds. The three hours were a hundred and eighty chords and the rests between them, and the rests, I came to think, were what the instruments were for. My tutor said that the ears of the people of the island were adapted to hear the music of the spheres, which played at certain periods, and that the court was now prepared to bear its part, upon whatever instrument each most excelled. I asked what the period was. He said it was the island's, which was ours. I said that I heard only the one note, and he said that was how one knew it was in tune.

In our journey towards Lagado his majesty ordered that the island should stop over certain towns and villages, from whence he might receive the petitions of his subjects; and for this purpose several packthreads were let down, with small weights at the bottom. On these the people strung their petitions, which mounted up directly, like the scraps of paper fastened by schoolboys to the string that holds their kite. Sometimes wine and victuals came up from below by pulleys. A petition goes up at the pace of the man who wrote it, which was mine, and is read at the pace of a king who is, as a rule, elsewhere; and the answer comes down by the same thread after as many weeks as it takes, to a man who has forgotten what he asked. Tarvo said that a town could wait nine months to be refused. I thought that the thread was the one thing in the kingdom that was the same speed at both ends, and that it was a very thin thing to be the only one.

Their ideas are perpetually conversant in lines and figures. If they would praise the beauty of a woman, or of any other animal, they describe it by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses and other geometrical terms, or by words of art drawn from music, needless here to repeat; and they describe her pace in the same way. I heard a gentleman praise a lady, in the second after a blow, in the following terms, which I give as my tutor rendered them: that her eyes were two circles of equal radius, her mouth an ellipse nicely proportioned, and her step in three-four time, with a rest on the second beat, which in a woman of her quality was the finest thing. I observed in the king's kitchen all sorts of mathematical and musical instruments, after the figures of which they cut up the joints that were served to his majesty's table.

Their houses are very ill built, the walls bevel, without one right angle in any apartment; and this defect arises from the contempt they bear to practical geometry, which they despise as vulgar and mechanic. The instructions are drawn by gentlemen who are gone and carried out by masons who are not, and are too refined for the intellects of the workmen, which occasions perpetual mistakes; between the one pace and the other the corners get lost. The king's own bedchamber, which I measured by eye when nobody was looking, was eleven degrees out at the north-east angle, and this was put right, by order of his majesty, by moving the bed.

Although they are dexterous enough upon a piece of paper, in the management of the rule, the pencil and the divider, yet in the common actions and behaviour of life I have not seen a more clumsy, awkward and unhandy people, nor so slow and perplexed in their conceptions upon all other subjects, except those of mathematics and music. They are very bad reasoners, and vehemently given to opposition, unless when they happen to be of the right opinion, which is seldom their case. I took the wrists of thirty-one of them in my first month, each in the second after a blow, when he was in time; every one held sixty to the half-second, and every one, a minute later, was gone again. They are slow where they are, and I believe very quick where they have gone. Imagination, fancy and invention they are wholly strangers to, nor have they any words by which those ideas can be expressed; they have many words for the places they go to, and none for going nowhere in particular, which, I am told, is what we call fancy.

Most of them, and especially those who deal in the astronomical part, have great faith in judicial astrology, although they are ashamed to own it publicly. But what I chiefly admired, and thought altogether unaccountable, was the strong disposition I observed in them towards news and politics, perpetually inquiring into public affairs, giving their judgments in matters of state, and passionately disputing every inch of a party opinion. In the second after a blow a Laputan will give a judgment on the war in Flanders, complete, and with figures; in the next he is on Jupiter, and nobody, himself least, remembers what he decided. I have observed the same disposition among most of the mathematicians I have known in Europe, though I could never discover the least analogy between the two sciences.

These people are under continual disquietudes, never enjoying a minute's peace of mind, and their disturbances proceed from causes which very little affect the rest of mortals. They apprehend that the earth, by the continual approaches of the sun towards it, must in course of time be absorbed or swallowed up; that the face of the sun will by degrees be encrusted with its own effluvia, and give no more light to the world; that the earth very narrowly escaped a brush from the tail of the last comet, which would infallibly have reduced it to ashes; and that the next, which they have calculated for one-and-thirty years hence, will probably destroy us, carrying a blazing tail of ten hundred thousand and fourteen miles. The sun, they say, daily spending its rays without any nutriment to supply them, will at last be wholly consumed. They hold besides that the sun has a governor, like any body, and that its tick is the day, and that the day is not what it was. [Margin: The editor has consulted the almanac-makers. The day, they say, is the length it was. R.S.]

They are so perpetually alarmed with the apprehension of these and the like impending dangers, that they can neither sleep quietly in their beds nor have any relish for the common pleasures of life. When they meet an acquaintance in the morning the first question is about the sun's health, how he looked at his setting and rising, and what hopes they have to avoid the stroke of the approaching comet. The question is meant. The astronomers go to look, and the rest, when they can spare the time, go after them, and the answer is what the man saw. Tarvo told me of a gentleman who went to the sun at the beginning of one winter and was nine days away, and who, on being struck back, said only that he looked well, a little tired at the edges; the whole court was greatly relieved, and there was a feast.

The eldest of the astronomers, Tarvo said, had gone out to meet the comet eleven years before, by the long road, and was by his own reckoning a third of the way along the tail. He stands in the western gallery with his hand raised, a little lower every year; his flappers feed him with a spoon every sixth hour, and he swallows like a man asleep, and on the first of each month they turn him to the light. It is expected that he will be back in good time for the event. It is hoped that he may give notice.

I have said that I was not struck, and that I went nowhere, and that is nearly true. On the nineteenth evening I was sitting in the apartment with the boy, who had been told to sit by me and watch my wrist, Tarvo holding that a stranger who needs no flapper will one day need one all at once. I was thinking, as I had not allowed myself to think since the Downs, of what hour it would be in the Greater Reach, and whether she had been told, and whether she believed it, and whether the hair had been put away. The boy said, "Sir, you are going." I said I was remembering. He said the difference was one for the gentlemen. I put two fingers under the cord, and it said forty-one. I asked him to strike me. It was the only time I asked, in that country. He struck my mouth and my right ear with the bladder, which did not hurt, and the peas ran sixty in my head, and I found it, as a swimmer finds the bottom, and took it; and I went on sitting with it. That is all I wish to say about the blow.

The women of the island have abundance of vivacity; they contemn their husbands, and are exceedingly fond of strangers, whereof there is always a considerable number from the continent below, attending at court upon the affairs of the several towns and corporations, or their own particular occasions, but they are much despised, because they want the same endowments. Among these the ladies choose their gallants. It is only fair to say that the ladies go seldom, and not far, having, so far as I could make out, another notion of the use of thought; so that a lady has a pace for the most of the day, and has it in a house where, for the most of the day, nobody else has.

But the vexation is that they act with too much ease and security, for the husband is always so rapt in speculation that the mistress and the lover may proceed to the greatest familiarities before his face, if he be but provided with paper and implements and without his flapper at his side. A husband gone to the moon at his own supper table may be sat beside, and kissed upon the right ear (which is the flapper's place), and know nothing of it; and the flappers, who see all, say nothing, it being an old rule of their trade that a flapper notices the beat and nothing else.

The wives and daughters lament their confinement to the island, although I think it the most delicious spot of ground in the world; and although they live here in the greatest plenty and magnificence, and are allowed to do whatever they please, they long to see the world and take the diversions of the metropolis, which they are not allowed to do without a particular licence from the king, and this is not easy to be obtained, because the people of quality have found by frequent experience how hard it is to persuade their women to return from below. I was told of a great court lady, wife of the prime minister, the richest subject in the kingdom, a graceful person and extremely fond of her, with several children and the finest palace on the island, who went down to Lagado on the pretence of health and hid there for several months, until the king sent a warrant to search for her, and she was found in an obscure eating-house, all in rags, having pawned her clothes to maintain an old deformed footman, who beat her every day, and in whose company she was taken, much against her will.

Her husband received her with all possible kindness, and without the least reproach, and she soon contrived to steal down again with all her jewels, to the same footman, and has not been heard of since. I record that the husband's kindness was real, and that he was to be had, by my count, for about eleven minutes in the day, in the seconds after a blow; and that the footman, though old and deformed and violent, was to be had all day. I do not offer this as an excuse, only as arithmetic. The reader may take the story for an English one rather than a Laputan; I would say only that the loneliness of one who keeps time in a house of persons who go is not confined to any climate. I have seen it in Redriff, at a table, with an almanac.

In about a month's time I had made a tolerable proficiency in their language, and was able to answer most of the king's questions when I had the honour to attend him. His majesty discovered not the least curiosity to inquire into the laws, government, history, religion or manners of the countries where I had been, but confined his questions to the state of mathematics, and received what I told him with great contempt and indifference, though often roused by his flapper on each side. I told him of the Lesser Reach, where the persons beat seven hundred and twenty to the minute; he was struck, and said, "Twelve to one," before I had said it, and asked nothing more about the people. I told him of the Greater Reach, where they beat five; he said, "Twelve to one, the other way," and was, I think, pleased.

I desired leave of this prince to see the curiosities of the island, which he was graciously pleased to grant, and ordered my tutor to attend me. I chiefly wanted to know to what cause, in art or in nature, it owed its several motions; and I thought I had a notion already, having lain a month upon its pulse.

The island is described, with the cave of the hands and the stone that keeps it. The author puts two fingers on the axle. The king's methods of reducing a town, and how Lindalino matched the beat and brought the island down to forty yards.

The flying or floating island is exactly circular, its diameter 7837 yards, or about four miles and a half, so that it contains ten thousand acres. It is three hundred yards thick. The under surface, which is all that is seen from below, is one even regular plate of adamant, rising to about two hundred yards; above it lie the several minerals in their usual order, and over all is a coat of rich mould ten or twelve feet deep. The upper surface slopes from the circumference to the centre, so that all the dews and rains that fall upon the island run in small rivulets towards the middle, and are emptied into four large basins, each about half a mile round and two hundred yards from the centre; and from these the sun exhales the water in the daytime, so that they never overflow. Besides, it being in the power of the king to raise the island above the region of clouds and vapours, he can withhold dew and rain from any country he pleases, for the highest clouds were never known to rise above two miles. I understood then why the question after the sun's health was meant. On that island the sun was a thing that could be held back.

At the centre is a chasm about fifty yards across, from which the astronomers descend into a large dome, called in their language flandona gagnole, the astronomers' cave, a hundred yards beneath the upper surface of the adamant. Twenty lamps burn there continually, and by the reflection of the adamant they cast a strong light into every part. We went down by a stair of two hundred and eleven steps, my tutor being struck at every thirtieth by a flapper who did not like stairs; and I saw as we descended that the persons at the bottom were not of the sort I had met above.

The place was stored with sextants, quadrants, telescopes, astrolabes, and other instruments, and among them, in plain grey, stood nine men. Their heads were not inclined. Their eyes pointed the same way, and it was at me. They wore no suns and no fiddles; I learned that they were thought above to be a kind of artisan, and were called by a word which means the hands. The eldest, who was seventy at the least, and had a thumb like a carpenter's, asked me in the language of the lessons, slowly, whether I was the one who had refused the flap. I said that I was. He said that he had wished to see that. He spoke to me for forty minutes without a blow, which was longer than any Laputan had spoken to me, and he did not once look at the ceiling.

The greatest curiosity of that cave, upon which the fate of the island depends, is a loadstone of a prodigious size, in the shape of a weaver's shuttle, six yards long and at the thickest part three across. An axle of adamant runs through its middle, and it is so exactly poised upon this that the weakest hand can turn it. The ends of the axle lie in a groove twelve inches deep in the face of a horizontal hoop of adamant, twelve yards across, which stands on eight feet each six yards high; and the hoop and the feet are all of one piece with the adamant that is the island's floor, so that the stone cannot be moved from its place by any force, but only turned.

The eldest took my hand, which none of the others did, and laid two fingers of it on the axle, at the place where he laid his own. It was one to the minute. I had felt it in my bed for a month, through a floor and a mattress, and it was another thing to feel it at the source, where it was warm: a slow, enormous, level push against the ends of my fingers, such as one feels in the neck of a very large animal that is asleep. "It keeps time," he said. "We keep the stone." I asked him who kept him. He said that it was a question the gentlemen above had not asked in three hundred years, and that I might put it to the king.

There were nine of them, and they kept the stone in watches of an hour, one man at a time with two fingers on the axle, doing nothing, which the eldest said was the whole of the art. The king's orders came down from above on a slate, with the direction and the height; and when the stone was to be turned the youngest turned it, a boy of fifteen, since the weakest hand can. He turned it as one turns a sleeper over. I asked whether they had ever turned it wrong. The eldest said once, in his time, by a degree; the island had gone a quarter of a mile out of its way, and the only person who noticed was a farmer, who sent up a petition about the shadow on his barley. It was refused in nine months.

By means of this stone the island is made to rise and fall, and to move from one place to another. I give the account of the eldest, and not my tutor's, who gave me three hours of lines and letters, and was, I believe, correct. The ground under all the king's dominions beats too, at the bottom of the mines and of the sea for six leagues from the shore; no one has counted it, and the stone has it by nature; and the stone has two ends, one that draws towards it and one that drives from it. "The island stands on what is left over," he said. If the driving end is set downward, so that the stone's beat goes against the ground's, a great deal is left over, and the island mounts; if the drawing end is set downward, none is, and it descends; and if the stone is turned aslant, the island goes aslant, rising and falling by turns, and is carried across the dominions by a series of slopes. It cannot go beyond the extent of the kingdom below, because what is in the ground is not spread through the whole globe but ends where the kingdom ends; nor rise above four miles, which is as far as the stone can feel. When the stone is laid level, the island stands still, and that is when the floor can be felt most plainly. Whichever way it is turned, the stone goes on at one to the minute. The hands have no part in that.

My tutor, who had come down behind us and been struck on the stair, showed me the catalogue of the stars. Although their largest telescopes do not exceed three feet, they magnify much more than those of a hundred with us, and show the stars with greater clearness, and this has enabled them to carry their discoveries further than our astronomers in Europe, for they have made a catalogue of ten thousand fixed stars, whereas the largest of ours do not contain above a third of that number. I knew the book for what it was on the first page, because I had kept one myself. Each star had its beat, to the second, and its place, and the year of its taking. It was a book of wrists. It was the longest I had ever seen, and it was kept by men who looked up all their lives, and never at a face.

They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars, the innermost distant from the centre of the planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five; the former goes round in ten hours, the latter in twenty-one and a half. My tutor showed me that the squares of their periods are very near in the same proportion as the cubes of their distances, which, he said, evidently showed them to be governed by the one law that governs the rest. I saw only that the nearer beats the quicker, and wrote it in my book. They have observed ninety-three comets, and settled their periods with great exactness. I asked whether the observations might be printed. My tutor, being struck, said that a thing which is printed is a thing that waits, and that nobody on the island would wait for it.

The king would be the most absolute prince in the universe if he could but prevail on his ministry to join with him; but the ministers have their estates below on the continent, and, considering that the office of a favourite has a very uncertain tenure, would never consent to the enslaving of their country. The eldest told me what the king can do. If a town engage in rebellion, or fall into violent factions, or refuse the usual tribute, the milder way is to keep the island hovering over it, whereby it is deprived of the sun and the rain, and the people are afflicted with dearth and diseases; and if the crime deserves it they are pelted from above with great stones, against which they have no defence but creeping into cellars while the roofs are beaten to pieces. The last remedy is to let the island drop directly upon their heads. "He does not like to," the eldest said. "It is his own ground; and the bottom may crack, if there are spires." I observed that he said it as a man says what he has seen done to a piece of furniture.

He told me of Lindalino, which I had heard of above in the form in which the gentlemen tell it, that is, as a problem. About three years before my arrival, while the king was in his progress, Lindalino, the second city of the kingdom, was the first he visited. Three days after his departure the inhabitants, who had often complained of oppression, shut the gates, seized the governor, and with incredible speed and labour raised four large towers, one at each corner of the city (which is an exact square), equal in height to a strong pointed rock that stands in the middle; and on the top of each tower, and of the rock, they fixed a great loadstone. "They had been counting us," the eldest said. "Three hundred years. The island goes over at the same hour in the same month, and in every family a boy sits on the roof with a string and a stone and counts it. The book is in the town hall. They knew our beat better than the king did. They set their stones to it."

It was eight months before the king had perfect notice that Lindalino was in rebellion. He commanded that the island be wafted over the city. The people were unanimous, they had laid in store of provisions, and a great river runs through the middle of the town. The king hovered over them several days to deprive them of the sun and the rain, and ordered many packthreads to be let down; and not a person offered to send up a petition, but instead of it very bold demands, the redress of all their grievances, great immunities, the choice of their own governor, and other exorbitances. His majesty then commanded all the inhabitants of the island to cast great stones from the lower gallery into the town; but the citizens had provided against this by conveying themselves and their goods into the four towers and other strong buildings and vaults underground.

The king, being determined to reduce this proud people, ordered the island to descend gently to within forty yards of the tops of the towers and the rock. "I was at the stone," the eldest said. "I had my whole hand on the axle. It went light. A stone that has been pushing against the ground for three hundred years, and finds nothing to push against, goes light in the hand, like a door when the man on the other side stops leaning; and then the whole island goes light; and then it wants to go home." He said it with his fingers where they had been all this while. "It stands on what is left over. Nothing was left over. They had five stones on five places, and every one of them had our beat, to the second, and a thing cannot be lifted by what is the same as itself." The officers sent word to the king that the descent was much speedier than usual, and that by turning the stone they could not without great difficulty keep it in a firm position, and begged leave to raise the island higher. A general council was called, and the hands ordered to attend.

"I asked leave to try something," he said. "I took a line of a hundred yards, and when we had the island up over the town, above where the thing had hold of us, I fastened to the end of the line a piece of adamant with iron in it, of the same sort as the floor, and let it down slowly from the lowest gallery towards the top of a tower. It had not gone down four yards before I felt it drawn so strongly that I could hardly pull it back. Then I threw down some small pieces, and they went as if they were thrown by a man. We tried the other three towers, and the rock. It was the same." I asked whether he had been afraid. He said that he had not told anyone how much, and that he had been very busy, which was a way of not being afraid that he recommended.

This incident broke entirely the king's measures, and he was forced to give the town their own conditions. I was assured afterwards by a great minister that if the island had descended so near the town as not to be able to raise itself, the citizens were determined to fix it for ever, to kill the king and all his servants, and entirely change the government. The eldest said that this was what the gentlemen called it. He said that what they would have done was to go on counting.

By a fundamental law of the realm, neither the king, nor either of his two eldest sons, is permitted to leave the island; nor the queen, till she is past child-bearing. I asked the eldest whether the king minded. He said that the king minded nothing in the second after a blow and everything in the second before. He said it without smiling, and I did not smile, and the stone went on, one, and one.

He said that I might stay as long as I liked, since the gentlemen would not come down. I sat an hour in the cave with two fingers on the axle, my tutor having gone up the stairs to the moon. It was the first hour on that island in which nothing was struck, and I did not find that I went anywhere, and I did not find that I came back. I record that the stone was warm.

The author leaves Laputa with a bladder of eleven peas. He is conveyed to Balnibarbi and arrives at the metropolis, where everyone walks fast and the labourers dig to a drum. He is received by a great lord whose estate is out of step, and hears how the Academy began.

Although I cannot say that I was ill treated in this island, I must confess that I thought myself too much neglected, not without some degree of contempt; for neither prince nor people appeared to be curious in any part of knowledge except mathematics and music, wherein I was far their inferior, and upon that account very little regarded. On the other side, having seen all the curiosities of the island, I was heartily weary of it. They were excellent in two sciences for which I have great esteem, and in which I am not unversed; but so abstracted and involved in speculation that I never met with such disagreeable companions. For two months I conversed only with women, tradesmen, flappers and court pages, and with the hands in the cave, who were not asked about; by which I rendered myself extremely contemptible; yet these were the only people from whom I could ever receive a reasonable answer.

I had obtained, by hard study, a good degree of knowledge of their language, and I resolved to leave the island with the first opportunity. There was a great lord at court, nearly related to the king, and for that reason alone used with respect. He was universally reckoned the most ignorant and stupid person among them. He had performed many eminent services for the crown, and had great natural and acquired parts, adorned with integrity and honour; but so ill an ear for music that his detractors reported he had been often known to beat time in the wrong place. I had seen what they meant. At the concert of the spheres, when the court sat fifty-nine seconds with its instruments in its lap, he sat with his lips moving, counting them, and on the fifty-eighth he lifted a finger. Neither could his tutors, without extreme difficulty, teach him to demonstrate the most easy proposition in mathematics.

This lord had never gone. He did not seem to mind; he said that he had been told at six years old that he had nowhere to go, and had found it a lighter thing than he expected. He was pleased to show me many marks of favour, and often did me the honour of a visit, and desired to be informed of the affairs of Europe, the laws and customs, the manners and learning of the several countries where I had travelled. He listened with great attention, and made very wise observations on all I said. He had two flappers attending him for state, but never made use of them except at court and in visits of ceremony, and would always command them to withdraw when we were alone together. I found that I had forgotten how long a sentence is when it is let to finish. On his fourth visit I told him that I wished to go down. He said that he had known it since the second, and was sorry.

I entreated this illustrious person to intercede for me with his majesty for leave to depart, which he accordingly did, as he told me, with regret; for indeed he had made me several offers very advantageous, which, however, I refused, with expressions of the highest acknowledgment. On the 16th day of February I took leave of his majesty and the court. The king made me a present to the value of about two hundred credits, and my protector, his kinsman, as much more, together with a letter of recommendation to a friend of his in Lagado, the metropolis. The island was then hovering over a mountain about two miles from the city, and I was to be let down from the lowest gallery in the same manner as I had been taken up.

Tarvo came to the gallery, and the boy with him. Tarvo said that he was not to strike me, since I had not wanted it, but that he had something for me; and he put into my hand a bladder the size of a hen's egg, tied at the neck, with eleven peas in it. "You cannot strike yourself, sir," he said. "But you can shake it." I said that I did not know how to thank him. He said that if I found I had gone, the thing to do was to count something, anything, since sixty was the same in every language; and that the cord was a good one, but that a man should not trust to one thing. Then he looked at the sky, as a flapper does when a master is leaving, and the boy, who had been told not to, struck my right ear, very gently, on the beat.

I fixed myself to the seat, and the chain was paid out by six men, who let me down at sixty and rested together, and I knew them by the way they rested, for they were the six who had drawn me up. The island went above me, a plate of shining adamant with a man looking over the edge of it, and the man grew very small without going out of time. I had lived upon it ten weeks, and I was sorry, going down, though I should not have thought it.

I felt some satisfaction in finding myself on firm ground. The continent, so far as it is subject to the monarch of the flying island, passes under the general name of Balnibarbi, and the metropolis is called Lagado. I walked to the city without any concern, being clad like one of the natives, and sufficiently instructed to converse with them. For three days I listened for the floor. The ground does beat, the hands say, at the bottom of the mines, but not so as to be heard in a street; and a man who has lain ten weeks upon one to the minute is like a man who hears a clock stop in the next room, and walks about the house listening for what is not there.

I soon found out the house of the person to whom I was recommended, presented my letter from his friend the grandee in the island, and was received with much kindness. This great lord, whose name was Munodi, ordered me an apartment in his own house, where I continued during my stay, and was entertained in a most hospitable manner.

The next morning he took me in his chariot to see the town, which is about half the bigness of London; but the houses very strangely built, and most of them out of repair. The people in the streets walked fast, looked wild, their eyes fixed, and were generally in rags. I put two fingers on the wrist of a man who stopped me to ask the way, his eyes beyond my shoulder: he was a hundred and four, standing still. I took five that day, and none was under ninety.

We passed through one of the town gates, and went about three miles into the country, where I saw many labourers working in the ground with several sorts of tools, but was not able to conjecture what they were about. On every rise stood a man with a drum, who beat a hundred and ten, and the labourers dug to it, forty or fifty to a drum, in ranks; and the soil appeared to be excellent, and I did not observe any expectation either of corn or grass. I could not forbear admiring these odd appearances in town and country, and made bold to ask my conductor what could be meant by so many busy heads, hands and faces, both in the streets and in the fields, since I did not discover any good effects they produced; but, on the contrary, I never knew a soil so unhappily cultivated, houses so ill contrived and ruinous, or a people whose countenances and habit expressed so much misery and want.

This lord Munodi was a person of the first rank, and had been some years governor of Lagado, but, by a cabal of ministers, was discharged for insufficiency. However, the king treated him with tenderness, as a well-meaning man, but of a low contemptible understanding. When I gave that free censure of the country and its inhabitants, he made no further answer than by telling me that I had not been long enough among them to form a judgment, and that the different nations of the world had different customs; with other common topics to the same purpose.

But when we returned to his palace he asked me how I liked the building, what absurdities I observed, and what quarrel I had with the dress or looks of his domestics. This he might safely do, because everything about him was magnificent, regular and polite. I said that his excellency's prudence, quality and fortune had exempted him from those defects which folly and beggary had produced in others. The two who served at table were sixty-one and sixty-four, and steady, and I stood a moment in the dining-room because it had four right angles in it, the first I had seen since Redriff. He said that if I would go with him to his country-house, about twenty miles distant, where his estate lay, there would be more leisure for this kind of conversation; and I told him that I was entirely at his disposal; and we set out the next morning.

During our journey he made me observe the several methods used by the farmers in managing their lands, which to me were wholly unaccountable, for except in some very few places I could not discover one ear of corn or blade of grass. But in three hours the scene was wholly altered. We came into a most beautiful country, with farmers' houses at small distances, neatly built, and the fields enclosed, containing vineyards, corn-grounds and meadows; I do not remember to have seen a more delightful prospect. There was no drum. At four fields I had the chariot stopped and took a wrist across the wall of each, of men who bent and rose at their own times: sixty-three, fifty-eight, sixty-eight, seventy-one. They were not in step, and the corn was in. His excellency observed my countenance to clear up, and told me with a sigh that there his estate began, and would continue the same till we should come to his house; that his countrymen ridiculed and despised him for managing his affairs no better, and for setting so ill an example to the kingdom, which, however, was followed by very few, such as were old, and wilful, and weak like himself.

The house was a noble structure, built by the best rules of ancient architecture, with fountains, gardens, walks, avenues and groves laid out with exact judgment and taste. I praised everything, and his excellency took no notice of it until after supper, when, there being no third companion, he told me with a very melancholy air that he feared he must throw down his houses in town and country and rebuild them after the present mode, destroy all his plantations and cast them in the form that modern usage required, and give the same orders to his tenants, or else incur the censure of pride, singularity, affectation, ignorance and caprice, and perhaps increase his majesty's displeasure. The admiration I appeared to be under, he said, would cease when he had told me what I could not have heard of at court, the people there being too much taken up with their speculations to regard what passed below.

The sum of his discourse was this. About forty years ago certain persons went up to Laputa, on business or diversion, and after five months came back with a very little smattering in mathematics, but full of volatile spirits acquired in that airy region. They had spent five months on a floor that beat one to the minute, and found when they came down that five months at the pace of the heavens had spoiled them for the pace of corn. They began to dislike the management of everything below, and fell into schemes of putting all arts, sciences, languages and mechanics upon a new foot. To this end they procured a royal patent for erecting an academy of projectors in Lagado; and the humour prevailed so strongly among the people that there is not a town of any consequence in the kingdom without such an academy.

In these colleges the professors contrive new rules and methods of agriculture and building, and new instruments and tools for all trades and manufactures; whereby, as they undertake, one man shall do the work of ten, a palace may be built in a week of materials so durable as to last for ever without repairing, and all the fruits of the earth shall come to maturity at whatever season we think fit to choose, and increase a hundredfold more than they do at present, with innumerable other happy proposals. The drums were the first of these, a hundred and ten being the rate at which a man does the work of two. The only inconvenience is that none of the projects is yet brought to perfection; and in the mean time the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes. By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair.

As for himself, being not of an enterprising spirit, he was content to go on in the old forms, to live in the houses his ancestors had built, and to act as they did in every part of life without innovation; and some few other persons of quality and gentry had done the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill commonwealth's men, preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of their country.

His lordship added that he would not, by any further particulars, prevent the pleasure I should certainly take in viewing the grand academy, whither he was resolved I should go. He only desired me to observe a ruined building on the side of a mountain about three miles distant, of which he gave me this account. He had a very convenient mill within half a mile of his house, turned by a current from a large river, and sufficient for his own family as well as for a great number of his tenants. About seven years ago a club of those projectors came to him with proposals to destroy this mill and build another on the side of that mountain, on the long ridge of which a canal must be cut for a repository of water, to be conveyed up by pipes and engines to supply the mill; because the wind and air upon a height agitated the water, and made it quicker, and fitter for motion, and because the water, descending down a declivity, would turn the mill with half the current of a river whose course is more upon a level. He, being then not very well with the court, and pressed by many of his friends, complied; and after employing a hundred men for two years the work miscarried, the projectors went off, laying the blame entirely upon him, railing at him ever since, and putting others upon the same experiment, with equal assurance of success, as well as equal disappointment.

In a few days we came back to town; and his excellency, considering the bad character he had in the academy, would not go with me himself, but recommended me to a friend of his, to bear me company thither. My lord was pleased to represent me as a great admirer of projects, and a person of much curiosity and easy belief; which was not without truth, for I had myself been a sort of projector in my younger days. I had kept a book of wrists for more than twenty years. He had not seen it. [Margin: The editor has seen it. It is a long book. R.S.]

The author is permitted to see the grand academy of Lagado. The arts wherein the professors employ themselves, with the beat of each; and a frame for writing books.

The academy is not one building but a continuation of several houses on both sides of a street, which, growing waste, were bought and joined together and applied to that use, so that to go from one projector to the next one passes through a wall that has been taken out. I was received very kindly by the warden, and went for many days to the academy. Every room has one or more projectors in it, and I believe I could not be in fewer than five hundred rooms. I took a wrist in most of them, when it could be got, and shall give the numbers where they were worth giving.

The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt and skin were all of one colour. He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. His wrist was a hundred and twelve. He showed me the phials in a rack, each labelled with the day it was drawn; I asked what the figure on each was, and he said it was the sun's beat at that noon, taken by a glass of his own, so that the warmth might be let out at the right rate. He opened one for me. It was cold. He said it was an early one. He told me he did not doubt that in eight years more he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers. I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, knowing their practice of begging from all who go to see them.

I went into another chamber, but was ready to hasten back, being almost overcome with a horrible stink. My conductor pressed me forward, conjuring me in a whisper to give no offence, which would be highly resented, and therefore I durst not so much as stop my nose. The projector of this cell was the most ancient student of the academy; his face and beard were of a pale yellow, and his hands and clothes daubed over with filth. When I was presented to him he gave me a close embrace, a compliment I could well have excused. His employment, from his first coming into the academy, was to reduce what he called the finished article to the food it had been, and he had a weekly allowance of the material from the society, in a vessel about the bigness of a Redriff barrel. I took his wrist with the hand he did not have hold of, and it was fifty-one, and as steady as a miller's, and the only restful wrist in the building. I put this down without remark.

I saw another at work to calcine ice into gunpowder, who likewise showed me a treatise he had written concerning the malleability of fire, which he intended to publish. He was a hundred and nine; he said that fire was a quick subject, and one must keep up with it.

There was a most ingenious architect who had contrived a new method for building houses, by beginning at the roof and working downward to the foundation; which he justified to me by the like practice of those two prudent insects, the bee and the spider. The roof of his specimen had been up eleven months, on a scaffold, with a stout man to sit under it, and the walls were not yet begun. He said that the end of a thing is the beginning of it, if rightly viewed. I said that I had begun one or two things from the end myself.

There was a man born blind, who had several apprentices in his own condition; their employment was to mix colours for painters, which their master taught them to distinguish by feeling and smelling. It was indeed my misfortune to find them at that time not very perfect in their lessons, and the professor himself happened to be generally mistaken. His wrist was sixty, and he was the calmest man in the street. This artist is much encouraged and esteemed by the whole fraternity.

In another apartment I was highly pleased with a projector who had found a device of ploughing the ground with hogs, to save the charges of ploughs, cattle and labour. In an acre of ground you bury, at six inches distance and eight deep, a quantity of acorns, dates, chestnuts, and other mast or vegetables whereof these animals are fondest; then you drive six hundred or more of them into the field, where in a few days they will root up the whole ground in search of their food, and make it fit for sowing, at the same time manuring it with their dung. It is true that, upon experiment, they found the charge and trouble very great, and had little or no crop. However, it is not doubted that this invention may be capable of great improvement. It was the only farming scheme I saw in Lagado that was not done to a drum, the hogs keeping the time of their own hunger, which is never in step; and it had failed like the rest, which the projector said proved only that the experiment had not been continued long enough.

I went into another room, where the walls and ceiling were all hung round with cobwebs, except a narrow passage for the artist to go in and out. At my entrance he called aloud to me not to disturb his webs. He lamented the fatal mistake the world had been so long in, of using silkworms, while we had such plenty of domestic insects which infinitely excelled the former, because they understood how to weave as well as spin. And he proposed further that by employing spiders the charge of dyeing silks should be wholly saved, whereof I was fully convinced when he showed me a vast number of flies most beautifully coloured, wherewith he fed his spiders, assuring us that the webs would take a tincture from them. He had them of all hues, and hoped to fit everybody's fancy, as soon as he could find a proper food for the flies, of gums and oils, to give strength and consistence to the threads.

There was an astronomer who had undertaken to place a sun-dial upon the great weathercock on the town-house, by adjusting the annual and diurnal motions of the earth and sun so as to answer and coincide with all accidental turnings of the wind. I asked what hour it told. He said that it told the hour of the wind, which was the only hour that was always to hand.

I visited many other apartments, but shall not trouble the reader with all the curiosities I observed, being studious of brevity. I had hitherto seen only one side of the academy, the other being appropriated to the advancers of speculative learning, of whom I shall say something when I have mentioned one illustrious person more, who is called among them the universal artist. He told us he had been thirty years employing his thoughts for the improvement of human life. He had two large rooms full of wonderful curiosities, and fifty men at work. Some were condensing air into a dry tangible substance, by extracting the nitre and letting the aqueous or fluid particles percolate; others softening marble for pillows and pin-cushions; others petrifying the hoofs of a living horse, to preserve them from foundering. The artist himself was at that time busy upon two great designs: the first, to sow land with chaff, wherein he affirmed the true seminal virtue to be contained, as he demonstrated by several experiments which I was not skilful enough to comprehend; the other, by a certain composition of gums, minerals and vegetables outwardly applied, to prevent the growth of wool upon two young lambs, and he hoped in a reasonable time to propagate the breed of naked sheep all over the kingdom. His wrist was a hundred and four. He said that the day was too short for his purposes. I said that I had heard that said, on an island.

We crossed a walk to the other part of the academy, where, as I have said, the projectors in speculative learning resided. The first professor I saw was in a very large room, with forty pupils about him. After salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a frame which took up the greatest part of both the length and breadth of the room, he said that perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations; but the world would soon be sensible of its usefulness, and he flattered himself that a more noble, exalted thought never sprang in any other man's head. Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study. His own wrist was sixty-six, and he was the one man in the academy who did not hurry; the frame did that for him.

It stood in the middle of the room, twenty feet square, and its surface was made of bits of wood the size of dice, some larger than others, all linked together by slender wires, with a paper pasted on every face; and on the papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses and declensions, but in no order. Forty iron handles stood round the edge, and a lad at each. At the professor's word they turned them, together, with a sudden stroke, and the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. Thirty-six of the lads then read the lines softly as they appeared, and wherever they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence they dictated them to the other four, who were scribes. This was done again and again, and at every turn the bits of wood went over and the words shifted into new places.

Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labour, and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio of broken sentences already collected, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences; which, however, might be still improved, and much expedited, if the public would raise a fund for making and employing five hundred such frames in Lagado, and oblige the managers to contribute in common their several collections. In the intervals I took the wrists of three of the lads at the handles. They were ninety-six, a hundred and two, and a hundred and five, and they did not look at the words. They looked at the next handle. I asked to hear a specimen. He turned the leaves of the nineteenth folio, which was a good one, and read me a line of four words together that had been found the week before: a hair across the wrist. He said that he had not yet found what it was for. I said that it was a very good line, and he marked it in the margin for the laws, short things being generally laws.

He assured me that this invention had employed all his thoughts from his youth; that he had emptied the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made the strictest computation of the general proportion there is in books between the numbers of particles, nouns, verbs and other parts of speech. I made my humblest acknowledgment to this illustrious person for his great communicativeness, and promised that if ever I had the good fortune to return to my native country I would do him justice as the sole inventor of this wonderful machine, the form and contrivance of which I desired leave to delineate on paper, as in the figure here annexed. I told him that although it were the custom of our learned in Europe to steal inventions from each other, who had thereby at least this advantage, that it became a controversy which was the right owner, yet I would take such caution that he should have the honour entire, without a rival. [Margin: The figure is omitted. The engraver, asked to draw twenty feet of squares, asked for a larger plate. R.S.]

We next went to the school of languages, where three professors sat in consultation upon improving that of their own country. The first project was to shorten discourse by cutting polysyllables into one, and leaving out verbs and participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but nouns.

The other project was a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever, and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health as well as brevity. For it is plain that every word we speak is, in some degree, a diminution of our lungs by corrosion, and consequently contributes to the shortening of our lives. They had computed from the wrist that a man who talks as men talk spends upon words, between twenty and fifty, the breaths of eleven years of his life, and that the saving, if he spoke with things, would be nine of them. An expedient was therefore offered, that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they were to discourse on.

This invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues after the manner of their forefathers; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people. However, many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which has only this inconvenience, that if a man's business be very great and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us, who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave. I counted one such conversation, laid out upon the pavement in a glove, a shell, a knife and a loaf, at about forty to the minute, which is slow, and both gentlemen, I thought, were very much at their ease.

I was at the mathematical school, where the master taught his pupils after a method scarce imaginable to us in Europe. The proposition and demonstration were fairly written on a thin wafer, with ink composed of a cephalic tincture. This the student was to swallow upon a fasting stomach, and for three days following eat nothing but bread and water. As the wafer digested, the tincture mounted to his brain, bearing the proposition along with it. But the success has not hitherto been answerable, partly by some error in the quantum or composition, and partly by the perverseness of lads, to whom this bolus is so nauseous that they generally steal aside and discharge it upwards before it can operate; neither have they been yet persuaded to use so long an abstinence as the prescription requires. I made the master a small present. It had, he said, been a dear season for wafers.

A further account of the academy. The political projectors, who cannot be counted; a physician who would take the pulses of a senate; and the author's additions, which are honourably received.

In the school of political projectors I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses, which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. I could not take their wrists. I held one man's for the full minute, as I was taught, and he went from forty-four to a hundred and thirty and back twice, and the figure I wrote down was the mean, which was the number of nobody. In the Lesser Reach that would have been an article of impeachment. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities and eminent services; of instructing princes to know their true interest by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them, with many other wild, impossible chimeras that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.

I asked the first of them how long he had been in the school. He said eleven years, and that he had come to propose something to the king. I asked what. He said that he had forgotten, but that it was important, and that his flapper would know. He had none. They are not kept in Lagado, the first projectors having come down from Laputa without them, thinking the custom of the island beneath men of science; and they had gone, and no one had come to fetch them, and the school was what had become of them. I took the bladder from my pocket, which I had not meant to do, and shook it at his right ear, at sixty. For three seconds he looked at me with a perfectly clear face. "Ah," he said, "you are the man who is in time"; and he was gone again, and I put the bladder away, and did not do it a second time in that school, there being too many of them.

But I shall so far do justice to this part of the academy as to acknowledge that all of them were not so visionary. There was a most ingenious doctor, who seemed to be perfectly versed in the whole nature and system of government. This illustrious person had very usefully employed his studies in finding out effectual remedies for all diseases and corruptions to which the several kinds of public administration are subject, by the vices or infirmities of those who govern, as well as by the licentiousness of those who are to obey. For instance: whereas all writers and reasoners have agreed that there is a strict universal resemblance between the natural and the political body, can there be anything more evident than that the health of both must be preserved, and the diseases cured, by the same prescriptions? It is allowed that senates and great councils are often troubled with redundant, ebullient and other peccant humours; with many diseases of the head, and more of the heart; with strong convulsions, with grievous contractions of the nerves and sinews in both hands, but especially the right; with spleen, flatus, vertigos and deliriums, sour frothy ructations, canine appetites and crudeness of digestion, besides many others needless to mention.

This doctor therefore proposed that upon the meeting of the senate certain physicians should attend it the three first days of their sitting, and at the close of each day's debate feel the pulses of every senator; after which, having maturely considered and consulted upon the nature of the several maladies and the methods of cure, they should on the fourth day return to the senate-house, attended by their apothecaries stored with proper medicines, and before the members sat administer to each of them lenitives, aperitives, abstersives, corrosives, restringents, palliatives, laxatives, cephalalgics, icterics, apophlegmatics, acoustics, as their several cases required, and, according as these medicines should operate, repeat, alter or omit them at the next meeting. He had it all in a table. A senate of five hundred, he said, gave him fifteen hundred wrists in three days, and from fifteen hundred wrists he could tell what a body meant before it knew.

This project could not be of any great expense to the public, and might, in my poor opinion, be of much use for the despatch of business in those countries where senates have any share in the legislative power: beget unanimity, shorten debates, open a few mouths which are now closed, and close many more which are now open; curb the petulancy of the young, and correct the positiveness of the old; rouse the stupid, and damp the pert. I did not tell him that I had read such a ledger once. I said that I thought it was so, that I had been told as much by a young officer who never looked up; and that if it were to be done at all, it should be done in the open, and the figure read out to the man. He said that this was a refinement which had not occurred to him, and wrote it down.

Again, because it is a general complaint that the favourites of princes are troubled with short and weak memories, the same doctor proposed that whoever attended a first minister, after having told his business with the utmost brevity and in the plainest words, should at his departure give the said minister a tweak by the nose, or a kick in the belly, or tread on his corns, or lug him thrice by both ears, or run a pin into his breech, or pinch his arm black and blue, to prevent forgetfulness; and at every levee-day repeat the same operation, till the business were done or absolutely refused. I told him that a thing of the kind was done in Laputa with a bladder of dried peas, at a lower cost and with less bruising, and that it had the merit of a count. He said that he had heard of it, and thought it too gentle for ministers.

He likewise directed that every senator in the great council of a nation, after he had delivered his opinion and argued in the defence of it, should be obliged to give his vote directly contrary, because if that were done the result would infallibly terminate in the good of the public. When parties in a state are violent, he offered a wonderful contrivance to reconcile them. You take a hundred leaders of each party; you dispose them into couples of such whose heads are nearest of a size, and of a beat; then let two nice operators saw off the hinder part of the head of each couple at the same time, in such a manner that the brain may be equally divided, and let the pieces be interchanged, each applied to the head of his opposite party-man. It seems indeed to be a work that requires some exactness, but the professor assured us that if it were dexterously performed the cure would be infallible. For the two half-brains, being left to debate the matter between themselves within the space of one skull, would soon come to a good understanding, and produce that moderation as well as regularity of thinking so much to be wished for in the heads of those who imagine they come into the world only to watch and govern its motion; and as to the difference of brains, in quantity or quality, among those who are directors in faction, the doctor assured us, from his own knowledge, that it was a perfect trifle.

I heard a very warm debate between two professors about the most commodious and effectual ways and means of raising money without grieving the subject. The first affirmed that the justest method would be to lay a certain tax upon vices and folly, the sum fixed upon every man to be rated in the fairest manner by a jury of his neighbours. The second was of an opinion directly contrary: to tax those qualities of body and mind for which men chiefly value themselves, the rate to be more or less according to the degrees of excelling, the decision whereof should be left entirely to their own breast. The highest tax was upon men who are the greatest favourites of the other sex, and the assessments according to the number and nature of the favours they have received, for which they are allowed to be their own vouchers. Wit, valour and politeness were likewise proposed to be largely taxed, and collected in the same manner, by every person's giving his own word for the quantum of what he possessed. But as to honour, justice, wisdom and learning, they should not be taxed at all, because they are qualifications of so singular a kind that no man will either allow them in his neighbour or value them in himself.

To keep senators in the interest of the crown it was proposed that the members should raffle for employments, every man first taking an oath and giving security that he would vote for the court, whether he won or not; after which the losers had, in their turn, the liberty of raffling upon the next vacancy. Thus hope and expectation would be kept alive; none would complain of broken promises, but impute their disappointments wholly to fortune, whose shoulders are broader and stronger than those of a ministry.

Another professor, whom I found the soundest in that school, showed me a large paper of instructions for discovering plots and conspiracies against the government. He advised great statesmen to examine into the diet of all suspected persons, their times of eating, upon which side they lay in bed; and, above all, to take their wrists, and compare them, a week at a time, against a table which he had pinned to the wall, of figures and their meanings. Fifty-one was a refusal, and a cold-blooded one if it was repeated; seventy-four, a nuisance in the precincts; ninety-seven, an embassy. I knew the form of it, and three of the entries, to within a meaning. I did not say how.

The whole discourse was written with great acuteness, containing many observations both curious and useful for politicians, but, as I conceived, not altogether complete. This I ventured to tell the author, and offered, if he pleased, to supply him with some additions. He received my proposition with more compliance than is usual among writers, especially those of the projecting species, professing he would be glad to receive further information.

I told him that in the kingdom of Tribnia, by the natives called Langden, where I had sojourned some time in my travels, the bulk of the people consist in a manner wholly of discoverers, witnesses, informers, accusers, prosecutors, evidences, swearers, together with their several subservient and subaltern instruments, all under the colours, the conduct and the pay of ministers of state and their deputies. The plots in that kingdom are usually the workmanship of those persons who desire to raise their own characters of profound politicians; to restore new vigour to a crazy administration; to stifle or divert general discontents; to fill their coffers with forfeitures; and to raise or sink the opinion of public credit, as either shall best answer their private advantage. It is first agreed and settled among them what suspected persons shall be accused of a plot; then effectual care is taken to secure all their letters and papers, and put the owners in chains.

I told him also that in the Lesser Reach the accuser is put to death if the accused proves innocent, and that the effect was that accusations were made only by persons who could not afford the accused's innocence. He said that this was very ingenious, and asked whether the Reach had many plots. I said that it had had one, and that it had been read out of a ledger.

The papers, I said, are delivered to a set of artists very dexterous in finding out the mysterious meanings of words, syllables and letters. For instance, they can discover a close stool to signify a privy council; a flock of geese, a senate; a lame dog, an invader; the plague, a standing army; a buzzard, a prime minister; the gout, a high priest; a gibbet, a secretary of state; a chamber pot, a committee of grandees; a sieve, a court lady; a broom, a revolution; a mouse-trap, an employment; a bottomless pit, a treasury; a sink, a court; a cap and bells, a favourite; a broken reed, a court of justice; an empty tun, a general; a running sore, the administration. When this method fails they have two others more effectual, which the learned among them call acrostics and anagrams. First, they can decipher all initial letters into political meanings: thus N shall signify a plot, B a regiment of horse, L a fleet at sea; or, secondly, by transposing the letters of the alphabet in any suspected paper they can lay open the deepest designs of a discontented party. So, for example, if I should say in a letter to a friend, Our brother Tom has just got the piles, a skilful decipherer would discover that the same letters which compose that sentence may be analysed into the following words, Resist, a plot is brought home; The tour. And this is the anagrammatic method.

The professor made me great acknowledgments for communicating these observations, and promised to make honourable mention of me in his treatise. That night I took my wrist with the bladder in my other hand. It was eighty-eight; the academy had got into it. I shook the peas at sixty to the minute for a quarter of an hour, and it was sixty-three; and I thought that I saw nothing in this country that could invite me to a longer continuance, and began to think of home.

The author leaves Lagado, arrives at Maldonada, and takes a short voyage to Glubbdubdrib. His reception by the governor, who lends his own beat to the dead for a day. They are all forty-one.

I took leave of my noble protector, Lord Munodi, who had shown me so much favour, and made me a generous present at my departure. He took my wrist at his door, which no one in Balnibarbi had done, and held it as the captain had held it on the quay, and said that he did not expect to see me again, and that it was not a thing he said of everyone. It was sixty-four. He said he had thought it would be higher.

The continent of which this kingdom is a part reaches north to the Pacific Ocean, which is not above a hundred and fifty miles from Lagado, where there is a good port, and much commerce with the great island of Luggnagg, which lies south-east of Japan about a hundred leagues. There is a strict alliance between the Japanese emperor and the king of Luggnagg, which affords frequent opportunities of sailing from one island to the other. I determined therefore to go that way, in order to get home. I hired two mules, with a guide, to show me the way and carry my small baggage.

My journey was without any accident or adventure worth relating. When I arrived at the port of Maldonada, for so it is called, there was no ship in the harbour bound for Luggnagg, nor likely to be for some time. The town is about as large as Deptford. I soon fell into some acquaintance, and was very hospitably received. A gentleman of distinction said to me that since the ships bound for Luggnagg could not be ready in less than a month, it might be no disagreeable amusement for me to take a trip to the little island of Glubbdubdrib, about five leagues off to the south-west. He offered himself and a friend to accompany me, and that I should be provided with a small convenient bark for the voyage.

Glubbdubdrib, as nearly as I can interpret the word, signifies the island of sorcerers or magicians. It is about one third as large as the Isle of Wight, and extremely fruitful; it is governed by the head of a certain tribe, who are all magicians. This tribe marries only among each other, and the eldest in succession is prince or governor. He has a noble palace, and a park of about three thousand acres, surrounded by a wall of hewn stone twenty feet high. In this park are several small enclosures for cattle, corn and gardening.

The governor and his family are served and attended by domestics of a kind somewhat unusual. By his skill in necromancy he has a power of calling whom he pleases from the dead, and commanding their service for twenty-four hours, but no longer; nor can he call the same persons up again in less than three months, except upon very extraordinary occasions.

When we arrived at the island, which was about eleven in the morning, one of the gentlemen who accompanied me went to the governor and desired admittance for a stranger who came on purpose to have the honour of attending on his highness. This was immediately granted, and we all three entered the gate of the palace between two rows of guards, armed and dressed after a very antic manner, and with something in their countenances that made my flesh creep with a horror I cannot express. We passed through several apartments, between servants of the same sort ranked on each side as before, till we came to the chamber of presence, where, after three profound obeisances and a few general questions, we were permitted to sit on three stools near the lowest step of his highness's throne.

He understood the language of Balnibarbi, although it was different from that of the island. He desired me to give him some account of my travels; and, to let me see that I should be treated without ceremony, he dismissed all his attendants with a turn of his finger, at which, to my great astonishment, they vanished in an instant, like visions in a dream when we awake on a sudden. I could not recover myself in some time, till the governor assured me that I should receive no hurt; and observing my two companions to be under no concern, who had often been entertained in the same manner, I began to take courage, and related to his highness a short history of my several adventures; yet not without some hesitation, and frequently looking behind me to the place where I had seen those domestic spectres.

I had the honour to dine with the governor, where a new set of ghosts served up the meat, and waited at table. I now observed myself to be less terrified than I had been in the morning. I stayed till sunset, but humbly desired his highness to excuse me for not accepting his invitation of lodging in the palace. My two friends and I lay at a private house in the town adjoining, which is the capital of this little island; and the next morning we returned to pay our duty to the governor, as he was pleased to command us.

After this manner we continued in the island for ten days, most part of every day with the governor, and at night in our lodging. I soon grew so familiarized to the sight of spirits that after the third or fourth time they gave me no emotion at all; or, if I had any apprehensions left, my curiosity prevailed over them. On the fourth day I took a wrist. It was that of a footman who stood behind my chair, a young man with a Greek nose, who had been dead, the governor said, about two thousand years. I laid two fingers on the plate, and there was nothing; and then, as I held them, a beat came up into them slowly, like the pulse in a limb that has been slept on, and it was forty-one. I took the next, and it was forty-one. They were all forty-one. I looked at the governor, who was watching my fingers with the courtesy of a man who has watched many people do this, and he said, "Mine."

I understood then what had made my flesh creep at the gate. It was not the dress, which was antic, nor the countenances, which were only dead. It was that their faces arrived at forty-one in bodies of my size. I had seen faces do that only among the giants, who are twelve times larger and have the excuse; a man does not expect it of his own make, and the body knows before the mind that something is being done to it. The footman with the Greek nose did not seem to mind. I asked him whether the dinner had been good. He said that it had not. The governor said that this was why he kept him.

He told me that the dead have none of their own, and that he lent them his for the twenty-four hours, as he lent them their faces; that it was the only thing he had to lend that they could use. It was a good one, he said, and a little slow, as his family's were. He was forty-one himself when he was not lending, and sixty-eight at the end of a day with a hundred out, and slept; and it took three months to come back to its old strength, which was why he could not call the same persons up again within that time, except upon very extraordinary occasions. "And they cannot vary it," he said. "A man who lies, as you will have noticed in your trade, goes up three or four. The dead have no up to go. It is not a virtue of theirs, sir. It is the arrangement."

The tribe marries only among its own, he told me, for this reason: the beat must not be disturbed. They are forty-one, all of them, down the generations, like a coat handed on; and the eldest, when he comes to the government, has the lending as he has the park, and the wall. When he calls his own father to dinner, which he does on the first day of every quarter, he has nothing to lend him, the old man being of the same make, and has only to give him the day. "He is the only one I do not lend to," he said. "He comes with what he had."

His highness the governor therefore ordered me to call up whatever persons I would choose to name, and in whatever numbers, among all the dead from the beginning of the world to the present time, and command them to answer any questions I should think fit to ask; with this condition, that my questions must be confined within the compass of the times they lived in. And one thing I might depend upon, that they would certainly tell the truth, for lying was a talent of no use in the lower world. I made my humble acknowledgments to his highness for so great a favour.

We were in a chamber from whence there was a fair prospect into the park. And because my first inclination was to be entertained with scenes of pomp and magnificence, I desired to see Alexander the Great at the head of his army, just after the battle of Arbela; which, upon a motion of the governor's finger, immediately appeared in a large field under the window where we stood. Alexander was called up into the room. It was with great difficulty that I understood his Greek, and I had but little of my own. I took his wrist before I thought, and it was forty-one, in a man who had had, by every account, a hundred and ten at breakfast and at dinner; it was like seeing a sword hung up. I asked what it had been at Arbela. He said that nobody had ever taken it; they had counted his army. He assured me upon his honour that he was not poisoned, but died of a bad fever by excessive drinking.

Next I saw Hannibal passing the Alps, who told me he had not a drop of vinegar in his camp. I saw Cæsar and Pompey at the head of their troops, just ready to engage. I saw the former in his last great triumph. I desired that the senate of Rome might appear before me in one large chamber, and an assembly of somewhat a later age in counterview in another. The first seemed to be an assembly of heroes and demigods; the other, a knot of pedlars, pick-pockets, highwaymen and bullies. They were all forty-one. I mention it because it was the only way in which I could not tell them apart.

The governor, at my request, gave the sign for Cæsar and Brutus to advance towards us. I was struck with a profound veneration at the sight of Brutus, and could easily discover the most consummate virtue, the greatest intrepidity and firmness of mind, the truest love of his country, and general benevolence for mankind, in every lineament of his countenance. I observed, with much pleasure, that these two persons were in good intelligence with each other; and Cæsar freely confessed to me that the greatest actions of his own life were not equal, by many degrees, to the glory of taking it away. I had the honour to have much conversation with Brutus, and was told that his ancestor Junius, Socrates, Epaminondas, Cato the younger, Sir Thomas More and himself were perpetually together: a sextumvirate to which all the ages of the world cannot add a seventh. They had kept the same time in life, Brutus said, which was how they found one another. He did not mean the beat, he said; and then said that perhaps he did. I asked Cæsar, which I should not have, what his had been on the morning, at the foot of the stairs. He said seventy-one, and that he had thought it high for a man who was only going to a meeting. Brutus said that he had not counted his, that he supposed it to have been a hundred, and that it was a thing he found he could not remember, though he remembered the rest.

I entered them that night in the small book, in the same hand and the same columns as the living, which is not the custom. In the second column, where the young officer had taught me to write what the person was doing, I wrote for all of them, Being lent. For Brutus I wrote, after a time, Not remembering, and crossed it out, and wrote it again.

On the ninth evening I had my fingers on a footman's wrist when his twenty-four hours were done. The governor turned his finger. The beat went out of the wrist as the tide goes out of a creek, not at once, from the edges, and I felt it go; and then there was an arm with my fingers on it, which was the arm of a man who had been dead a long while and had been given a day. I did not let go until it was no longer there to be held. The governor waited. It is a courtesy, he said, that some visitors require.

It would be tedious to trouble the reader with relating what vast numbers of illustrious persons were called up, to gratify that insatiable desire I had to see the world in every period of antiquity placed before me. I chiefly fed my eyes with beholding the destroyers of tyrants and usurpers, and the restorers of liberty to oppressed and injured nations. But it is impossible to express the satisfaction I received in my own mind, after such a manner as to make it a suitable entertainment to the reader. On the last evening I took the governor's wrist, as a courtesy between professions. It was sixty-eight, he having lent a hundred and nine that day; and he thanked me, and said that nobody had asked.

A further account of Glubbdubdrib. Ancient and modern history corrected by persons who can no longer vary a beat; and the author, that night, does a piece of arithmetic.

Having a desire to see those ancients who were most renowned for wit and learning, I set apart one day on purpose. I proposed that Homer and Aristotle might appear at the head of all their commentators; but these were so numerous that some hundreds were forced to attend in the court and outward rooms of the palace. I knew and could distinguish those two heroes at first sight, not only from the crowd but from each other. Homer was the taller and comelier person of the two, walked very erect for one of his age, and his eyes were the most quick and piercing I ever beheld. Aristotle stooped much, and made use of a staff. His visage was meagre, his hair lank and thin, and his voice hollow. They were forty-one, like the rest; but I observed that the governor's loan stopped somewhere short of the man, and that in Homer it stopped before the eyes, which were a hundred and ten, and in Aristotle before the staff, which he leaned on as a thing that was his own.

I soon discovered that both of them were perfect strangers to the rest of the company, and had never seen or heard of them before; and I had a whisper from a ghost who shall be nameless, that these commentators always kept in the most distant quarters from their principals in the lower world, through a consciousness of shame and guilt, because they had so horribly misrepresented the meaning of those authors to posterity. I introduced Didymus and Eustathius to Homer, and prevailed on him to treat them better than perhaps they deserved, for he soon found they wanted a genius to enter into the spirit of a poet. But Aristotle was out of all patience with the account I gave him of Scotus and Ramus, as I presented them to him; and he asked them whether the rest of the tribe were as great dunces as themselves.

I then desired the governor to call up Descartes and Gassendi, with whom I prevailed to explain their systems to Aristotle. This great philosopher freely acknowledged his own mistakes in natural philosophy, because he proceeded in many things upon conjecture, as all men must do; and he found that Gassendi, who had made the doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as he could, and the vortices of Descartes, were equally to be exploded. He predicted the same fate to attraction, whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters. He said that new systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age; and even those who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical principles would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of vogue when that was determined. I thought of a stone in a cave, which had been warm, and did not say so; it seemed to me that a stone was not a system.

I spent five days in conversing with many others of the ancient learned. I saw most of the first Roman emperors. I prevailed on the governor to call up Heliogabalus's cooks to dress us a dinner, but they could not show us much of their skill, for want of materials. A helot of Agesilaus made us a dish of Spartan broth, but I was not able to get down a second spoonful. He stirred it, I remember, at forty-one, and it seemed to me to have been made with that in mind.

The two gentlemen who conducted me to the island were pressed by their private affairs to return in three days, which I employed in seeing some of the modern dead, who had made the greatest figure for two or three hundred years past in our own and other countries of Europe; and having been always a great admirer of old illustrious families, I desired the governor would call up a dozen or two of kings, with their ancestors in order for eight or nine generations. But my disappointment was grievous and unexpected. For instead of a long train with royal diadems, I saw in one family two fiddlers, three spruce courtiers and an Italian prelate. In another, a barber, an abbot and two cardinals. I have too great a veneration for crowned heads to dwell any longer on so nice a subject. But as to counts, marquises, dukes, earls and the like, I was not so scrupulous. And I confess it was not without some pleasure that I found myself able to trace the particular features by which certain families are distinguished up to their originals. I could plainly discover whence one family derives a long chin; why a second has abounded with knaves for two generations and fools for two more; why a third happened to be crack-brained and a fourth to be sharpers. Their wrists could tell me nothing, being all one; it was the chins that told me, and I had never before been grateful for a chin. Neither could I wonder at all this, when I saw such an interruption of lineages by pages, lackeys, valets, coachmen, gamesters, fiddlers, players, captains and pickpockets.

I was chiefly disgusted with modern history. For having strictly examined all the persons of greatest name in the courts of princes for a hundred years past, I found how the world had been misled by prostitute writers, to ascribe the greatest exploits in war to cowards; the wisest counsel to fools; sincerity to flatterers; Roman virtue to betrayers of their country; piety to atheists; truth to informers. How many innocent and excellent persons had been condemned to death or banishment by the practising of great ministers upon the corruption of judges and the malice of factions; how many villains had been exalted to the highest places of trust, power, dignity and profit; how great a share in the motions and events of courts, councils and senates might be challenged by bawds, whores, pimps, parasites and buffoons. How low an opinion I had of human wisdom and integrity, when I was truly informed of the springs and motives of great enterprises and revolutions in the world, and of the contemptible accidents to which they owed their success.

Here I discovered the roguery and ignorance of those who pretend to write anecdotes or secret history; who send so many kings to their graves with a cup of poison; will repeat the discourse between a prince and chief minister where no witness was by; unlock the thoughts and cabinets of ambassadors and secretaries of state; and have the perpetual misfortune to be mistaken. Here I discovered the true causes of many great events that have surprised the world: how a whore can govern the back-stairs, the back-stairs a council, and the council a senate. A general confessed in my presence that he got a victory purely by the force of cowardice and ill conduct; and I asked what he had been at the time. He said that he had been told a hundred and thirty-one, which was the pace at which he had run; the enemy's general, he understood, had been a hundred and forty, in the other direction, on a better horse. An admiral confessed that for want of proper intelligence he beat the enemy to whom he intended to betray the fleet. Three kings protested to me that in their whole reigns they never did once prefer any person of merit, unless by mistake or the treachery of some minister in whom they confided; neither would they do it if they were to live again; and they showed, with great strength of reason, that the royal throne could not be supported without corruption, because that positive, confident, restiff temper which virtue infused into a man was a perpetual clog to public business. A man of virtue, one of them said, keeps a steady wrist, and a court is a thing that must be got round.

I had the curiosity to inquire in a particular manner by what methods great numbers had procured to themselves high titles of honour and prodigious estates; and I confined my inquiry to a very modern period, however without grating upon present times, because I would be sure to give no offence even to foreigners (for I hope the reader need not be told that I do not in the least intend my own country in what I say upon this occasion). A great number of persons concerned were called up; and upon a very slight examination discovered such a scene of infamy that I cannot reflect upon it without some seriousness. I put the same question to each of them, in the same place, and each gave the same answer, and there was no up in it anywhere. Perjury, oppression, subornation, fraud, pandarism and the like infirmities were among the most excusable arts they had to mention, and for these I gave, as it was reasonable, great allowance. But when some confessed they owed their greatness and wealth to the betraying of their country or their prince, others to poisoning, more to the perverting of justice in order to destroy the innocent, I hope I may be pardoned if these discoveries inclined me a little to abate of that profound veneration which I am naturally apt to pay to persons of high rank, who ought to be treated with the utmost respect due to their sublime dignity by us their inferiors.

I had often read of some great services done to princes and states, and desired to see the persons by whom those services were performed. Upon inquiry I was told that their names were to be found on no record, except a few of them whom history has represented as the vilest of rogues and traitors. As to the rest, I had never once heard of them. They all appeared with dejected looks and in the meanest habit, most of them telling me they died in poverty and disgrace, and the rest on a scaffold or a gibbet.

Among others there was one person whose case appeared a little singular. He had a youth about eighteen years old standing by his side. He told me he had for many years been commander of a ship, and in the sea fight at Actium had the good fortune to break through the enemy's great line of battle, sink three of their capital ships and take a fourth, which was the sole cause of Antony's flight, and of the victory that ensued; that the youth standing by him, his only son, was killed in the action. He added that upon the confidence of some merit, the war being at an end, he went to Rome, and solicited at the court of Augustus to be preferred to a greater ship, whose commander had been killed; but without any regard to his pretensions it was given to a boy who had never seen the sea, the son of Libertina, who waited on one of the emperor's mistresses. Returning back to his own vessel, he was charged with neglect of duty, and the ship given to a favourite page of Publicola, the vice-admiral; whereupon he retired to a poor farm at a great distance from Rome, and there ended his life. I was so curious to know the truth of this story that I desired Agrippa might be called, who was admiral in that fight. He appeared, and confirmed the whole account, but with much more advantage to the captain, whose modesty had extenuated or concealed a great part of his merit. The captain and his son stood so close that I could not tell which of them I was counting; the boy's hand was in the pocket of his father's cloak, as a child's is. They were the same age, in the only column I had.

I was surprised to find corruption grown so high and so quick in that empire, by the force of luxury so lately introduced; which made me less wonder at many parallel cases in other countries, where vices of all kinds have reigned so much longer, and where the whole praise, as well as pillage, has been engrossed by the chief commander, who perhaps had the least title to either.

As every person called up made exactly the same appearance he had done in the world, it gave me melancholy reflections to observe how much the race of humankind was degenerated among us within these hundred years past; how the pox, under all its consequences and denominations, had altered every lineament of an English countenance; shortened the size of bodies, unbraced the nerves, relaxed the sinews and muscles, introduced a sallow complexion, and rendered the flesh loose and rancid. I did the arithmetic that night. By the rule of the Reaches a body a tenth shorter beats a tenth faster. The Englishmen of a hundred years ago stood a hand taller than their grandsons against the door-post, and their own beat, had it been left to them, would have been fifty-three or fifty-four. I had thought that sixty was the beat of a man. It was the beat of a man of this age.

I descended so low as to desire some English yeoman of the old stamp might be summoned to appear, once so famous for the simplicity of their manners, diet and dress; for justice in their dealings; for their true spirit of liberty; for their valour and love of their country. Neither could I be wholly unmoved, after comparing the living with the dead, when I considered how all these pure native virtues were prostituted for a piece of money by their grandchildren; who, in selling their votes and managing at elections, have acquired every vice and corruption that can possibly be learned in a court.

The author returns to Maldonada and sails to Luggnagg. His wrist is taken at the customs, and a lie of the ordinary size is passed. He licks the dust of the king's floor. The struldbrugs are described, and the author, in a rapture, tells how he would live for ever, at sixty.

The day of our departure being come, I took leave of his highness the Governor of Glubbdubdrib, and returned with my two companions to Maldonada, where, after a fortnight's waiting, a ship was ready to sail for Luggnagg. The two gentlemen, and some others, were so generous and kind as to furnish me with provisions and see me on board. I was a month in this voyage. We had one violent storm, and were under a necessity of steering westward to get into the trade wind, which holds for above sixty leagues. I shook the bladder at noon for the first week, and then forgot; and on the tenth day I found that I had not needed it, and I record this without comment, Tarvo having told me not to trust to one thing. On the 21st of April, 1708, we sailed into the river of Clumegnig, which is a seaport town at the south-east point of Luggnagg. We cast anchor within a league of the town, and made a signal for a pilot. Two of them came on board in less than half an hour, by whom we were guided between certain shoals and rocks, which are very dangerous in the passage, to a large basin, where a fleet may ride in safety within a cable's length of the town wall.

Some of our sailors, whether out of treachery or inadvertence, had informed the pilots that I was a stranger and a great traveller; whereof these gave notice to a custom-house officer, by whom I was examined very strictly upon my landing. He took my wrist before he took my name, which in Luggnagg is the order of proceeding. This officer spoke to me in the language of Balnibarbi, which by the force of much commerce is generally understood in that town, especially by seamen and those employed in the customs. I thought it necessary to disguise my country, and call myself a Hollander, because my intentions were for Japan, and I knew the Dutch were the only Europeans permitted to enter into that kingdom. I said it, and it was sixty-five, from sixty-one before I said it. He looked at the figure and wrote it down without surprise, and told me that the book had a column for what a stranger says and what the wrist says, and that a difference of three or four was ordinary and was passed, and seven or more was sent up to the king. I had never before told a lie of the ordinary size. I record that it is a feeling.

I therefore told the officer that, having been shipwrecked on the coast of Balnibarbi, and cast on a rock, I was received up into Laputa, or the flying island, of which he had often heard, and was now endeavouring to get to Japan, whence I might find a convenience of returning to my own country. The officer said I must be confined till he could receive orders from court, for which he would write immediately, and hoped to receive an answer in a fortnight. I was carried to a convenient lodging with a sentry placed at the door; however, I had the liberty of a large garden, and was treated with humanity enough, being maintained all the time at the king's charge. I was invited by several persons, chiefly out of curiosity, because it was reported that I came from countries very remote, of which they had never heard.

I hired a young man who came in the same ship, to be an interpreter. He was a native of Luggnagg, but had lived some years at Maldonada, and was a perfect master of both languages. He was nineteen, and his own beat was seventy, which he said was the speed of his trade, interpreters being paid by the word. By his assistance I was able to hold a conversation with those who came to visit me; but this consisted only of their questions and my answers.

The despatch came from court about the time we expected. It contained a warrant for conducting me and my retinue to Traldragdubh, or Trildrogdrib (for it is pronounced both ways as near as I can remember), by a party of ten horse. All my retinue was that poor lad for an interpreter, whom I persuaded into my service, and at my humble request we had each of us a mule to ride on. A messenger was despatched half a day's journey before us, to give the king notice of my approach, and to desire that his majesty would please to appoint a day and hour when it would be his gracious pleasure that I might have the honour to lick the dust before his footstool.

This is the court style, and I found it to be more than matter of form; for upon my admittance, two days after my arrival, I was commanded to crawl upon my belly and lick the floor as I advanced. But on account of my being a stranger, care was taken to have it made so clean that the dust was not offensive. However, this was a peculiar grace, not allowed to any but persons of the highest rank when they desire an admittance. Nay, sometimes the floor is strewed with dust on purpose, when the person to be admitted happens to have powerful enemies at court; and I have seen a great lord with his mouth so crammed that when he had crept to the proper distance from the throne, he was not able to speak a word. Neither is there any remedy, because it is capital for those who receive an audience to spit or wipe their mouths in his majesty's presence. I put two fingers under the cord as I went, on the boards, and it was seventy-four. A man crawling on his belly goes at about twenty to the minute, which is the slowest that anyone had gone in my presence since the giants; and the courtiers stood in ranks at sixty on either hand, and watched me come, as one watches an event at the pace of the person to whom it is happening.

There is indeed another custom, which I cannot altogether approve of. When the king has a mind to put any of his nobles to death in a gentle, indulgent manner, he commands the floor to be strewed with a certain brown powder of a deadly composition, which being licked up infallibly kills him in twenty-four hours. I noted that the term was the governor's. But in justice to this prince's great clemency, and the care he has of his subjects' lives (wherein it were much to be wished that the monarchs of Europe would imitate him), it must be mentioned for his honour that strict orders are given to have the infected parts of the floor well washed after every such execution; which, if his domestics neglect, they are in danger of incurring his royal displeasure. I myself heard him give directions that one of his pages should be whipped, whose turn it was to give notice about washing the floor after an execution, but maliciously had omitted it; by which neglect a young lord of great hopes, coming to an audience, was unfortunately poisoned, although the king at that time had no design against his life. But this good prince was so gracious as to forgive the poor page his whipping, upon promise that he would do so no more, without special orders.

To return from this digression. When I had crept within four yards of the throne, I raised myself gently upon my knees, and then striking my forehead seven times against the ground, I pronounced the following words, as they had been taught me the night before: Ickpling gloffthrobb squutserumm blhiop mlashnalt zwin tnodbalkguffh slhiophad gurdlubh asht. This is the compliment established by the laws of the land for all persons admitted to the king's presence. It may be rendered into English thus: "May your celestial majesty outlive the sun, eleven moons and a half!" I had come from an island where they asked each morning after the sun's health. Here they wished the king the longer life.

To this the king returned some answer, which, although I could not understand, yet I replied as I had been directed: Fluft drin yalerick dwuldom prastrad mirpush, which properly signifies, "My tongue is in the mouth of my friend"; and by this expression was meant that I desired leave to bring my interpreter; whereupon the young man already mentioned was accordingly introduced, by whose intervention I answered as many questions as his majesty could put in above an hour. I spoke in the Balnibarbian tongue, and my interpreter delivered my meaning in that of Luggnagg.

The king was much delighted with my company, and ordered his bliffmarklub, or high chamberlain, to appoint a lodging in the court for me and my interpreter, with a daily allowance for my table, and a large purse of gold for my common expenses. I staid three months in this country, out of perfect obedience to his majesty, who was pleased highly to favour me, and made me very honourable offers. But I thought it more consistent with prudence and justice to pass the remainder of my days with my wife and family.

The Luggnaggians are a polite and generous people; and although they are not without some share of that pride which is peculiar to all Eastern countries, yet they show themselves courteous to strangers, especially such who are countenanced by the court. I had many acquaintance, and among persons of the best fashion; and being always attended by my interpreter, the conversation we had was not disagreeable.

One day, in much good company, I was asked by a person of quality whether I had seen any of their struldbrugs, or immortals. I said I had not, and desired he would explain to me what he meant by such an appellation applied to a mortal creature. He told me that sometimes, though very rarely, a child happened to be born in a family with a red circular spot in the forehead, directly over the left eyebrow, which was an infallible mark that it should never die. The spot, as he described it, was about the compass of a silver threepence, but in the course of time grew larger, and changed its colour; for at twelve years old it became green, so continued till five-and-twenty, then turned to a deep blue; at five-and-forty it grew coal black, and as large as a shilling, but never admitted any further alteration. He said these births were so rare that he did not believe there could be above eleven hundred struldbrugs, of both sexes, in the whole kingdom; of which he computed about fifty in the metropolis, and among the rest a young girl born about three years ago; that these productions were not peculiar to any family, but a mere effect of chance; and that the children of the struldbrugs themselves were equally mortal with the rest of the people.

I freely own myself to have been struck with inexpressible delight upon hearing this account; and the person who gave it me happening to understand the Balnibarbian language, which I spoke very well, I could not forbear breaking out into expressions perhaps a little too extravagant. I cried out, as in a rapture: "Happy nation, where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal! Happy people, who enjoy so many living examples of ancient virtue, and have masters ready to instruct them in the wisdom of all former ages! But happiest, beyond all comparison, are those excellent struldbrugs, who, being born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehensions of death!" I discovered my admiration that I had not observed any of these illustrious persons at court, the black spot on the forehead being so remarkable a distinction that I could not have easily overlooked it; and it was impossible that his majesty, a most judicious prince, should not provide himself with a good number of such wise and able counsellors. I was resolved, upon the very first occasion, to deliver my opinion to him on this matter freely and at large; and whether he would please to take my advice or not, yet in one thing I was determined, that his majesty having frequently offered me an establishment in this country, I would with great thankfulness accept the favour, and pass my life here in the conversation of those superior beings the struldbrugs, if they would please to admit me.

The gentleman to whom I addressed my discourse said to me, with a sort of smile which usually arises from pity to the ignorant, that he was glad of any occasion to keep me among them, and desired my permission to explain to the company what I had spoke. He did so, and they talked together for some time in their own language, whereof I understood not a syllable, neither could I observe by their countenances what impression my discourse had made on them. After a short silence the same person told me that his friends and mine (so he thought fit to express himself) were very much pleased with the judicious remarks I had made on the great happiness and advantages of immortal life, and they were desirous to know in a particular manner what scheme of living I should have formed to myself if it had fallen to my lot to have been born a struldbrug.

I answered that it was easy to be eloquent on so copious and delightful a subject, especially to me, who had been often apt to amuse myself with visions of what I should do if I were a king, a general, or a great lord; and upon this very case I had frequently run over the whole system how I should employ myself and pass the time if I were sure to live for ever. That if it had been my good fortune to come into the world a struldbrug, as soon as I could discover my own happiness, by understanding the difference between life and death, I would first resolve, by all arts and methods whatsoever, to procure myself riches; in the pursuit of which, by thrift and management, I might reasonably expect, in about two hundred years, to be the wealthiest man in the kingdom. In the second place, I would from my earliest youth apply myself to the study of arts and sciences, by which I should arrive in time to excel all others in learning. Lastly, I would carefully record every action and event of consequence that happened in the public, impartially draw the characters of the several successions of princes and great ministers of state, with my own observations on every point, and exactly set down the several changes in customs, language, fashions of dress, diet and diversions. By all which acquirements I should be a living treasure of knowledge and wisdom, and certainly become the oracle of the nation.

I would never marry after threescore, but live in a hospitable manner, yet still on the saving side. I would entertain myself in forming and directing the minds of hopeful young men, by convincing them, from my own remembrance, experience and observation, fortified by numerous examples, of the usefulness of virtue in public and private life. But my choice and constant companions should be a set of my own immortal brotherhood, among whom I would elect a dozen from the most ancient down to my own contemporaries; mingling a few of the most valuable among you mortals, whom length of time would harden me to lose with little or no reluctance, and treating your posterity after the same manner, just as a man diverts himself with the annual succession of pinks and tulips in his garden, without regretting the loss of those which withered the preceding year. And I would see the revolutions of states and empires, ancient cities in ruins, and obscure villages become the seats of kings; the discovery of the longitude, the perpetual motion, the universal medicine, and many other great inventions brought to the utmost perfection; and I should make wonderful discoveries in astronomy, by outliving and confirming our own predictions, and observing the progress and return of comets. I added that, as I had it from my own wrist, I should be sixty for ever, which is the best number a man can be, and that I did not see what there was to choose between us.

I enlarged upon many other topics which the natural desire of endless life and sublunary happiness could easily furnish me with. When I had ended, and the sum of my discourse had been interpreted, as before, to the rest of the company, there was a good deal of talk among them in the language of the country, not without some laughter at my expense. At last the same gentleman who had been my interpreter said that he was desired by the rest to set me right in a few mistakes which I had fallen into through the common imbecility of human nature, and upon that allowance was less answerable for them.

The gentleman sets the author right about the struldbrugs: the number does not keep. The author sees them, and puts his hand over a cord. His appetite for living for ever is much abated, and he is glad to be fifty-one.

He said that this breed of struldbrugs was peculiar to their country, for there were no such people either in Balnibarbi or Japan, where he had the honour to be ambassador from his majesty, and found the natives in both those kingdoms very hard to believe that the fact was possible; and it appeared from my astonishment when he first mentioned the matter to me that I received it as a thing wholly new and scarcely to be credited. That in the two kingdoms above mentioned, where during his residence he had conversed very much, he observed long life to be the universal desire and wish of mankind. That whoever had one foot in the grave was sure to hold back the other as strongly as he could. That the oldest had still hopes of living one day longer, and looked on death as the greatest evil, from which nature always prompted him to retreat. Only in this island of Luggnagg the appetite for living was not so eager, from the continual example of the struldbrugs before their eyes.

That the system of living contrived by me was unreasonable and unjust, because it supposed a perpetuity of youth, health and vigour, which no man could be so foolish to hope, however extravagant he may be in his wishes. That the question therefore was not whether a man would choose to be always in the prime of youth, attended with prosperity and health, but how he would pass a perpetual life under all the usual disadvantages which old age brings along with it. For although few men will avow their desires of being immortal upon such hard conditions, yet in the two kingdoms before mentioned he observed that every man desired to put off death some time longer, let it approach ever so late; and he rarely heard of any man who died willingly, except he were incited by the extremity of grief or torture. And he appealed to me whether in those countries I had travelled, as well as my own, I had not observed the same general disposition.

He asked me, as one who had taken a good many wrists, what I supposed became of the number in a man who does not stop. I said that I supposed it kept. He said that it was the commonest mistake of the young: that the number had always been going down, in me and in him, by a hair a year; that in a mortal it went down to the end, and the end was the stopping; and that in a struldbrug the going down went on, and the stopping did not.

After this preface he gave me a particular account of the struldbrugs among them. He said they commonly acted like mortals till about thirty years old, after which, by degrees, they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession; for otherwise, there not being above two or three of that species born in an age, they were too few to form a general observation by. When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain and talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. At fourscore, he said, they are forty-eight, which was nearly my own among the giants; and the world about them, at sixty, is a trifle too quick to love.

Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects against which their envy seems principally directed are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral they lament and repine that others have gone to a harbour of rest to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or particulars of any fact it is safer to depend on common tradition than upon their best recollections. He explained it as a physician explains: the world goes by them a little faster each year, and what goes by faster than it can be taken in is not remembered. "They do not forget," he said. "They are not there when it happens." The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to dotage and entirely lose their memories; these meet with more pity and assistance, because they want many bad qualities which abound in others.

If a struldbrug happen to marry one of his own kind, the marriage is dissolved of course by the courtesy of the kingdom as soon as the younger of the two comes to be fourscore; for the law thinks it a reasonable indulgence that those who are condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife. As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years they are looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates; only a small pittance is reserved for their support, and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period they are held incapable of any employment of trust or profit; they cannot purchase lands or take leases; neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause, either civil or criminal, not even for the decision of meers and bounds. The law gives the reason: that a witness must have been present, and a man at forty-eight is present at a thing a little after it.

At ninety they lose their teeth and hair; they have at that age no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue, without increasing or diminishing. In talking they forget the common appellation of things and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations. For the same reason they never can amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and by this defect they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable. A sentence at sixty takes about four seconds, he said, and at forty about six, and I might consider what a page was to a man who is forty-two and has a memory of three words.

The language of this country being always upon the flux, the struldbrugs of one age do not understand those of another; neither are they able, after two hundred years, to hold any conversation, farther than by a few general words, with their neighbours the mortals; and thus they lie under the disadvantage of living like foreigners in their own country. At two hundred they are twenty-eight, and a neighbour is a gabble. A few general words, said slowly, are what can be got through, and no one has the time.

This was the account given me of the struldbrugs, as near as I can remember. I afterwards saw five or six of different ages, the youngest not above two hundred years old, who were brought to me at several times by some of my friends; but although they were told that I was a great traveller and had seen all the world, they had not the least curiosity to ask me a question; only desired I would give them slumskudask, or a token of remembrance; which is a modest way of begging, to avoid the law that strictly forbids it, because they are provided for by the public, although indeed with a very scanty allowance.

The youngest was brought on a chair by two porters, in the afternoon, and the interview lasted till dusk. He was twenty-eight. It took him eleven minutes to ask for his token, the word being long and his breath short, and he asked it of the wall to my left, having lost the position of my face during the second syllable. My interpreter, who had the patience of a man paid by the word, said it over to me three times as it arrived. I put two fingers to the wrist; it was like laying a hand to the side of a ship. I saw that he had been looking at my other hand all the while; at the cord. I put my hand over it. I am not proud of the hand. The interpreter said that he asked everyone, that it was the law that he might not beg and the custom that he might ask, and that the cord was nothing to him; but his eyes were on it, and I kept my hand there until I had found a silver button and put it into his, and he held it a good while without closing his fingers, and then, quite slowly, did.

They are despised and hated by all sorts of people. When one of them is born, it is reckoned ominous, and their birth is recorded very particularly, so that you may know their age by consulting the register, which, however, has not been kept above a thousand years past, or at least has been destroyed by time or public disturbances. But the usual way of computing how old they are is by asking them what kings or great persons they can remember, and then consulting history; for infallibly the last prince in their mind did not begin his reign after they were fourscore years old.

They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld; and the women more horrible than the men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness in proportion to their number of years, which is not to be described; and among half a dozen I soon distinguished which was the eldest, although there was not above a century or two between them. I could have told it by the wrists before the faces: twenty-eight, twenty-one, sixteen, eleven, nine, seven.

The seventh was a woman, the eldest, and I was taken to see her in a room above a corn-chandler's. She had been set by the window, I was told, since the last reign but two, and the household had not moved her, there being no occasion. In the hour I stood there she lifted her head as far as the sill, which was the whole of her business for the day. A little girl of the house, who might have been six, climbed into her lap and out of it twice while I watched, and the old woman did not see her go. The interpreter said that the child was her descendant in the fourteenth degree, and that the old woman did not know her; at the rate the child moved, they could hardly be said to be of one species. I held the wrist for the full minute, which is how a surgeon avoids deceiving himself, and counted seven, and had not the strength for a second.

I saw the little girl born three years before once, in the street of the metropolis, in her nurse's arms, with the spot over her left eyebrow as red as a berry and about the size of a silver threepence. She was three, and she was a hundred and forty, like any child, and she laughed at a dog, which went by faster than she could follow. The nurse saw me looking and hurried her on, as one hurries a child past a stranger who has stared too long. I do not know what she thought I wanted. I wanted to be told that she was only a child, and nobody did.

The reader will easily believe that from what I had heard and seen my keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated. I grew heartily ashamed of the pleasing visions I had formed, and thought no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure from such a life. I had said that I should be sixty for ever. I thought of it that night as a man thinks of a bill he has put his name to. The king heard of all that had passed between me and my friends upon this occasion, and rallied me very pleasantly; wishing I could send a couple of struldbrugs to my own country to arm our people against the fear of death; but this, it seems, is forbidden by the fundamental laws of the kingdom, or else I should have been well content with the trouble and expense of transporting them.

I could not but agree that the laws of this kingdom relative to the struldbrugs were founded upon the strongest reasons, and such as any other country would be under the necessity of enacting in the like circumstances. Otherwise, as avarice is the necessary consequence of old age, those immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public.

That night I took my wrist. It was fifty-one, which is the number my wife gave me at the door, and I was glad of it, as I had not been. It was lower than sixty, and it would go on being lower. I did not shake the bladder. I lay a long time with the two fingers where they were, and counted; and in the sixth minute, between one beat and the next, I understood that there was going to be an end of the beats, and that I should be, God willing, in a bed in Redriff when it came; and I slept.

The author leaves Luggnagg and sails to Japan. His wrist is taken at Nangasac, and a word that has been carried nine months is explained to him, and someone asks whose. He returns by way of Amsterdam to Redriff, where his wife counts him fifty-three and he counts her sixty-eight. End of the third part.

I thought this account of the struldbrugs might be some entertainment to the reader, because it seems to be a little out of the common way; at least I do not remember to have met the like in any book of travels that has come to my hands; and if I am deceived, my excuse must be that it is necessary for travellers who describe the same country very often to agree in dwelling on the same particulars, without deserving the censure of having borrowed or transcribed from those who wrote before them. There is indeed a perpetual commerce between this kingdom and the great empire of Japan; and it is very probable that the Japanese authors may have given some account of the struldbrugs; but my stay in Japan was so short, and I was so entirely a stranger to the language, that I made only one inquiry there, and shall come to it. I hope the Dutch, upon this notice, will be curious and able enough to supply my defects.

His majesty having often pressed me to accept some employment in his court, and finding me absolutely determined to return to my native country, was pleased to give me his licence to depart, and honoured me with a letter of recommendation, under his own hand, to the Emperor of Japan. He likewise presented me with four hundred and forty-four large pieces of gold (this nation delighting in even numbers) and a red diamond, of about the compass of a silver threepence, which I disliked to look at, and sold at Redriff for eleven hundred credits.

On the 6th day of May, 1709, I took a solemn leave of his majesty and all my friends. This prince was so gracious as to order a guard to conduct me to Glanguenstald, which is a royal port to the south-west part of the island. In six days I found a vessel ready to carry me to Japan, and spent fifteen days in the voyage. We landed at a small port-town called Xamoschi, situated on the south-east part of Japan; the town lies on the western point, where there is a narrow strait leading northward into a long arm of the sea, upon the north-west part of which Yedo, the metropolis, stands.

At landing I showed the custom-house officers my letter from the king of Luggnagg to his imperial majesty. They knew the seal perfectly well; it was as broad as the palm of my hand. The impression was, A king lifting up a lame beggar from the earth. I looked at it a good while longer than the officers thought proper. The magistrates of the town, hearing of my letter, received me as a public minister. They provided me with carriages and servants, and bore my charges to Yedo, where I was admitted to an audience, and delivered my letter, which was opened with great ceremony, and explained to the Emperor by an interpreter, who then gave me notice, by his majesty's order, that I should signify my request, and, whatever it were, it should be granted, for the sake of his royal brother of Luggnagg.

The Emperor was behind a screen of paper, in the Japanese way, and I did not see his hands. The interpreter told me, in a low voice, that nobody in that kingdom had taken the Emperor's wrist in four hundred years, and that this was what the screen was for; that the court did very well with a figure that was guessed at, and that the guess had not been wrong yet, or not so that anyone had said. I thought of a platform in the Lesser Reach, and a number read out before the court that I had written down; and I bowed to the paper.

This interpreter was a person employed to transact affairs with the Hollanders. He had taken my wrist at the door, which they do now, having learned it of the Dutch, and found it sixty-six, which he said was calm for a shipwrecked merchant; and he soon conjectured, by my countenance, that I was a European, and therefore repeated his majesty's commands in Low Dutch, which he spoke perfectly well. I answered, as I had before determined, that I was a Dutch merchant, shipwrecked in a very remote country, whence I had travelled by sea and land to Luggnagg, and then took shipping for Japan, where I knew my countrymen often traded, and with some of these I hoped to get an opportunity of returning into Europe; I therefore most humbly entreated his royal favour to give order that I should be conducted in safety to Nangasac.

To this I added another petition: that for the sake of my patron the king of Luggnagg, his majesty would condescend to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed on my countrymen, of trampling upon the crucifix, because I had been thrown into his kingdom by my misfortunes, without any intention of trading. When this latter petition was interpreted to the Emperor, he seemed a little surprised, and said he believed I was the first of my countrymen who ever made any scruple in this point; and that he began to doubt whether I was a real Hollander or not, but rather suspected I must be a Christian. However, for the reasons I had offered, but chiefly to gratify the king of Luggnagg by an uncommon mark of his favour, he would comply with the singularity of my humour; but the affair must be managed with dexterity, and his officers should be commanded to let me pass, as it were by forgetfulness. For he assured me that if the secret should be discovered by my countrymen the Dutch, they would cut my throat in the voyage.

I returned my thanks, by the interpreter, for so unusual a favour; and some troops being at that time on their march to Nangasac, the commanding officer had orders to convey me safe thither, with particular instructions about the business of the crucifix. On the 9th day of June, 1709, I arrived at Nangasac, after a very long and troublesome journey.

The soldiers marched at sixty, and I at sixty with them, for nineteen days. I had not before in my life marched a long road without having to decide my pace, and I found that I liked it a great deal more than I had expected, and I distrust the feeling. At night, in the inns, the officers took the wrists of their men and wrote them down, and every one was within three of the book; and I lay awake and heard thirty men breathe on one count, and was ashamed of how well I slept.

At the water-gate, which is a low stone arch with a lamp lit under it even at noon, where the foreigners are entered in a book as they come up out of the boats, one at a time, an old clerk with a brush took my wrist. They take it there as one takes a bird, the thumb upon the plate and the whole wrist in the hand. The commanding officer said a word to him, which I took for the business of the crucifix, and he wrote in one column the word forgotten; in another he wrote my number, which was seventy, and my name, which was not mine; and he was putting down the brush when he saw the cord. I had been covering it with my other hand, I found, for some months, by habit. I took that hand away. I thought of the youngest struldbrug, and what he had asked of the wall. The clerk said, "Katami."

I had carried the word nine months. I said it back to him. He looked up for the first time. The interpreter of the port, who had come in for the entry and spoke Low Dutch, said that it was an old word and not a common one, and meant a thing kept of a person when the person is not there to keep it, or is not any longer there. "A hair is the usual one," he said. The clerk spoke again, and the interpreter said that he asked whose.

Nobody had asked. My wife had not asked; the captain on the quay had not; Tarvo had said only that somebody had kept me. I said, in Low Dutch, which was not a language I had thought to say it in, that it was a girl's. He asked how old. I said nine. He asked where. I said that I did not know the way; that it was across a sea; that it was a country in which she was forty feet high. The interpreter did not put that last into Japanese. He asked whether she was alive. I said that I did not know. The clerk took the brush and wrote in the margin of the book, outside the columns, two characters, and showed them to me, and the interpreter said that it was the word. I asked whether I might have the page. He said no. He wrote it again on a slip, and I have the slip; I keep it in the small book, between the pages of the dead. [Margin: Mrs. Gulliver has written beside this paragraph, in pencil, "Asked." R.S.]

I soon fell into the company of some Dutch sailors belonging to the Amboyna of Amsterdam, a stout ship of 450 tons. I had lived long in Holland, pursuing my studies at Leyden, and I spoke Dutch well. The seamen soon knew from whence I came last: they were curious to inquire into my voyages and course of life. I made up a story as short and probable as I could, but concealed the greatest part. I knew many persons in Holland. I was able to invent names for my parents, whom I pretended to be obscure people in the province of Gelderland. I told it at sixty-five, a lie of the ordinary size, and nobody on that ship took my wrist at table, the Dutch having a delicacy about it.

I would have given the captain, one Theodorus Vangrult, what he pleased to ask for my voyage to Holland; but understanding I was a surgeon, he was contented to take half the usual rate, on condition that I would serve him in the way of my calling. Before we took shipping I was often asked by some of the crew whether I had performed the ceremony above mentioned. I evaded the question by general answers, that I had satisfied the Emperor and court in all particulars. However, a malicious rogue of a skipper went to an officer, and pointing to me told him I had not yet trampled on the crucifix; but the other, who had received instructions to let me pass, gave the rascal twenty strokes on the shoulders with a bamboo; after which I was no more troubled with such questions.

Nothing happened worth mentioning in this voyage. We sailed with a fair wind to the Cape of Good Hope, where we staid only to take in fresh water. On the 10th of April, 1710, we arrived safe at Amsterdam, having lost only three men by sickness in the voyage, and a fourth, who fell from the foremast into the sea, not far from the coast of Guinea. I had taken the wrists of the three, in their last week, and written them in the small book; for the fourth I had only the noon before, which was a hundred and six. From Amsterdam I soon after set sail for home, in a small vessel belonging to that city.

On the 16th of April, 1710, we put in at the Downs. I landed next morning, and saw once more my native country, after an absence of five years and six months complete. I went straight to Redriff, where I arrived the same day at two in the afternoon, and found my wife and family in good health.

My wife was at the door. I took her wrist before she could take mine, which I had never done; she let me. It was sixty-eight. I said that mine was fifty-one, that I had had it at the Downs that morning, and she took it with two fingers and held it, and said it was fifty-three. I said fifty-one. She said that she would not argue, which was what she had said the last time; and then she said that she would, and that she made it fifty-three, and that between us we might call it fifty-two. We have called it fifty-two since.

Johnny, who was eleven, was standing on the stair, very still, looking at my face, as he had stood the morning I came home from the Reach, and I took his wrist, which he held out as though it had been a letter. It was seventy. He asked what mine had been at the end of it. I said fifty-one. He said that at school he was the slowest in his class, and that the master said it was a sign of a good mind; I said that the master was a kind man. Betty, who is thirteen, counted me herself without being asked, and came out at fifty-four, and wrote it on the back of her hand with the pencil.

At supper she showed me five almanacs, the backs of them, in pencil, in the margin where the tides are: one number for each noon of five years and six months, and every one of them her own. She had kept her own count, she said, to have something to put against mine when I came. She had put a small cross against the days she had been frightened; they were not many, and she did not say which they had been, and I did not ask, being afraid that I could have told her. The lowest was sixty-four. I said that I had not been below forty-nine, and she asked where, and I said on a rock, and she asked which. It took until the candle was down to tell her. I did not get as far as the cord. I thought that I should, in the morning.

The author, having told his wife about the cord, sets out as captain of a ship. His men conspire against him, confine him a long time to his cabin, and set him on shore in an unknown land. The Yahoos, who cannot be counted, are described. The author meets two Houyhnhnms, who strike hoof on hoof.

I continued at home with my wife and children about five months in a very happy condition, if I could have learned the lesson of knowing when I was well. She took my wrist at noon, and wrote it on the almanac, and for five months it was fifty-two, give or take a figure; she showed me the column on the first of every month, as a farmer shows a field. On the third morning I had told her about the cord. It took the better part of an hour, at the table, and she did not speak until I had done. Then she asked how old the girl was, and I said nine, and she asked how long I had been gone from that country, and I said four years, and she did the sum with her lips, as she does the household sums, and said, "Then it's four months." I said that it was. "She'll not have stopped, then," said my wife. I said that I did not know. She said that she did.

I left my poor wife big with child, and accepted an advantageous offer made me to be captain of the Adventurer, a stout merchantman of three hundred and fifty tons; for I understood navigation well, and being grown weary of a surgeon's employment at sea, which, however, I could exercise upon occasion, I took a skilful young man of that calling, one Robert Purefoy, into my ship. I will make no defence. I record that she took my wrist at the door on the morning I left, and that it was sixty-one, and that she wrote it down, and that I knew what I was doing, and went.

We set sail from Portsmouth upon the 7th day of August, 1710; on the 14th we met with Captain Pocock, of Bristol, at Teneriffe, who was going to the bay of Campechy to cut logwood. I took his wrist on the quay, as one does with an old acquaintance: it was sixty-three, and he told me that he had never known it vary, which I took for a boast. On the 16th he was parted from us by a storm; I heard since my return that his ship foundered, and none escaped but one cabin-boy. He was an honest man and a good sailor, but a little too positive in his own opinions, which was the cause of his destruction, as it has been with several others; for if he had followed my advice, he might have been safe at home with his family at this time, as well as myself. I have thought since that a man whose beat never varies is a man who cannot turn, and that I met in him, a little too early, a thing I was to meet again.

I had several men who died in my ship of calentures, so that I was forced to get recruits out of Barbadoes and the Leeward Islands, where I touched by the direction of the merchants who employed me; which I had soon too much cause to repent, for I found afterwards that most of them had been buccaneers. I took their wrists on the quay at Bridgetown, as I took every man's, and wrote them in the book, and it should have told me: eleven of the fifteen were over a hundred at rest, and a surgeon ought to know what that is in a ship. I thought to bring them down by keeping them busy. I had fifty hands on board, and my orders were that I should trade with the Indians in the South Sea and make what discoveries I could.

These rogues, whom I had picked up, debauched my other men, and they all formed a conspiracy to seize the ship and secure me; which they did one morning, rushing into my cabin and binding me hand and foot, threatening to throw me overboard if I offered to stir. I told them I was their prisoner, and would submit. This they made me swear to do, and then they unbound me, only fastening one of my legs with a chain near my bed, and placed a sentry at my door with his piece charged, who was commanded to shoot me dead if I attempted my liberty. They sent me down victuals and drink, and took the government of the ship to themselves. Their design was to turn pirates and plunder the Spaniards, which they could not do till they got more men. But first they resolved to sell the goods in the ship, and then go to Madagascar for recruits, several among them having died since my confinement. They sailed many weeks, and traded with the Indians; but I knew not what course they took, being kept a close prisoner in my cabin, and expecting nothing less than to be murdered, as they often threatened me.

Nobody counted me in the cabin. I took my own wrist a hundred times, and trusted none of the figures, having learned in the canoe what a count is worth that is made by the man; it ran a hundred and ten the first week and sixty the third, and I could not have said whether that was fear or practice. I shook the bladder three times a day, quietly, at sixty. The sentry, who could hear it through the door, took it for a rattle for a child, and was kind about it, and asked once, without any sort of interest, whether it was a boy.

Upon the 9th day of May, 1711, one James Welch came down to my cabin and said he had orders from the captain to set me ashore. I expostulated with him, but in vain; neither would he so much as tell me who their new captain was. They forced me into the long-boat, letting me put on my best suit of clothes, which were as good as new, and take a small bundle of linen, but no arms except my hanger; and they were so civil as not to search my pockets, into which I conveyed what money I had, with some other little necessaries. They rowed about a league, and then set me down on a strand. I desired them to tell me what country it was. They all swore they knew no more than myself, but said that the captain (as they called him) was resolved, after they had sold the lading, to get rid of me in the first place where they could discover land. They pushed off immediately, advising me to make haste for fear of being overtaken by the tide, and so bade me farewell. Welch had put my linen into the boat himself. At Bridgetown his had been the only wrist among them under seventy. I do not say that this was kindness. I say that I find I remember it.

In this desolate condition I advanced forward, and soon got upon firm ground, where I sat down on a bank to rest myself, and consider what I had best do. When I was a little refreshed I went up into the country, resolving to deliver myself to the first savages I should meet, and purchase my life from them by some bracelets, glass rings and other toys, which sailors usually provide themselves with in those voyages, and whereof I had some about me. The land was divided by long rows of trees, not regularly planted but naturally growing; there was great plenty of grass, and several fields of oats. I walked very circumspectly, for fear of being surprised, or suddenly shot with an arrow from behind or on either side. I fell into a beaten road, where I saw many tracks of human feet, and some of cows, but most of horses.

At last I beheld several animals in a field, and one or two of the same kind sitting in trees. Their shape was very singular and deformed, which a little discomposed me, so that I lay down behind a thicket to observe them better. Some of them coming forward near the place where I lay gave me an opportunity of distinctly marking their form. Their heads and breasts were covered with a thick hair, some frizzled and others lank; they had beards like goats, and a long ridge of hair down their backs and the fore parts of their legs and feet; but the rest of their bodies was bare, so that I might see their skins, which were of a brown buff colour. They had no tails. They climbed high trees as nimbly as a squirrel, for they had strong extended claws before and behind, terminating in sharp points and hooked, and would often spring, and bound, and leap, with prodigious agility. The females were not so large as the males; they had long lank hair on their heads, but none on their faces, nor anything more than a sort of down on the rest of their bodies, and their dugs hung between their forefeet, and often reached almost to the ground as they walked. The hair of both sexes was of several colours, brown, red, black and yellow. I tried them for pace, as I had tried everyone since the Reach, and I could not do it: they were not at any pace, and they were at all of them in the space of a breath; one leapt, and was still, and leapt, as a clock does whose escapement has been taken out. Upon the whole, I never beheld in all my travels so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy.

So that, thinking I had seen enough, full of contempt and aversion, I got up and pursued the beaten road, hoping it might direct me to the cabin of some Indian. I had not got far when I met one of these creatures full in my way, and coming up directly to me. The ugly monster, when he saw me, distorted several ways every feature of his visage, and stared, as at an object he had never seen before; then, approaching nearer, lifted up his fore-paw, whether out of curiosity or mischief I could not tell; but I drew my hanger, and gave him a good blow with the flat side of it, for I durst not strike with the edge, fearing the inhabitants might be provoked against me, if they should come to know that I had killed or maimed any of their cattle. I have thought since, and I put it down for what it is worth, that the paw was coming to my wrist. When the beast felt the smart he drew back and roared so loud that a herd of at least forty came flocking about me from the next field, howling and making odious faces; but I ran to the body of a tree, and leaning my back against it, kept them off by waving my hanger. Several of this cursed brood, getting hold of the branches behind, leaped up into the tree, whence they began to discharge their excrements on my head; however, I escaped pretty well by sticking close to the stem of the tree, but was almost stifled with the filth which fell about me on every side.

In the midst of this distress I observed them all to run away on a sudden as fast as they could; at which I ventured to leave the tree and pursue the road, wondering what it was that could put them into this fright. But looking on my left hand, I saw a horse walking softly in the field; which my persecutors having sooner discovered was the cause of their flight. I knew him for what he was before I knew him for a horse. He walked at a pace. It was not mine; I put it at forty-four. After that field it was like a clock coming through a room of watches.

The horse started a little when he came near me, but soon recovering himself, looked full in my face with manifest tokens of wonder; he viewed my hands and feet, walking round me several times. I would have pursued my journey, but he placed himself directly in the way, yet looking with a very mild aspect, never offering the least violence. We stood gazing at each other for some time; at last I took the boldness to reach my hand towards his neck, with a design to stroke it, using the common style and whistle of jockeys when they are going to handle a strange horse. But this animal seemed to receive my civilities with disdain, shook his head, and bent his brows, softly raising up his right fore-foot to remove my hand. Then he neighed three or four times, but in so different a cadence that I almost began to think he was speaking to himself, in some language of his own.

While he and I were thus employed, another horse came up, who, applying himself to the first in a very formal manner, they gently struck each other's right hoof before, neighing several times by turns and varying the sound, which seemed to be almost articulate. I took the stroke for a salute. It was a counting: each gave the other one, and the two agreed, and that was the whole of the greeting; it is the only salute I have met in which nothing is said that might not be true. They went some paces off, as if it were to confer together, walking side by side backward and forward, like persons deliberating upon some affair of weight, but often turning their eyes towards me, as it were to watch that I might not escape.

I was amazed to see such actions and behaviour in brute beasts, and concluded with myself that if the inhabitants of this country were endued with a proportionable degree of reason, they must needs be the wisest people upon earth. This thought gave me so much comfort that I resolved to go forward until I could discover some house or village, or meet with any of the natives, leaving the two horses to discourse together as they pleased. But the first, who was a dapple gray, observing me to steal off, neighed after me in so expressive a tone that I fancied myself to understand what he meant; whereupon I turned back and came near to him to expect his farther commands, but concealing my fear as much as I could, for I began to be in some pain how this adventure might terminate.

The two horses came up close to me, looking with great earnestness upon my face and hands. The gray steed rubbed my hat all round with his right fore-hoof, and discomposed it so much that I was forced to adjust it better by taking it off and settling it again; whereat both he and his companion (who was a brown bay) appeared to be much surprised. The latter felt the lappet of my coat, and finding it to hang loose about me, they both looked with new signs of wonder. The gray took my right hand between his hoof and his pastern, at the wrist, and squeezed it so hard that I was forced to roar; he was counting me. I was sixty-eight. When he let go he looked at the bay, and the bay struck his hoof, and they neighed; and after that they both touched me with all possible tenderness. I think now that what they said to one another was that this Yahoo had a beat. They were under great perplexity about my shoes and stockings, which they felt very often, neighing to each other, and using various gestures, not unlike those of a philosopher when he would attempt to solve some new and difficult phenomenon.

Upon the whole, the behaviour of these animals was so orderly and rational, so acute and judicious, that I at last concluded they must needs be magicians, who had thus metamorphosed themselves upon some design, and seeing a stranger in the way, resolved to divert themselves with him; or perhaps were really amazed at the sight of a man so very different in habit, feature and complexion from those who might probably live in so remote a climate. Upon the strength of this reasoning I ventured to address them in the following manner: "Gentlemen, if you be conjurers, as I have good cause to believe, you can understand my language; therefore I make bold to let your worships know that I am a poor distressed Englishman, driven by his misfortunes upon your coast; and I entreat one of you to let me ride upon his back, as if he were a real horse, to some house or village where I can be relieved. In return of which favour I will make you a present of this knife and bracelet," taking them out of my pocket. The two creatures stood silent while I spoke, seeming to listen with great attention, and when I had ended they neighed frequently towards each other, as if they were engaged in serious conversation. I plainly observed that their language expressed the passions very well, and the words might, with little pains, be resolved into an alphabet more easily than the Chinese.

I could frequently distinguish the word Yahoo, which was repeated by each of them several times; and although it was impossible for me to conjecture what it meant, yet while the two horses were busy in conversation I endeavoured to practise this word upon my tongue; and as soon as they were silent I boldly pronounced Yahoo in a loud voice, imitating at the same time, as near as I could, the neighing of a horse; at which they were both visibly surprised; and the gray repeated the same word twice, as if he meant to teach me the right accent; wherein I spoke after him as well as I could, and found myself perceivably to improve every time, though very far from any degree of perfection. Then the bay tried me with a second word, much harder to be pronounced; but, reducing it to the English orthography, may be spelt thus, Houyhnhnm. I did not succeed in this so well as in the former; but after two or three farther trials I had better fortune; and they both appeared amazed at my capacity. The first word they said with a catch in it, as a man says a name he would rather not; the second level, in four notes, at the pace of a walk.

After some farther discourse, which I then conjectured might relate to me, the two friends took their leaves, with the same compliment of striking each other's hoof; and the gray made me signs that I should walk before him; wherein I thought it prudent to comply till I could find a better director. When I offered to slacken my pace he would cry hhuun, hhuun. I guessed his meaning, and gave him to understand, as well as I could, that I was weary, and not able to walk faster; upon which he would stand a while to let me rest. It was a number, I found, and not a cry: he said it at the pace he walked, forty-four to the minute, and when I slackened he said it faster; I could not walk at it, being sixty, and it was like walking in front of a bell. When I was weary he stood. I record that the first person in that country to take notice that I was tired was a horse.

The author is conducted by a Houyhnhnm to his house. The house described. The author takes a Yahoo's wrist. The food of the Houyhnhnms, and the author's. A table that keeps one count; and a night between two kinds of sound.

Having travelled about three miles, we came to a long kind of building, made of timber stuck in the ground and wattled across; the roof was low and covered with straw. I now began to be a little comforted, and took out some toys which travellers usually carry for presents to the savage Indians of America and other parts, in hopes the people of the house would be thereby encouraged to receive me kindly. The horse made me a sign to go in first. It was a large room with a smooth clay floor, and a rack and manger extending the whole length on one side. There were three nags and two mares, not eating, but some of them sitting down upon their hams, which I very much wondered at; but wondered more to see the rest employed in domestic business; these seemed but ordinary cattle. When the gray came in they stood, all five, and I could not see who had begun it; and when he neighed in a style of authority and received answers, they sat, together, and no one had given the sign. However, this confirmed my first opinion, that a people who could so far civilize brute animals must needs excel in wisdom all the nations of the world.

Beyond this room there were three others, reaching the length of the house, to which you passed through three doors opposite to each other, in the manner of a vista. We went through the second room towards the third. Here the gray walked in first, beckoning me to attend; I waited in the second room, and got ready my presents for the master and mistress of the house; they were two knives, three bracelets of false pearls, a small looking-glass and a bead necklace. The horse neighed three or four times, and I waited to hear some answers in a human voice, but I heard no other returns than in the same dialect, only one or two a little shriller than his. I began to think that this house must belong to some person of great note among them, because there appeared so much ceremony before I could gain admittance. But that a man of quality should be served all by horses was beyond my comprehension. I feared my brain was disturbed by my sufferings and misfortunes. I roused myself, and looked about me in the room where I was left alone: this was furnished like the first, only after a more elegant manner. I rubbed my eyes often, but the same objects still occurred. I pinched my arms and sides to awake myself, hoping I might be in a dream. I then absolutely concluded that all these appearances could be nothing else but necromancy and magic. But I had no time to pursue these reflections, for the gray came to the door and made me a sign to follow him into the third room, where I saw a very comely mare, together with a colt and foal, sitting on their haunches upon mats of straw, not unartfully made, and perfectly neat and clean.

The mare soon after my entrance rose from her mat, and coming up close, after having nicely observed my hands and face, gave me a most contemptuous look; and turning to the horse, I heard the word Yahoo often repeated betwixt them; the meaning of which word I could not then comprehend, although it was the first I had learned to pronounce. But I was soon better informed, to my everlasting mortification; for the horse, beckoning to me with his head, and repeating the hhuun, hhuun, as he did upon the road, which I understood was to attend him, led me out into a kind of court, where was another building at some distance from the house. Here we entered, and I saw three of those detestable creatures which I first met after my landing, feeding upon roots, and the flesh of some animals, which I afterwards found to be that of asses and dogs, and now and then a cow dead by accident or disease. They were all tied by the neck with strong withes fastened to a beam; they held their food between the claws of their forefeet, and tore it with their teeth.

The master horse ordered a sorrel nag, one of his servants, to untie the largest of these animals and take him into the yard. The beast and I were brought close together, and by our countenances diligently compared, both by master and servant, who thereupon repeated several times the word Yahoo. My horror and astonishment are not to be described, when I observed in this abominable animal a perfect human figure: the face of it indeed was flat and broad, the nose depressed, the lips large and the mouth wide; but these differences are common to all savage nations, where the lineaments of the countenance are distorted by the natives suffering their infants to lie grovelling on the earth, or by carrying them on their backs, nuzzling with their face against the mothers' shoulders. The forefeet of the Yahoo differed from my hands in nothing else but the length of the nails, the coarseness and brownness of the palms, and the hairiness on the backs. There was the same resemblance between our feet, with the same differences, which I knew very well, though the horses did not, because of my shoes and stockings; the same in every part of our bodies, except as to hairiness and colour, which I have already described.

I took its wrist. It let me; it did not know the gesture, and did not mind, and the sorrel held it by the withe. There was hair on the inner wrist as on the back of the hand, and I parted it with my thumb, and the plate was there, in its place under the hair, as it is in me. I held it the full minute. It went from forty to a hundred and sixty and back; in the middle of the minute it yawned, and was ninety. It was a governor with nobody to keep it. I had thought that I knew what the horror would be, and I had been wrong about where it would be, which was in the thumb.

The great difficulty that seemed to stick with the two horses was to see the rest of my body so very different from that of a Yahoo, for which I was obliged to my clothes, whereof they had no conception. The sorrel nag offered me a root, which he held (after their manner, as we shall describe in its proper place) between his hoof and pastern; I took it in my hand, and having smelt it, returned it to him again as civilly as I could. He brought out of the Yahoos' kennel a piece of ass's flesh; but it smelt so offensively that I turned from it with loathing; he then threw it to the Yahoo, by whom it was greedily devoured. He afterwards showed me a wisp of hay and a fetlock full of oats; but I shook my head to signify that neither of these were food for me. And indeed I now apprehended that I must absolutely starve if I did not get to some of my own species; for as to those filthy Yahoos, although there were few greater lovers of mankind at that time than myself, yet I confess I never saw any sensitive being so detestable on all accounts; and the more I came near them the more hateful they grew, while I stayed in that country. This the master horse observed by my behaviour, and therefore sent the Yahoo back to his kennel. He then put his fore-hoof to his mouth, at which I was much surprised, although he did it with ease, and with a motion that appeared perfectly natural, and made other signs to know what I would eat; but I could not return him such an answer as he was able to apprehend; and if he had understood me, I did not see how it was possible to contrive any way for finding myself nourishment. While we were thus engaged I observed a cow passing by, whereupon I pointed to her, and expressed a desire to go and milk her. This had its effect, for he led me back into the house, and ordered a mare-servant to open a room, where a good store of milk lay in earthen and wooden vessels, after a very orderly and cleanly manner. She gave me a large bowlful, of which I drank very heartily, and found myself well refreshed.

About noon I saw coming towards the house a kind of vehicle drawn like a sledge by four Yahoos. There was in it an old steed, who seemed to be of quality; he alighted with his hind-feet forward, having by accident got a hurt in his left fore-foot. He came to dine with our horse, who received him with great civility. They dined in the best room, and had oats boiled in milk for the second course, which the old horse ate warm, but the rest cold. Their mangers were placed circular in the middle of the room, and divided into several partitions, round which they sat on their haunches upon bosses of straw. In the middle was a large rack, with angles answering to every partition of the manger; so that each horse and mare ate their own hay and their own mash of oats and milk with much decency and regularity. The behaviour of the young colt and foal appeared very modest, and that of the master and mistress extremely cheerful and complaisant to their guest. The gray ordered me to stand by him; and much discourse passed between him and his friend concerning me, as I found by the stranger's often looking on me, and the frequent repetition of the word Yahoo.

They ate together. Heads down and up, seven at the manger, on one count, as men row; nobody had said it, and nobody was keeping it. The old steed's left fore-foot was hurt, and I noticed over the oats that the whole table was a little slow for the length of the course, as men walk with a lame one: he was forty-three, and they were forty-three, and no one referred to it. There was no drum in the room, and no flapper, and no hair across any wrist; there was nothing to keep it, and it was kept. I stood by the gray with my own count running somewhere in the sixties, and I felt it begin to go down in me, like water finding its level in a pipe.

I happened to wear my gloves, which the master gray observing seemed perplexed, discovering signs of wonder what I had done to my forefeet. He put his hoof three or four times to them, as if he would signify that I should reduce them to their former shape, which I presently did, pulling off both my gloves and putting them into my pocket. His hoof had come to the glove at the wrist, as a man knocks upon a door that has been shut in his face; I understood that he wished to reach the plate. This occasioned farther talk; and I saw the company was pleased with my behaviour, whereof I soon found the good effects. I was ordered to speak the few words I understood; and while they were at dinner the master taught me the names for oats, milk, fire, water and some others, which I could readily pronounce after him, having from my youth a great facility in learning languages.

When dinner was done, the master horse took me aside, and by signs and words made me understand the concern he was in that I had nothing to eat. Oats in their tongue are called hlunnh. This word I pronounced two or three times; for although I had refused them at first, yet upon second thoughts I considered that I could contrive to make of them a kind of bread, which might be sufficient, with milk, to keep me alive till I could make my escape to some other country, and to creatures of my own species. The horse immediately ordered a white mare servant of his family to bring me a good quantity of oats in a sort of wooden tray. These I heated before the fire as well as I could, and rubbed them till the husks came off, which I made a shift to winnow from the grain. I ground and beat them between two stones; then took water, and made them into a paste or cake, which I toasted at the fire and ate warm with milk. It was at first a very insipid diet, though common enough in many parts of Europe, but grew tolerable by time; and having been often reduced to hard fare in my life, this was not the first experiment I had made how easily nature is satisfied.

And I cannot but observe that I never had one hour's sickness while I stayed in this island. It is true I sometimes made a shift to catch a rabbit or bird by springs made of Yahoo's hairs; and I often gathered wholesome herbs, which I boiled and ate as salads with my bread; and now and then, for a rarity, I made a little butter, and drank the whey. I was at first at a great loss for salt, but custom soon reconciled me to the want of it; and I am confident that the frequent use of salt among us is an effect of luxury, and was first introduced only as a provocative to drink, except where it is necessary for preserving flesh in long voyages or in places remote from great markets; for we observe no animal to be fond of it but man, and as to myself, when I left this country it was a great while before I could endure the taste of it in anything that I ate. I was never above fifty-five, in the three years, after the first month. I put it to the oats. I did not say, as I should now, that I put it to the table.

This is enough to say upon the subject of my diet, wherewith other travellers fill their books, as if the readers were personally concerned whether we fare well or ill. However, it was necessary to mention this matter, lest the world should think it impossible that I could find sustenance for three years in such a country and among such inhabitants.

When it grew towards evening, the master horse ordered a place for me to lodge in; it was but six yards from the house, and separated from the stable of the Yahoos. Here I got some straw, and covering myself with my own clothes, slept very sound. But I was in a short time better accommodated, as the reader shall know hereafter, when I come to treat more particularly about my way of living. The first night the kennel was not quiet; it was never quiet; it went all night like a bag of rats. On the other side, six yards off, was a sound I had no word for, five persons asleep on one count. I lay between them and could not sleep until I had chosen which to keep time to. I chose the house.

The author studies to learn the language, and his master assists him. The language described, and spoken at forty-four. A bare wrist, and a hair that is called a Yahoo's. The author gives his master a short account of his voyage, at sixty-four.

My principal endeavour was to learn the language, which my master (for so I shall henceforth call him), and his children, and every servant of his house were desirous to teach me; for they looked upon it as a prodigy that a brute animal should discover such marks of a rational creature. I pointed to every thing, and inquired the name of it, which I wrote down in my journal-book when I was alone, and corrected my bad accent by desiring those of the family to pronounce it often. In this employment a sorrel nag, one of the under-servants, was very ready to assist me.

In speaking they pronounced through the nose and throat, and their language approaches nearest to the High-Dutch, or German, of any I know in Europe, but is much more graceful and significant. The emperor Charles V made almost the same observation when he said that if he were to speak to his horse it should be in High-Dutch. It is a language that is said at a pace. Every sentence of it goes in a measure of four, as if for walking, with a rest after the fourth, and the rests, I found, are where they agree; I was five weeks in understanding that they were not pauses for thought. It has no word for hurry. It has a dozen words for what I should call degrees of keeping time, and not one for being late, which is the commonest word in mine.

The curiosity and impatience of my master were so great that he spent many hours of his leisure to instruct me. He was convinced (as he afterwards told me) that I must be a Yahoo; but my teachableness, civility and cleanliness astonished him, which were qualities altogether opposite to those animals. He took my wrist with the hoof each morning for the first month, as a man looks at the sky, and I was sixty-two, sixty-four, sixty-one. A Yahoo is never the same twice, and I was, within three; and he said that this was the first Yahoo he had heard of with a character.

He was most perplexed about my clothes, reasoning sometimes with himself whether they were a part of my body; for I never pulled them off till the family were asleep, and got them on before they waked in the morning. My master was eager to learn whence I came, how I acquired those appearances of reason which I discovered in all my actions, and to know my story from my own mouth, which he hoped he should soon do by the great proficiency I made in learning and pronouncing their words and sentences. To help my memory I formed all I learned into the English alphabet, and writ the words down with the translations. This last, after some time, I ventured to do in my master's presence. It cost me much trouble to explain to him what I was doing; for the inhabitants have not the least idea of books or literature. A thing said once is, among them, said to all, and I have wondered since what they would have done with a column.

In about ten weeks' time I was able to understand most of his questions, and in three months could give him some tolerable answers. He was extremely curious to know from what part of the country I came, and how I was taught to imitate a rational creature; because the Yahoos (whom he saw I exactly resembled in my head, hands and face, that were only visible), with some appearance of cunning, and the strongest disposition to mischief, were observed to be the most unteachable of all brutes. I answered that I came over the sea, from a far place, with many others of my own kind, in a great hollow vessel made of the bodies of trees; that my companions forced me to land on this coast, and then left me to shift for myself.

It was with some difficulty, and by the help of many signs, that I brought him to understand me. He replied that I must needs be mistaken, or that I said the thing which was not; for they have no word in their language to express lying or falsehood. This last he had from the elders, as a thing Yahoos do, which is known by the count going up; and mine had not gone up. It was sixty-four, as it was when I told the truth, and he had it from the hoof. So I was mistaken. He knew it was impossible that there could be a country beyond the sea, or that a parcel of brutes could move a wooden vessel whither they pleased upon water. He was sure no Houyhnhnm alive could make such a vessel, nor would trust Yahoos to manage it.

The word Houyhnhnm, in their tongue, signifies a horse, and in its etymology the perfection of nature. I told my master that I was at a loss for expression, but would improve as fast as I could, and hoped in a short time I should be able to tell him wonders. He was pleased to direct his own mare, his colt and foal, and the servants of the family to take all opportunities of instructing me; and every day, for two or three hours, he was at the same pains himself. Several horses and mares of quality in the neighbourhood came often to our house, upon the report spread of a wonderful Yahoo that could speak like a Houyhnhnm, and seemed, in his words and actions, to discover some glimmerings of reason. These delighted to converse with me; they put many questions, and received such answers as I was able to return. By all these advantages I made so great a progress that in five months from my arrival I understood whatever was spoken, and could express myself tolerably well. The last thing I learned was not a word, but to say them at forty-four.

The Houyhnhnms who came to visit my master out of a design of seeing and talking with me could hardly believe me to be a right Yahoo, because my body had a different covering from others of my kind. They were astonished to observe me without the usual hair or skin, except on my head, face and hands; but I discovered that secret to my master upon an accident which happened about a fortnight before.

I have already told the reader that every night, when the family were gone to bed, it was my custom to strip, and cover myself with my clothes. It happened one morning early that my master sent for me by the sorrel nag, who was his valet. When he came I was fast asleep, my clothes fallen off on one side, and my shirt above my waist. I awaked at the noise he made, and observed him to deliver his message in some disorder; after which he went to my master, and in a great fright gave him a very confused account of what he had seen. This I presently discovered; for, going as soon as I was dressed to pay my attendance upon his honour, he asked me the meaning of what his servant had reported, that I was not the same thing when I slept as I appeared to be at other times; that his valet assured him some part of me was white, some yellow, at least not so white, and some brown.

I had hitherto concealed the secret of my dress, in order to distinguish myself, as much as possible, from that cursed race of Yahoos; but now I found it in vain to do so any longer. Besides, I considered that my clothes and shoes would soon wear out, which already were in a declining condition, and must be supplied by some contrivance from the hides of Yahoos or other brutes; whereby the whole secret would be known. I therefore told my master that in the country whence I came, those of my kind always covered their bodies with the hairs of certain animals prepared by art, as well for decency as to avoid the inclemencies of air, both hot and cold; of which, as to my own person, I would give him immediate conviction, if he pleased to command me, only desiring his excuse if I did not expose those parts that nature taught us to conceal. He said my discourse was all very strange, but especially the last part; for he could not understand why nature should teach us to conceal what nature had given; that neither himself nor family were ashamed of any parts of their bodies; but however I might do as I pleased. Whereupon I first unbuttoned my coat, and pulled it off. I did the same with my waistcoat. I drew off my shoes, stockings and breeches. I let my shirt down to my waist, and drew up the bottom, fastening it like a girdle about my middle to hide my nakedness.

My master observed the whole performance with great signs of curiosity and admiration. He took up all my clothes in his pastern, one piece after another, and examined them diligently; he then stroked my body very gently, and looked round me several times; after which he said it was plain I must be a perfect Yahoo, but that I differed very much from the rest of my species in the softness, whiteness and smoothness of my skin, my want of hair in several parts of my body, the shape and shortness of my claws behind and before, and my affectation of walking continually on my two hinder feet. He desired to see no more, and gave me leave to put on my clothes again, for I was shuddering with cold. The last thing he did, before I did, was to take my wrist in his hoof, bare, with no glove and no linen between, as he had wished on the first day. He held it a long while, and the cord with it. I was fifty-eight. He asked what the black thing was. I had by then perhaps four hundred words, and none for it. I said that it was a hair, and of one of my kind. He said, "A Yahoo's," and I did not correct him.

I expressed my uneasiness at his giving me so often the appellation of Yahoo, an odious animal for which I had so utter a hatred and contempt. I begged he would forbear applying that word to me, and make the same order in his family and among his friends whom he suffered to see me. I requested likewise that the secret of my having a false covering to my body might be known to none but himself, at least as long as my present clothing should last; for as to what the sorrel nag, his valet, had observed, his honour might command him to conceal it.

All this my master very graciously consented to; and thus the secret was kept till my clothes began to wear out, which I was forced to supply by several contrivances that shall hereafter be mentioned. In the meantime he desired I would go on with my utmost diligence to learn their language, because he was more astonished at my capacity for speech and reason than at the figure of my body, whether it were covered or not; adding that he waited with some impatience to hear the wonders which I promised to tell him. From thenceforward he doubled the pains he had been at to instruct me: he brought me into all company, and made them treat me with civility; because, as he told them privately, this would put me into good humour and make me more diverting.

Every day, when I waited on him, beside the trouble he was at in teaching, he would ask me several questions concerning myself, which I answered as well as I could, and by these means he had already received some general ideas, though very imperfect. It would be tedious to relate the several steps by which I advanced to a more regular conversation; but the first account I gave of myself in any order and length was to this purpose: That I came from a very far country, as I already had attempted to tell him, with about fifty more of my own species; that we travelled upon the seas in a great hollow vessel made of wood, and larger than his honour's house. I described the ship to him in the best terms I could, and explained, by the help of my handkerchief displayed, how it was driven forward by the wind. That upon a quarrel among us I was set on shore on this coast, where I walked forward, without knowing whither, till he delivered me from the persecution of those execrable Yahoos.

He asked me who made the ship, and how it was possible that the Houyhnhnms of my country would leave it to the management of brutes. My answer was that I durst proceed no further in my relation unless he would give me his word and honour that he would not be offended, and then I would tell him the wonders I had so often promised. He agreed; and I went on by assuring him that the ship was made by creatures like myself, who in all the countries I had travelled, as well as in my own, were the only governing rational animals; and that upon my arrival hither I was as much astonished to see the Houyhnhnms act like rational beings as he or his friends could be in finding some marks of reason in a creature he was pleased to call a Yahoo, to which I owned my resemblance in every part, but could not account for their degenerate and brutal nature.

I said farther that if good fortune ever restored me to my native country, to relate my travels hither, as I resolved to do, everybody would believe that I said the thing that was not, that I invented the story out of my own head; and (with all possible respect to himself, his family and friends, and under his promise of not being offended) our countrymen would hardly think it probable that a Houyhnhnm should be the presiding creature of a nation, and a Yahoo the brute. I said it at sixty-four. He took it, and it was sixty-four, and he said that he saw I believed what I said, which was a thing he could see, and that he did not see how I could.

The Houyhnhnms' notion of truth and falsehood: a country of one count has no place for doubt. The author is asked to show a lie, and does it once, with the master's hoof on his wrist. The tyranny of count. The author gives a more particular account of himself, and of the crew he took on.

My master heard me with great appearances of uneasiness in his countenance, because doubting, or not believing, are so little known in this country that the inhabitants cannot tell how to behave themselves under such circumstances. I should say what it is, in a country of one count. If a thing is said, and the hearer's count does not move, it is true; if it moves, it is not, or the speaker is mistaken. There is no third place for the hearer to stand, and my master, who could not find one, stood a long while in the doorway where it should have been, a little off the count. He was forty-seven. I had not before seen a Houyhnhnm off the count by more than one.

And I remember, in frequent discourses with my master concerning the nature of manhood in other parts of the world, having occasion to talk of lying and false representation, it was with much difficulty that he comprehended what I meant, although he had otherwise a most acute judgment. For he argued thus: that the use of speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive information of facts; now, if any one said the thing which was not, these ends were defeated, because I cannot properly be said to understand him; and I am so far from receiving information that he leaves me worse than in ignorance; for I am led to believe a thing black when it is white, and short when it is long. And these were all the notions he had concerning that faculty of lying, so perfectly well understood, and so universally practised, among human creatures.

He asked me to show him. I was unwilling; it was, I believe, the only time I have lied to a Houyhnhnm, and I did it at his request, with his hoof on my wrist, bare, in the afternoon, in the yard. I said that I was a horse. It was sixty-four, and then it was sixty-eight, and he held it a long while, with his head a little on one side, as he held a bird's egg once to the light. "It is small," he said. "I had thought it would be large." He took the hoof away and looked at it. He said that he understood now what the elders meant, and that he wished he did not; and for the rest of that day he spoke to me only when I spoke to him.

That night the house was five persons on one count and the master a beat behind them, in the third room, awake. I heard it from the straw; it is not a thing I had heard before, and it went on until nearly morning. In the morning he was back on it, and no one referred to it, which is how I knew that they had all heard.

To return from this digression. When I asserted that the Yahoos were the only governing animals in my country, which my master said was altogether past his conception, he desired to know whether we had Houyhnhnms among us, and what was their employment. I told him we had great numbers; that in summer they grazed in the fields, and in winter were kept in houses with hay and oats, where Yahoo servants were employed to rub their skins smooth, comb their manes, pick their feet, serve them with food and make their beds. "I understand you well," said my master: "it is now very plain, from all you have spoken, that whatever share of reason the Yahoos pretend to, the Houyhnhnms are your masters; I heartily wish our Yahoos would be so tractable." I begged his honour would please to excuse me from proceeding any further, because I was very certain that the account he expected from me would be highly displeasing. But he insisted in commanding me to let him know the best and the worst. I told him he should be obeyed.

I owned that the Houyhnhnms among us, whom we called horses, were the most generous and comely animals we had; that they excelled in strength and swiftness; and when they belonged to persons of quality were employed in travelling, racing, or drawing chariots; they were treated with much kindness and care, till they fell into diseases or became foundered in the feet; but then they were sold, and used to all kind of drudgery till they died; after which their skins were stripped, and sold for what they were worth, and their bodies left to be devoured by dogs and birds of prey. But the common race of horses had not so good fortune, being kept by farmers and carriers and other mean people, who put them to greater labour, and fed them worse. I described, as well as I could, our way of riding; the shape and use of a bridle, a saddle, a spur and a whip; of harness and wheels. I added that we fastened plates of a certain hard substance, called iron, at the bottom of their feet, to preserve their hoofs from being broken by the stony ways on which we often travelled. I said also that a horse, ridden, goes at the count of the man upon him, and that the spur is the way the count is given. He said nothing for a long time. Then he said, quite softly, that he had supposed I was telling him of a tyranny of strength, and that it was a tyranny of count.

My master, after some expressions of great indignation, wondered how we dared to venture upon a Houyhnhnm's back; for he was sure that the weakest servant in his house would be able to shake off the strongest Yahoo, or by lying down and rolling on his back squeeze the brute to death. I answered that our horses were trained up, from three or four years old, to the several uses we intended them for; that if any of them proved intolerably vicious they were employed for carriages; that they were severely beaten, while they were young, for any mischievous tricks; that the males, designed for the common use of riding or draught, were generally castrated about two years after their birth, to take down their spirits, and make them more tame and gentle; that they were indeed sensible of rewards and punishments; but his honour would please to consider that they had not the least tincture of reason, any more than the Yahoos in this country.

It put me to the pains of many circumlocutions to give my master a right idea of what I spoke; for their language does not abound in variety of words, because their wants and passions are fewer than among us. But it is impossible to express his noble resentment at our savage treatment of the Houyhnhnm race; particularly after I had explained the manner and use of castrating horses among us, to hinder them from propagating their kind, and to render them more servile. He said that if it were possible there could be any country where Yahoos alone were endued with reason, they certainly must be the governing animal, because reason in time will always prevail against brutal strength. But, considering the frame of our bodies, and especially of mine, he thought no creature of equal bulk was so ill-contrived for employing that reason in the common offices of life; whereupon he desired to know whether those among whom I lived resembled me, or the Yahoos of his country.

I assured him that I was as well shaped as most of my age; but the younger, and the females, were much more soft and tender, and the skins of the latter generally as white as milk. He said I differed indeed from other Yahoos, being much more cleanly, and not altogether so deformed; but, in point of real advantage, he thought I differed for the worse: that my nails were of no use either to my fore or hinder feet; as to my forefeet, he could not properly call them by that name, for he never observed me to walk upon them; that they were too soft to bear the ground; that I generally went with them uncovered; neither was the covering I sometimes wore on them of the same shape, or so strong as that on my feet behind: that I could not walk with any security, for if either of my hinder feet slipped I must inevitably fall.

He then began to find fault with other parts of my body: the flatness of my face, the prominence of my nose, my eyes placed directly in front, so that I could not look on either side without turning my head; that I was not able to feed myself without lifting one of my forefeet to my mouth, and therefore nature had placed those joints to answer that necessity. He knew not what could be the use of those several clefts and divisions in my feet behind; that these were too soft to bear the hardness and sharpness of stones without a covering made from the skin of some other brute; that my whole body wanted a fence against heat and cold, which I was forced to put on and off every day, with tediousness and trouble. He added, mildly, that I had one good part, which was the inner wrist, being bare, and easy to find; and that he supposed nature had meant it. And lastly, that he observed every animal in this country naturally to abhor the Yahoos, whom the weaker avoided, and the stronger drove from them. So that, supposing us to have the gift of reason, he could not see how it were possible to cure that natural antipathy which every creature discovered against us; nor consequently how we could tame and render them serviceable. However, he would, as he said, debate the matter no farther, because he was more desirous to know my own story, the country where I was born, and the several actions and events of my life before I came hither.

I assured him how extremely desirous I was that he should be satisfied on every point; but I doubted much whether it would be possible for me to explain myself on several subjects whereof his honour could have no conception, because I saw nothing in his country to which I could resemble them; that, however, I would do my best, and strive to express myself by similitudes, humbly desiring his assistance when I wanted proper words; which he was pleased to promise me.

I said my birth was of honest parents, in an island called England; which was remote from his country as many days' journey as the strongest of his honour's servants could travel in the annual course of the sun; that I was bred a surgeon, whose trade it is to cure wounds and hurts in the body, gotten by accident or violence; that my country was governed by a female man, whom we called queen. I said also that a surgeon is one who takes the count of the sick and tells them what it means. He asked whether the count was the same twice. I said that in the sick it never was. He said that I had then been bred, it appeared, to the trade of Yahoos. I said that I left it to get riches, whereby I might maintain myself and family when I should return; that in my last voyage I was commander of the ship, and had about fifty Yahoos under me, many of which died at sea, and I was forced to supply them by others picked out from several nations; that our ship was twice in danger of being sunk, the first time by a great storm, and the second by striking against a rock.

Here my master interposed, by asking me how I could persuade strangers, out of different countries, to venture with me, after the losses I had sustained and the hazards I had run. I said they were fellows of desperate fortunes, forced to fly from the places of their birth on account of their poverty or their crimes. Some were undone by lawsuits; others spent all they had in drinking, whoring and gaming; others fled for treason; many for murder, theft, poisoning, robbery, perjury, forgery, coining false money, for committing rapes, or for flying from their colours, or deserting to the enemy; and most of them had broken prison; none of these durst return to their native countries, for fear of being hanged, or of starving in a jail; and therefore they were under the necessity of seeking a livelihood in other places.

During this discourse my master was pleased to interrupt me several times. I had made use of many circumlocutions in describing to him the nature of the several crimes for which most of our crew had been forced to fly their country. This labour took up several days' conversation before he was able to comprehend me. He was wholly at a loss to know what could be the use or necessity of practising those vices. To clear up which, I endeavoured to give some ideas of the desire of power and riches; of the terrible effects of lust, intemperance, malice and envy. All this I was forced to define and describe by putting cases and making suppositions. After which, like one whose imagination was struck with something never seen or heard of before, he would lift up his eyes with amazement and indignation. Power, government, war, law, punishment, and a thousand other things had no terms wherein that language could express them, which made the difficulty almost insuperable to give my master any conception of what I meant. I gave him, for each, a count to stand beside: that a crime was a going up that was kept up; that a punishment was a hand that held another down to a count not its own; that a war was ten thousand going up on one signal. He lifted his eyes, and for the length of the sentence was forty-eight.

But being of an excellent understanding, much improved by contemplation and converse, he at last arrived at a competent knowledge of what human nature, in our parts of the world, is capable to perform, and desired I would give him some particular account of that land which we call Europe, but especially of my own country. On the last evening of that conversation he asked me to leave my wrist bare. I did. He sat with his hoof an inch from it, not touching, for the length of an hour; and said at the end that he was grateful; and I think now that he was putting something away.

The author, at his master's command, informs him of the state of England. The causes of war among the princes of Europe, and the wrist of a soldier. The master finds that he is pleased, and is forty-eight. The law, and the counts of lawyers, which do not go up.

The reader may please to observe that the following extract of many conversations I had with my master contains a summary of the most material points which were discoursed at several times for above two years; his honour often desiring fuller satisfaction as I farther improved in the Houyhnhnm tongue. I laid before him, as well as I could, the whole state of Europe; I discoursed of trade and manufactures, of arts and sciences; and the answers I gave to all the questions he made, as they arose upon several subjects, were a fund of conversation not to be exhausted. But I shall here only set down the substance of what passed between us concerning my own country, reducing it in order as well as I can, without any regard to time or other circumstances, while I strictly adhere to truth. My only concern is that I shall hardly be able to do justice to my master's arguments and expressions, which must needs suffer by my want of capacity, as well as by a translation into our barbarous English. It is barbarous, I find, chiefly in being quick. I have set his sentences down at sixty, for the reader's convenience; they were forty-four; and the reasoning in them is a third too fast in my English, and loses a little at that speed, as reason does.

In obedience, therefore, to his honour's commands, I related to him the Revolution under the Prince of Orange; the long war with France, entered into by the said prince, and renewed by his successor, the present queen, wherein the greatest powers of Christendom were engaged, and which still continued. I computed, at his request, that about a million of Yahoos might have been killed in the whole progress of it, and perhaps a hundred or more cities taken, and five times as many ships burnt or sunk.

He asked me what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another. I answered they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red or gray; and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.

Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretend to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrels with another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war is entered upon because the enemy is too strong, and sometimes because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want, and we both fight till they take ours or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable cause of a war to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence, or embroiled by factions among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into war against our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a territory of land that would render our dominions round and complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death, and make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous way of living. Alliance by blood or marriage is a frequent cause of war between princes; and the nearer the kindred is, the greater their disposition to quarrel; poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance. For these reasons the trade of a soldier is held the most honourable of all others, because a soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill, in cold blood, as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can. I did not tell him that a soldier's wrist at the work is sixty-one, which is the thing that is meant by cold blood; I knew, from another country, what a ledger would make of it.

"What you have told me," said my master, "upon the subject of war, does indeed discover most admirably the effects of that reason you pretend to; however, it is happy that the shame is greater than the danger; and that nature has left you utterly incapable of doing much mischief. For, your mouths lying flat with your faces, you can hardly bite each other to any purpose, unless by consent. Then as to the claws upon your feet before and behind, they are so short and tender that one of our Yahoos would drive a dozen of yours before him. And therefore, in recounting the numbers of those who have been killed in battle, I cannot but think you have said the thing which is not." He had his hoof on my wrist while he said it, and it had not moved; so he did not say that I lied. He said that what I said was not so, and for him the two were the same thing, and he had not the second.

I could not forbear shaking my head, and smiling a little at his ignorance. And being no stranger to the art of war, I gave him a description of cannons, culverins, muskets, carabines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, sea fights; ships sunk with a thousand men, twenty thousand killed on each side, dying groans, limbs flying in the air, smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses' feet, flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcases, left for food to dogs and wolves and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning and destroying. And to set forth the valour of my own dear countrymen, I assured him that I had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship, and beheld the dead bodies drop down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of the spectators.

I was going on to more particulars when my master commanded me silence. He had not taken the hoof away. I was a hundred and four, which was what I had been while I described the guns, and I noticed it; I had not, I think, in my life told a true thing at that speed. "You are not afraid," he said. "You are pleased." I did not answer him, and he took the answer. He said that whoever understood the nature of Yahoos might easily believe it possible for so vile an animal to be capable of every action I had named, if their strength and cunning equalled their malice. But as my discourse had increased his abhorrence of the whole species, so he found it gave him a disturbance in his mind to which he was wholly a stranger before. He thought his ears, being used to such abominable words, might, by degrees, admit them with less detestation: that although he hated the Yahoos of this country, he no more blamed them for their odious qualities than he did a gnnayh (a bird of prey) for its cruelty, or a sharp stone for cutting his hoof. But when a creature pretending to reason could be capable of such enormities, he dreaded lest the corruption of that faculty might be worse than brutality itself. He seemed therefore confident that, instead of reason, we were only possessed of some quality fitted to increase our natural vices; as the reflection from a troubled stream returns the image of an ill-shapen body, not only larger but more distorted. He was forty-eight, and held it.

He added that he had heard too much upon the subject of war, both in this and some former discourses. There was another point which a little perplexed him at present. I had informed him that some of our crew left their country on account of being ruined by law; that I had already explained the meaning of the word; but he was at a loss how it should come to pass that the law, which was intended for every man's preservation, should be any man's ruin. Therefore he desired to be further satisfied what I meant by law, and the dispensers thereof, according to the present practice in my own country; because he thought nature and reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in showing us what we ought to do and what to avoid.

I assured his honour that law was a science in which I had not much conversed, further than by employing advocates, in vain, upon some injustices that had been done me; however, I would give him all the satisfaction I was able. I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves. For example, if my neighbour has a mind to my cow, he has a lawyer to prove that he ought to have my cow from me. I must then hire another to defend my right, it being against all rules of law that any man should be allowed to speak for himself. Now in this case I, who am the right owner, lie under two great disadvantages: first, my lawyer, being practised almost from his cradle in defending falsehood, is quite out of his element when he would be an advocate for justice, which is an unnatural office he always attempts with great awkwardness, if not with ill-will. The second disadvantage is that my lawyer must proceed with great caution, or else he will be reprimanded by the judges, and abhorred by his brethren, as one that would lessen the practice of the law. And therefore I have but two methods to preserve my cow. The first is to gain over my adversary's lawyer with a double fee, who will then betray his client by insinuating that he hath justice on his side. The second way is for my lawyer to make my cause appear as unjust as he can, by allowing the cow to belong to my adversary; and this, if it be skilfully done, will certainly bespeak the favour of the bench.

I told him that these judges are persons appointed to decide all controversies of property, as well as for the trial of criminals, and picked out from the most dexterous lawyers who are grown old or lazy; and having been biassed all their lives against truth and equity, lie under such a fatal necessity of favouring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known some of them refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing anything unbecoming their nature or their office. It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever has been done before may legally be done again; and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of directing accordingly.

In pleading, they studiously avoid entering into the merits of the cause, but are loud, violent and tedious in dwelling upon all circumstances which are not to the purpose. For instance, in the case already mentioned, they never desire to know what claim or title my adversary has to my cow, but whether the said cow were red or black; her horns long or short; whether the field I graze her in be round or square; whether she was milked at home or abroad; what diseases she is subject to, and the like; after which they consult precedents, adjourn the cause from time to time, and in ten, twenty or thirty years come to an issue. It is likewise to be observed that this society has a peculiar cant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply; whereby they have wholly confounded the very essence of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong; so that it will take thirty years to decide whether the field left me by my ancestors for six generations belongs to me, or to a stranger three hundred miles off.

The master asked whether the counts of these lawyers went up. I said that I supposed they did, at first; and that after some years in the practice they did not, and that I had once taken a serjeant's wrist at a dinner, and found it sixty-one throughout a speech in which he proved that a man's house was not his own. He took his hoof from my wrist then, and looked at it for some time, and I understood that I had put a question into his country that it had not had. I said that I had never been able to do it myself. That was true, and he had it from the hoof, and it did not seem to help.

In the trial of persons accused for crimes against the state, the method is much more short and commendable: the judge first sends to sound the disposition of those in power, after which he can easily hang or save a criminal, strictly preserving all due forms of law. Here my master interposing said that it was a pity that creatures endowed with such prodigious abilities of mind as these lawyers, by the description I gave of them, must certainly be, were not rather encouraged to be instructors of others in wisdom and knowledge. In answer to which I assured his honour that in all points out of their own trade they were usually the most ignorant and stupid generation among us, the most despicable in common conversation, avowed enemies to all knowledge and learning, and equally disposed to pervert the general reason of mankind in every other subject of discourse as in that of their own profession.

A continuation of the state of England under Queen Anne. Money, and the poor who are ridden by the clock; wine that takes the count off; physicians who read the count and send in a bill; the character of a first minister, whose count tells you nothing; and the nobility. The author, at fifty-two, is found not to mind.

My master was yet wholly at a loss to understand what motives could incite this race of lawyers to perplex, disquiet and weary themselves, and engage in a confederacy of injustice, merely for the sake of injuring their fellow-animals; neither could he comprehend what I meant in saying they did it for hire. Whereupon I was at much pains to describe to him the use of money, the materials it was made of, and the value of the metals: that when a Yahoo had got a great store of this precious substance he was able to purchase whatever he had a mind to; the finest clothing, the noblest houses, great tracts of land, the most costly meats and drinks, and have his choice of the most beautiful females. Therefore, since money alone was able to perform all these feats, our Yahoos thought they could never have enough of it to spend or to save, as they found themselves inclined, from their natural bent either to profusion or avarice; that the rich man enjoyed the fruit of the poor man's labour, and the latter were a thousand to one in proportion to the former; that the bulk of our people were forced to live miserably, by labouring every day for small wages, to make a few live plentifully.

I added that a man who is hired goes at the count of the man who hires him, and that the wage is what is paid for the count. The master asked whether our poor were then ridden. I said, in a manner, by the clock. He asked who held the spur. I said that no one held it; that it was the want of the thing in the other hand. He did not say that he understood. He said that he supposed it was a more economical arrangement than a spur.

I enlarged myself much on these, and many other particulars to the same purpose; but his honour was still to seek; for he went upon a supposition that all animals had a title to their share in the productions of the earth, and especially those who presided over the rest. Therefore he desired I would let him know what these costly meats were, and how any of us happened to want them. Whereupon I enumerated as many sorts as came into my head, with the various methods of dressing them, which could not be done without sending vessels by sea to every part of the world, as well for liquors to drink as for sauces and innumerable other conveniences. I assured him that this whole globe of earth must be at least three times gone round before one of our better female Yahoos could get her breakfast, or a cup to put it in. He said that must needs be a miserable country which cannot furnish food for its own inhabitants. I replied that England was computed to produce three times the quantity of food more than its inhabitants are able to consume; but, in order to feed the luxury and intemperance of the males and the vanity of the females, we sent away the greatest part of our necessary things to other countries, whence in return we brought the materials of diseases, folly and vice, to spend among ourselves. Hence it follows of necessity that vast numbers of our people are compelled to seek their livelihood by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, flattering, suborning, forswearing, forging, gaming, lying, fawning, hectoring, voting, scribbling, star-gazing, poisoning, whoring, canting, libelling, freethinking, and the like occupations; every one of which terms I was at much pains to make him understand.

I told him that wine was not imported among us from foreign countries to supply the want of water or other drinks, but because it was a sort of liquid which made us merry by putting us out of our senses; diverted all melancholy thoughts; begat wild extravagant imaginations in the brain; raised our hopes and banished our fears; suspended every office of reason for a time, and deprived us of the use of our limbs, till we fell into a profound sleep; although it must be confessed that we always awaked sick and dispirited. I said that for an evening it took the count off a man, so that he was nobody's, and that we awoke to find it where we had left it, a little worse for the night. The master was forty-six for the length of that.

I was going on to tell him of another sort of people who get their livelihood by attending the sick. But here it was with the utmost difficulty that I brought him to apprehend what I meant. He could easily conceive that a Houyhnhnm grew weak and heavy a few days before his death, or by some accident might hurt a limb; but that nature, who works all things to perfection, should suffer any pains to breed in our bodies he thought impossible, and desired to know the reason of so unaccountable an evil. I told him that we fed on a thousand things which operated contrary to each other; that we ate when we were not hungry and drank without the provocation of thirst; that we sat whole nights drinking strong liquors, without eating a bit; that many diseases were propagated from father to son; that they would not be fewer than five or six hundred, spread over every limb and joint. To remedy which, there was a sort of people bred up among us in the profession, or pretence, of curing the sick; and because I had some skill in the faculty, I would let him know the whole mystery and method by which they proceed. Their fundamental is that all diseases arise from repletion, whence they conclude that a great evacuation of the body is necessary; and from herbs, minerals, gums, oils and a hundred worse things they form a composition the most nauseous they can contrive, which the stomach rejects, and this they call a vomit, or else they command us to take it in at the other orifice, and this they call a purge. In the sick, I said, the count is never the same twice, and the physician's art is chiefly in its reading; and I told him that one great excellency in this tribe was their skill at prognostics, wherein they seldom fail, their predictions in real diseases, when they rise to any degree of malignity, generally portending death, which is always in their power when recovery is not.

He asked how the count of a sick man was brought back. I said that it was not; that it was read, and a bill sent in. He said that on his side a Houyhnhnm was never ill, and went down a hair a day for three days at the end and stopped; and that the whole of what he knew of the matter was that it was quiet. I said that I had been bred to that trade, and had taken, in thirty years, I supposed, forty thousand wrists, and that I could not recall one that had been quiet.

I had formerly, upon occasion, discoursed with my master upon the nature of government in general, and particularly of our own excellent constitution, deservedly the wonder and envy of the whole world. But having here accidentally mentioned a minister of state, he commanded me, some time after, to inform him what species of Yahoo I particularly meant by that appellation. I told him that a first or chief minister of state, who was the person I intended to describe, was the creature wholly exempt from joy and grief, love and hatred, pity and anger; at least makes use of no other passions but a violent desire of wealth, power and titles; that he applies his words to all uses except to the indication of his mind; that he never tells a truth but with an intent that you should take it for a lie, nor a lie but with a design that you should take it for a truth; that those he speaks worst of behind their backs are in the surest way of preferment; and whenever he begins to praise you to others, or to yourself, you are from that day forlorn. The worst mark you can receive is a promise, especially when it is confirmed with an oath; after which every wise man retires and gives over all hopes. I added that his count was the commonest one in the kingdom, sixty-one, and did not rise when he lied or fall when he was moved, and that this was thought a great attainment; a man whose count tells you nothing is a man in whom nothing can be told. The master was forty-eight again, and said that it was a thing that could be done, then, to a count, and that he had been given to understand that it could not.

I told him there are three methods by which a man may rise to be chief minister. The first is by knowing how, with prudence, to dispose of a wife, a daughter or a sister; the second, by betraying or undermining his predecessor; and the third is by a furious zeal in public assemblies against the corruptions of the court. That these ministers, having all employments at their disposal, preserve themselves in power by bribing the majority of a senate or great council; and at last, by an expedient called an act of indemnity (whereof I described the nature to him), they secure themselves from after-reckonings, and retire from the public laden with the spoils of the nation. The palace of a chief minister is a seminary to breed up others in his own trade: the pages, lackeys and porters, by imitating their master, become ministers of state in their several districts, and learn to excel in the three principal ingredients, of insolence, lying and bribery. He is usually governed by a decayed wench or favourite footman, who are the tunnels through which all graces are conveyed, and may properly be called in the last resort the governors of the kingdom. I used the word, he having learned it of me for the thing that keeps the count, in its other sense; and he took it so, and thought I meant that the kingdom was kept by a decayed wench; and I did not correct him.

One day in discourse, my master, having heard me mention the nobility of my country, was pleased to make me a compliment which I could not pretend to deserve: that he was sure I must have been born of some noble family, because I far exceeded in shape, colour and cleanliness all the Yahoos of his nation, although I seemed to fail in strength and agility, which must be imputed to my different way of living from those other brutes; and besides, I was not only endowed with the faculty of speech, but likewise with some rudiments of reason, to a degree that, with all his acquaintance, I passed for a prodigy. He made me observe that among the Houyhnhnms the white, the sorrel and the iron-gray were not so exactly shaped as the bay, the dapple-gray and the black; nor born with equal talents of mind, or a capacity to improve them; and therefore continued always in the condition of servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own race, which in that country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural. All of them, I observed, were forty-four.

I made his honour my most humble acknowledgments for the good opinion he was pleased to conceive of me, but assured him at the same time that my birth was of the lower sort, having been born of plain honest parents who were just able to give me a tolerable education; that nobility among us was altogether a different thing from the idea he had of it; that our young noblemen are bred from their childhood in idleness and luxury; that as soon as years will permit they consume their vigour, and contract odious diseases among lewd females; and when their fortunes are almost ruined they marry some woman of mean birth, disagreeable person and unsound constitution, merely for the sake of money, whom they hate and despise. That the productions of such marriages are generally scrofulous, rickety or deformed children; by which means the family seldom continues above three generations, unless the wife takes care to provide a healthy father among her neighbours or domestics, in order to improve and continue the breed. That a weak diseased body, a meagre countenance and sallow complexion are the true marks of noble blood; and a healthy robust appearance is so disgraceful in a man of quality that the world concludes his real father to have been a groom or a coachman. The imperfections of his mind run parallel with those of his body, being a composition of spleen, dullness, ignorance, caprice, sensuality and pride. Without the consent of this illustrious body no law can be enacted, repealed or altered; and these nobles have likewise the decision of all our possessions without appeal.

By the end of that summer I was fifty-two, and it had not gone up once in the telling of any of this. My master remarked on it. He said that a Yahoo who could say such things at that count was either a better Yahoo than the rest or a worse, and that he would not know from the wrist which; for it seemed to him that I minded none of what I said. I said that I minded it a great deal. He took my wrist, and said that it did not seem so to him; and I found that he was right, and did not know since when.

The author's resolution never to return to humankind, and a count that has stopped going up. His master's observations on human nature, with parallel cases of Yahoos: a count held in common needs no overseer, and a hoard of shining stones holds a Yahoo's count still. The distance of four yards.

The reader may be disposed to wonder how I could prevail on myself to give so free a representation of my own species among a race of mortals who are already too apt to conceive the vilest opinion of humankind from that entire congruity between me and their Yahoos. But I must freely confess that the many virtues of those excellent quadrupeds, placed in opposite view to human corruptions, had so far opened my eyes and enlarged my understanding that I began to view the actions and passions of man in a very different light, and to think the honour of my own kind not worth managing; which, besides, it was impossible for me to do before a person of so acute a judgment as my master, who daily convinced me of a thousand faults in myself, whereof I had not the least perception before, and which with us would never be numbered even among human infirmities. I had likewise learned from his example an utter detestation of all falsehood or disguise; and truth appeared so amiable to me that I determined upon sacrificing every thing to it. My count had stopped going up in the telling. I took that for the truth, and I think now that I had the two the wrong way round.

Let me deal so candidly with the reader as to confess that there was yet a much stronger motive for the freedom I took in my representation of things. I had not yet been a year in this country before I contracted such a love and veneration for the inhabitants that I entered on a firm resolution never to return to humankind, but to pass the rest of my life among these admirable Houyhnhnms, in the contemplation and practice of every virtue, where I could have no example or incitement to vice. But it was decreed by fortune, my perpetual enemy, that so great a felicity should not fall to my share. However, it is now some comfort to reflect that in what I said of my countrymen I extenuated their faults as much as I durst before so strict an examiner, and upon every article gave as favourable a turn as the matter would bear. For, indeed, who is there alive that will not be swayed by his bias and partiality to the place of his birth? I have related the substance of several conversations I had with my master during the greatest part of the time I had the honour to be in his service; but have, for brevity sake, omitted much more than is here set down.

When I had answered all his questions, and his curiosity seemed to be fully satisfied, he sent for me one morning early, and commanded me to sit down at some distance, an honour which he had never before conferred upon me. The distance was four yards, which I measured, as I measured everything in that country, and it is the length at which a hoof cannot reach a wrist. I do not say it was meant. He did not take my wrist that morning, which was the first morning he had not, and I took the omission for a courtesy, and understood by evening that it was also an answer. He said he had been very seriously considering my whole story, as far as it related both to myself and my country; that he looked upon us as a sort of animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use than by its assistance to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones which nature had not given us; that we disarmed ourselves of the few abilities she had bestowed; had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions. As to myself, it was manifest I had neither the strength nor agility of a common Yahoo; that I walked infirmly on my hinder feet; had found out a contrivance to make my claws of no use or defence, and to remove the hair from my chin, which was intended as a shelter from the sun and the weather; lastly, that I could neither run with speed nor climb trees like my brethren, as he called them, the Yahoos in his country.

That our institutions of government and law were plainly owing to our gross defects in reason, and by consequence in virtue; because reason alone is sufficient to govern a rational creature; which was therefore a character we had no pretence to challenge, even from the account I had given of my own people; although he manifestly perceived that, in order to favour them, I had concealed many particulars, and often said the thing which was not. By reason alone he meant a count held in common, which the law is what a people has instead of. He had it, he said, in the yard, in the morning, with the others, and did not think of it, as one does not think of the ground; and he saw that I had had to be taught to walk on it. He added that a count held in common needs no overseer, and that it was the one thing in his country with no servant standing by.

He was the more confirmed in this opinion, because he observed that as I agreed in every feature of my body with other Yahoos, except where it was to my real disadvantage in point of strength, speed and activity, the shortness of my claws, and some other particulars where nature had no part; so from the representation I had given him of our lives, our manners and our actions, he found as near a resemblance in the disposition of our minds. He said the Yahoos were known to hate one another more than they did any different species of animals; and the reason usually assigned was the odiousness of their own shapes, which all could see in the rest but not in themselves. He had therefore begun to think it not unwise in us to cover our bodies, and by that invention conceal many of our deformities from each other, which would else be hardly supportable. But he now found he had been mistaken, and that the dissensions of those brutes in his country were owing to the same cause with ours, as I had described them. For if, said he, you throw among five Yahoos as much food as would be sufficient for fifty, they will, instead of eating peaceably, fall together by the ears, each single one impatient to have all to itself; and therefore a servant was usually employed to stand by while they were feeding abroad, and those kept at home were tied at a distance from each other. If a cow died of age or accident before a Houyhnhnm could secure it for his own Yahoos, those in the neighbourhood would come in herds to seize it, and then would ensue such a battle as I had described, with terrible wounds made by their claws on both sides, although they seldom were able to kill one another for want of such convenient instruments of death as we had invented. At other times the like battles have been fought between the Yahoos of several neighbourhoods without any visible cause; those of one district watching all opportunities to surprise the next before they are prepared. But if they find their project has miscarried, they return home, and, for want of enemies, engage in what I call a civil war among themselves.

That in some fields of his country there are certain shining stones of several colours, whereof the Yahoos are violently fond; and when part of these stones is fixed in the earth, as it sometimes happens, they will dig with their claws for whole days to get them out; then carry them away, and hide them by heaps in their kennels; but still looking round with great caution, for fear their comrades should find out their treasure. My master said he could never discover the reason of this unnatural appetite, or how these stones could be of any use to a Yahoo; but now he believed it might proceed from the same principle of avarice which I had ascribed to mankind. That he had once, by way of experiment, privately removed a heap of these stones from the place where one of his Yahoos had buried it; whereupon the sordid animal, missing his treasure, by his loud lamenting brought the whole herd to the place, there miserably howled, then fell to biting and tearing the rest, began to pine away, would neither eat nor sleep nor work, till he ordered a servant privately to convey the stones into the same hole, and hide them as before; which, when his Yahoo had found, he presently recovered his spirits and good humour, but took good care to remove them to a better hiding place, and has ever since been a very serviceable brute. The master had taken its count that morning, and again at evening: a hundred and fifty, and ninety. He said that he did not know what the stones were, but that they seemed to be the only thing in the country that could hold a Yahoo's count still. I had still in my pockets the money I had conveyed there when I was set ashore, and had not taken it out in that country; and that night I found that I had put my hand into it, as one touches a hole one has dug.

My master further assured me, which I also observed myself, that in the fields where the shining stones abound the fiercest and most frequent battles are fought, occasioned by perpetual inroads of the neighbouring Yahoos. He said it was common, when two Yahoos discovered such a stone in a field, and were contending which of them should be the proprietor, for a third to take the advantage, and carry it away from them both; which my master would needs contend to have some kind of resemblance with our suits at law; wherein I thought it for our credit not to undeceive him, since the decision he mentioned was much more equitable than many decrees among us, because the plaintiff and defendant there lost nothing beside the stone they contended for, whereas our courts of equity would never have dismissed the cause while either of them had any thing left.

He said that there was a sort of ruling Yahoo in most herds, as among us there is generally some leading or principal stag in a park, who was always more deformed in body and mischievous in disposition than any of the rest; that this leader had usually a favourite as like himself as he could get, whose employment was to lick his master's feet and posteriors, and drive the female Yahoos to his kennel; for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of ass's flesh. This favourite is hated by the whole herd, and therefore, to protect himself, keeps always near the person of his leader. He usually continues in office till a worse can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor, at the head of all the Yahoos in that district, young and old, male and female, come in a body and discharge their excrements upon him from head to foot. But how far this might be applicable to our courts, and favourites, and ministers of state, my master said I could best determine. I durst make no return to this malicious insinuation, which debased human understanding below the sagacity of a common hound, who has judgment enough to distinguish and follow the cry of the ablest dog in the pack, without being ever mistaken.

He told me also of a fancy that would sometimes take a Yahoo to retire into a corner, to lie down, and howl and groan, and spurn away all that came near him, although he were young and fat, wanted neither food nor water, nor did the servant imagine what could possibly ail him; and the only remedy they found was to set him to hard work, after which he would infallibly come to himself. I was silent out of partiality to my own kind; yet here I could plainly discover the true seeds of spleen, which only seizes on the lazy, the luxurious and the rich; who, if they were forced to undergo the same regimen, I would undertake for the cure. I thought also of a bladder of peas, and of the hard work being a count given from outside to a creature that has none, which serves for a while; and that the Yahoo in the corner was set to dig, and the digging was at a hundred and ten, and I had seen it before in a country with a drum; and I said nothing of that either.

I expected every moment that my master would accuse the Yahoos of those unnatural appetites in both sexes so common among us. But nature, it seems, has not been so expert a school-mistress; and these politer pleasures are entirely the productions of art and reason on our side of the globe. That night in the straw I took my wrist. It was forty-nine. I had not wished it lower. I noticed that I had not had the bladder out of my pocket since the autumn, and I felt for it, and it was where it had been, and I did not take it out.

The author relates several particulars of the Yahoos, and of a cub he takes by the wrist. A bathing in a river, and a count that is not what the nag supposed. The great virtues of the Houyhnhnms, which are addressed to no one in particular. The education and exercise of their youth. Their general assembly. A festival, and two fingers.

As I ought to have understood human nature much better than my master could, it was easy to lay what he had told me of the Yahoos beside myself and my countrymen; and I believed I might make further discoveries from my own observation. I therefore often begged his honour to let me go among the herds in the neighbourhood, and he as often consented, being perfectly convinced that the hatred I bore those brutes would never suffer me to be corrupted by them. He had taken my wrist again on the morning after the four yards, from the old distance and with the old hoof, and I was more glad of it than I could account for. It was fifty. He ordered one of his servants, a strong sorrel nag, very honest and good-natured, to be my guard; for I durst not undertake these excursions without his protection, having failed narrowly three or four times, in my first months, of falling into their clutches when I strayed at any distance without my hanger. The nag walked a little behind me, on the side the Yahoos would come from, which nobody had told him to do; and at the pace they all keep, so that for the first hour I thought about my feet, and after that did not.

We went out in the mornings to a slope below the oat-fields, where a herd of some forty lay about in the grass; and at a distance the nag judged proper I would strip up my sleeves and show my naked arms and breast, which I found they came to look at, and took, I believe, for a kind of introduction. They approached as near as they durst. Then they did as I did. I laid two fingers on the inside of my wrist, as I find I do whenever the ground is not what I took it for, and in a moment there were forty hands at forty wrists, at the elbow, at the neck, at the other hand, wrongly, eagerly, and with every sign of hatred; as a tame jackdaw in a cap and stockings is always persecuted by the wild ones when he happens to be got among them. I left off. They went on for some time without me.

I once caught a young male of three years old, or thereabouts, that had strayed from the rest while the nag was down at the brook, thirty yards off. I did what one does for any child that is frightened, and which I had not meant to do: I took it by the wrist, and held it, and said the number into its ear. It had been a hundred and seventy, and I lost the units. I said sixty, as a girl of nine had said it to me in a voice forty feet high, except that I was, on this occasion, the larger. By the fifth saying it was a hundred and ten, and the cub had stopped scratching, to listen. By the ninth it was a hundred, and it looked up at me. Then I think it smelt me. The little imp fell a-squalling, scratching and biting with such violence that I was forced to let it go; and it was high time, for a whole troop of old ones had come about us at the noise, and, finding the cub safe (for away it ran), and the nag by now at my elbow, they durst not venture near. I observed that its flesh smelt very rank, between a weasel and a fox but much more disagreeable; and I forgot to mention, and the reader will pardon me if I leave it out, that while I held it, it voided a yellow liquid all over my clothes. There was a small brook hard by, where I washed myself as clean as I could, and found that the bite had come through the cuff and stopped at the cord: the teeth stood in the black hair, in two small rows, and not in me. I durst not come into my master's presence until I had been sufficiently aired. When I did, I told him about the smell. I did not tell him what I had said into its ear. He would have asked what it was for; and I did not have it in his language.

By all I could discover, the Yahoos are the most unteachable of animals, their capacity never reaching higher than to draw or carry a burden; yet I am of opinion that the defect arises chiefly from a perverse, restive disposition, for they are cunning, malicious, treacherous and revengeful. They are strong and hardy, but of a cowardly spirit, and by consequence insolent, abject and cruel. It is observed that the red-haired of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest, whom they yet much exceed in strength and activity. I took nine wrists among the herds, which is not enough to say it of; I set it down as it is observed.

The Houyhnhnms keep some Yahoos in huts near the house, for present use; the rest are sent abroad to certain fields, where they dig up roots, eat several kinds of herbs, and search about for carrion, or catch weasels and luhimuhs, a sort of wild rat, which they devour greedily. Nature has taught them to dig deep holes with their nails in the side of a rising ground, and in these they lie, each by itself; only the females' are larger, to hold two or three cubs. I looked into some by day. They were warm, and held what each had kept, a bone, a stone, a rag; and in the larger ones there was a smell of milk, which I had not expected, and did not mention. They swim from their infancy like frogs, and can continue long under water, where they often take fish, which the females carry home to their young. And on this occasion I hope the reader will pardon my relating an odd adventure.

Being abroad one day with my protector the sorrel nag, and the weather exceeding hot, I entreated him to let me bathe in a river that was near. He consented, and I stripped myself stark naked and went down softly into the stream. A young female Yahoo, who had been standing behind a bank, saw the whole proceeding, and came running with all speed, for the reason, as the nag and I both supposed, for which such creatures run at a naked man, and leaped into the water within five yards of the place where I bathed. I measured it afterwards. It is one yard more than my master sat me from his hoof. I was never in my life so terribly frightened. The nag was grazing at some distance, not suspecting any harm. She embraced me. I roared as loud as I could, and the nag came galloping, four to the measure, the fourth foot down on the beat, so that even then he could not be out of time; whereupon she quitted her grasp with the utmost reluctancy and leaped upon the opposite bank, where she stood gazing and howling all the while I was putting on my clothes, with one hand at her neck, as if she were looking for something there.

I took her count, in so far as I took anything. It was between my ribs and hers, which is a bad place, and I had not meant to. As a surgeon I have taken the wrists of men and women in most conditions, and what the nag and I supposed has a count of its own, which I know; and this was not it. This was the count of a child who has run a long way to a door. I said nothing of that to the nag, who had his own supposition and was entitled to it; and I supposed it myself for some time. It was a matter of diversion to my master and his family, as well as of mortification to myself. The Houyhnhnms laugh all on one count, so that it comes through a room like a floor giving way; I laughed with my face, a half-beat after. For now I could no longer deny that I was a real Yahoo in every limb and feature, since the females had a natural propensity to me, as to one of their own species. Neither was the hair of this brute red, which might have been some excuse for an appetite a little irregular: it was black as a sloe, as black as the cord on my wrist, which I observed while I was dressing, and put my sleeve down over. Nor did her countenance appear altogether so hideous as the rest of her kind. I put her at eleven years old, having a surgeon's eye for teeth.

Having lived three years in this country, the reader will expect, as of other travellers, some account of the manners and customs of its inhabitants, which it was my principal study to learn. The noble Houyhnhnms, being endowed by nature with a general disposition to all virtues, and having no conception of what is evil in a rational creature, hold it their grand maxim to cultivate reason and be wholly governed by it. Nor is reason among them a point problematical, as with us, where men can argue with plausibility on both sides; it strikes you with immediate conviction, as it must where it is not mingled, obscured or discoloured by passion and interest. I remember with what difficulty I brought my master to the meaning of the word "opinion." I told him that two surgeons, taking the same man at the same wrist, will find two numbers a beat apart, and each be believed by those who like him. He asked which of them had counted wrongly. I said perhaps neither. He waited, as he does when a sentence of mine has gone wrong and he expects the second half to mend it. It did not. He said that where two have counted and there are two numbers, one of the two has not been counting, and that this should be said to him, and not given a name. So that controversies, wranglings and positiveness in false or dubious propositions are evils unknown among the Houyhnhnms. When I explained our several systems of natural philosophy he would laugh that a creature who pretended to reason should value itself upon the knowledge of other people's conjectures, in things where that knowledge, if it were certain, could be of no use; wherein he agreed entirely with Socrates, as Plato delivers him, which I mention as the highest honour I can do that prince of philosophers. I have often since reflected what destruction such a doctrine would make in the libraries of Europe, and how many paths of fame would be shut up in the learned world.

Friendship and benevolence are the two principal virtues among the Houyhnhnms, and these not confined to particular objects, but universal to the whole race. A stranger from the remotest part is treated like the nearest neighbour, and wherever he goes looks upon himself as at home. One came while I was there, a grey I had not seen, from the other side of the mountains, five days on the road, and was met in the yard with the same hoof on the same hoof, four, and the same silence after, and was inside the house by the end of the measure; I think he had been in it before he arrived. They keep decency and civility in the highest degree, and are altogether ignorant of ceremony. They have no fondness for their colts and foals, but the care they take in educating them proceeds entirely from the dictates of reason; and I watched my master at the gate with a neighbour's colt, and again with his own, and could not have said from his shoulders, or from his count, which was which. He said that nature teaches them to love the whole species, and that it is reason only that makes a distinction of persons, where there is a superior degree of virtue. I told him that I carried two figures for two children, seventy and fifty-four, taken at a door in Redriff, and that I had turned them over in several countries as another man turns a coin. He asked what for. I said, so that I should know them. He said that they were in the yard, he supposed, with all the others, and that I should know them there. I could not tell him that it was not the same; for I found I had not the word for the difference, in his language or in mine.

When the matron Houyhnhnms have produced one of each sex they no longer lie with their consorts, unless they lose one of their issue by some casualty, which very seldom happens; and then they meet again; or when such an accident befalls a person whose wife is past bearing, some other couple bestows a colt on him, and they go together again until the mother is with foal. This caution is necessary, to prevent the country from being overburdened with numbers. The inferior race, bred up to be servants, is not so strictly limited: these may produce three of each sex, to be domestics in the noble families. In their marriages they are exactly careful to choose such colours as will not make a disagreeable mixture in the breed. Strength is chiefly valued in the male, and comeliness in the female, not upon account of love, but to preserve the race from degenerating. Courtship, love, presents, jointures and settlements have no place in their thoughts, nor terms in their language to express them. The young couple meet and are joined merely because it is the determination of their parents and friends. The violation of marriage, or any other unchastity, was never heard of; and the pair pass their lives with the same friendship and mutual benevolence they bear to all others, without jealousy, fondness, quarrelling or discontent. I asked how a couple settled their number between them, as Mary and I had settled ours, at fifty-two, in the doorway. The master did not understand the question, and I did not put it again, having understood the answer.

In educating the youth of both sexes their method is admirable, and highly deserves our imitation. They are not suffered to taste a grain of oats, except upon certain days, till eighteen years old, nor milk but very rarely; and in summer they graze two hours in the morning and as many in the evening, as their parents likewise do; but the servants are not allowed above half that time. The count was the same in all of them. I noted that the servants had half the time to keep it in. Temperance, industry, exercise and cleanliness are the lessons equally enjoined on the young of both sexes; and my master thought it monstrous in us to give the females a different education from the males, except in some articles of domestic management, whereby, as he truly observed, one half of our natives were good for nothing but bringing children into the world; and to trust the care of our children to such useless animals, he said, was a greater instance of brutality. I thought of five almanacs in a drawer in Redriff, in a woman's hand, of noons that nobody had taught her to take; and I did not tell him that either. I was keeping a good deal from him by then, and finding it easy.

Every fourth year, at the vernal equinox, there is a representative council of the whole nation, which meets in a plain about twenty miles from our house, and continues five or six days. Here they inquire into the state and condition of the several districts, whether they abound or are deficient in hay, or oats, or cows, or Yahoos (the master told me the Yahoos are read out in the same column as the cows); and wherever there is any want, which is but seldom, it is immediately supplied by unanimous consent and contribution. Here likewise the regulation of children is settled: if a Houyhnhnm has two males, he exchanges one of them with another who has two females; and when a child has been lost by any casualty, where the mother is past breeding, it is determined what family in the district shall breed another to supply the loss. I thought of a third child in Redriff, born after I sailed, whose count I had not taken and of whose sex I had not been told; and that there was no district in which anyone had been asked to supply it, if it was lost, or to keep it, if it was not; and I put the thought where I had been putting the others.

But the Houyhnhnms train up their youth to strength, speed and hardiness by exercising them in running races up and down steep hills and over hard stony ground; and when they are all in a sweat they are ordered to leap over head and ears into a pond or a river. I stood at the pond with the sorrel nag and had it from him, after, what their count had been. It was forty-four, in the time it takes to say it. Four times a year the youth of a certain district meet to show their proficiency in running and leaping and other feats of strength and agility, and the victor is rewarded with a song in his or her praise, which they sing together, on the count, so that I could not tell who had won until they began. On the day the servants drive a herd of Yahoos into the field, laden with hay and oats and milk for the Houyhnhnms' repast; after which the brutes are immediately driven back, for fear of being noisome to the assembly. I was permitted to stand at the edge, at the nag's shoulder, and was not driven back, which I noticed, and the nag did not remark on. At the next festival she was among them. I knew her by the hair. She stood in the line with a load of hay on her back and looked across the field; and I looked at the nag's shoulder, which was at that moment the only place in the field I could look. She laid two fingers on the inside of her wrist. She had it right. At the river she had looked for it at her neck, and the others did it at the elbow; and nobody had taught her. It is easy to find. Nature meant it. I did not do it back. That night in the straw I took my wrist. It was fifty-three, and I wished it lower, which I had not done before; and it did not go.

A grand debate at the general assembly of the Houyhnhnms, and how it was determined; the master's account of it, at forty-four, with one place at forty-six. The learning of the Houyhnhnms. Their buildings, and their hands. Their manner of burials: a mare who is late for nothing. The defectiveness of their language, and a word used of a cord.

One of these grand assemblies was held in my time, about three months before my departure, whither my master went as the representative of our district. He was away seven days, the plain being twenty miles off and the council five or six days in session, and the house kept the count with four. It kept it. But I heard where he was not, as the tongue goes to where a tooth has been; and the sorrel nag, who is not given to remarks, stood for some time on the second evening at the place in the yard where my master stood.

In this council was resumed their old debate, and indeed the only debate that ever happened in their country, the same that they had held before and would hold again; the question being whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth. My master, after his return, gave me a very particular account of it. He gave it at forty-four, as he says everything; and in one place he was forty-six, which I saw without seeing, being taken up with the words, and went back for only afterwards. One of the members for the affirmative offered several arguments of great strength and weight: that as the Yahoos were the most filthy, noisome and deformed animals which nature ever produced, so they were the most restive and indocible, mischievous and malicious; that they would privately suck the teats of the Houyhnhnms' cows, kill and devour their cats, trample down their oats and grass, if they were not continually watched, and commit a thousand other extravagancies.

He took notice of a general tradition, that Yahoos had not been always in their country; but that many ages ago two of these brutes appeared together upon a mountain, whether produced by the heat of the sun upon corrupted mud and slime, or from the ooze and froth of the sea, was never known; that these engendered, and their brood in a short time grew so numerous as to overrun and infest the whole nation; that the Houyhnhnms, to get rid of the evil, made a general hunting, and at last enclosed the whole herd; and, destroying the elder, every Houyhnhnm kept two of the young in a kennel, and brought them to such a degree of tameness as an animal so savage by nature can be capable of, using them for draught and carriage. I thought of two creatures on a mountain with nobody to take their wrists, and of what a governor does that has nobody to keep it, and for how many generations; and I said nothing, not being asked.

The member added that there seemed to be much truth in this tradition, and that these creatures could not be yinhniamshy, the aborigines of the land, because of the violent hatred which the Houyhnhnms, as well as all other animals, bore them; which, although their evil disposition sufficiently deserved, could never have arrived at so high a degree if they had been aborigines, or they would have been rooted out long since. The inhabitants, taking a fancy to use the service of the Yahoos, had very imprudently neglected to cultivate the breed of asses, which are a comely animal, easily kept, more tame and orderly, without any offensive smell, and strong enough for labour, though they yield to the other in agility; and if their braying be no agreeable sound, it is far preferable to the horrible howlings of the Yahoos. An ass has one pace, and keeps it all day, and the Houyhnhnms, who have one pace, found this a recommendation.

Several others declared their sentiments to the same purpose, when my master proposed an expedient to the assembly, whereof he had indeed borrowed the hint from me. He approved of the tradition, and affirmed that the two Yahoos said to have been seen first among them had been driven thither over the sea; that, coming to land and being forsaken by their companions, they retired to the mountains, and degenerating by degrees became in process of time much more savage than those of their own species in the country whence the two originals came. The reason of this assertion, he said, was that he had now in his possession a certain wonderful Yahoo (meaning myself) which most of them had heard of, and many of them had seen. He then related how he first found me; that my body was all covered with an artificial composure of the skins and hairs of other animals; that I spoke in a language of my own, and had thoroughly learned theirs; that when he saw me without my covering I was an exact Yahoo in every part, only of a whiter colour, less hairy, and with shorter claws; and that he observed in me all the qualities of a Yahoo, only a little more civilized by some tincture of reason, which, however, was in a degree as far inferior to the Houyhnhnm race as the Yahoos of their country were to me. I think, from what he told me, that he gave them the tincture as a count that would hold: he had taken it a thousand mornings, and it had gone down in that time as water finds its level. He did not offer this as a recommendation, and I do not know how they took it.

He added how I had endeavoured to persuade him that in my own and other countries the Yahoos acted as the governing, rational animal, and held the Houyhnhnms in servitude; and that, among other things, I mentioned a custom we had of castrating Houyhnhnms when they were young, in order to render them tame, to take the count down; that the operation was easy and safe; that it was no shame to learn wisdom from brutes, as industry is taught by the ant and building by the swallow (for so I translate the word lyhannh, although it be a much larger fowl); that this invention might be practised upon the younger Yahoos here, which, besides rendering them tractable and fitter for use, would in an age put an end to the whole species without destroying life; and that in the mean time the Houyhnhnms should be exhorted to cultivate the breed of asses, which, as they are in all respects more valuable brutes, so they have this advantage, to be fit for service at five years old, which the others are not till twelve.

I had said it to show him why I was angry on behalf of his kind. I had said it with my hand open on the table, as a man speaks against his own people, and I had meant it as an indictment; and it had been received as a proposal. I did not say this. He had not asked, and he told me of the borrowing because he thought it fair that I should know it, and I knew it. This was all my master thought fit to tell me, at that time, of what passed in the grand council. But he was pleased to conceal one particular, which related personally to myself, whereof I soon felt the unhappy effect, as the reader will know in its proper place, and whence I date all the succeeding misfortunes of my life. I have gone over the account since, as one goes over a ledger, to find the place where he was forty-six; and I think it was at the end, where he said that was all, and I took it, as I took everything said in that country, to mean that it was.

The Houyhnhnms have no letters, and consequently their knowledge is all traditional; but there happening few events of any moment among a people so well united, naturally disposed to every virtue, wholly governed by reason, and cut off from all commerce with other nations, the historical part is easily preserved without burdening their memories. A thing said in that country is said once, to all, and is then in the yard; I carried the only book in it, in my pocket, and it was of no use to anyone there. They are subject to no diseases, and have therefore no need of physicians; they have excellent medicines, composed of herbs, to cure accidental bruises and cuts in the pastern or frog of the foot by sharp stones, as well as other maims and hurts. They calculate the year by the revolution of the sun and moon, but use no subdivision into weeks, there being in that country nothing that comes round every seven; and they understand the nature of eclipses, which is the utmost progress of their astronomy.

In poetry they must be allowed to excel all other mortals, wherein the justness of their similes and the minuteness as well as exactness of their descriptions are indeed inimitable. Their verses are made in measures of four, with the rests where they agree, and contain usually either some exalted notions of friendship and benevolence, or the praises of those who were victors in races and other bodily exercises. I learned one by ear, about a hill, forty-four lines in length, and said it in the straw at night as other men say a prayer. Their buildings, although very rude and simple, are not inconvenient, but well contrived to defend them from all injuries of cold and heat. They have a kind of tree which at forty years old loosens in the root, and falls with the first storm; it grows very straight, and, being pointed like stakes with a sharp stone (for the Houyhnhnms know not the use of iron), they stick them erect in the ground, about ten inches asunder, and weave oat straw, or sometimes wattles, between them. I paced the wall of my master's house, and the stakes were at ten inches to the inch, as if it had been built to a beat; I suppose it was. The roof is made after the same manner, and so are the doors.

The Houyhnhnms use the hollow part between the pastern and the hoof of their fore-foot as we do our hands, and with greater dexterity than I could at first imagine. It is the same hollow in which my master took my wrist, and I had not once thought what else it did. I have seen a white mare of our family thread a needle (which I lent her on purpose) with that joint; she did it at the first attempt, in the time of one measure, and gave it back, and asked what it was for. I said, to join cloth. She asked why it was parted. I had no answer that she could have used. They milk their cows, reap their oats, and do all the work that requires hands in the same manner; they have a kind of hard flints which, by grinding against other stones, they form into instruments that serve instead of wedges, axes and hammers; the Yahoos draw home the sheaves in carriages, and the servants tread them in covered huts to get out the grain; and they make a rude kind of earthen and wooden vessels, and bake the former in the sun.

If they can avoid casualties, they die only of old age, and are buried in the obscurest places that can be found, their friends and relations expressing neither joy nor grief at their departure; nor does the dying person discover the least regret that he is leaving the world, any more than if he were upon returning home from a visit to one of his neighbours. I remember my master having once made an appointment with a friend and his family to come to his house upon some affair of importance. On the day fixed the mistress and her two children came very late, and I, who had laid the table by habit at noon, took them for late; nobody else did, there being no such word. She made two excuses: first, for her husband, who, as she said, had happened that very morning to shnuwnh. The word is strongly expressive in their language, but not easily rendered into English; it signifies, to retire to his first mother. Her excuse for not coming sooner was that, her husband dying late in the morning, she was a good while consulting her servants about a convenient place where his body should be laid. She struck the hoof in the yard half a beat behind my master's, and nobody referred to it. I observed that she behaved herself in our house as cheerfully as the rest. She died about three months after.

They live generally to seventy or seventy-five years, very seldom to fourscore. Some weeks before their death they feel a gradual decay, but without pain; and about ten days before it, which they seldom fail in computing, from the way the count goes down, they return the visits that have been made them by those who are nearest in the neighbourhood, being carried in a convenient sledge drawn by Yahoos, which vehicle they use not only upon this occasion, but when they grow old, upon long journeys, or when they are lamed by any accident. The mistress came so, ten days before, and took a solemn leave of every one in the house, as if she were going to some remote part of the country where she designed to pass the rest of her life; the colts last. I asked the sorrel nag afterwards where the husband had been put. He said he did not know; that it was the obscurest place that could be found, and that the servants who had found it had not been told to remember it, and had not. I asked whether anyone went there. He said, to what end. I could not say, in his language, to what end. I stood in the yard with my hand on my wrist, on the cord, and understood that I had put to him a question with nothing under it, and that he had gone round it, as one goes round a soft place in a road, courteously, without looking down.

I know not whether it may be worth observing that the Houyhnhnms have no word in their language to express any thing that is evil, except what they borrow from the deformities or ill qualities of the Yahoos. Thus they denote the folly of a servant, an omission of a child, a stone that cuts their feet, a continuance of foul or unseasonable weather, and the like, by adding to each the epithet of Yahoo; as hhnm Yahoo, whnaholm Yahoo, ynlhmndwihlma Yahoo, and an ill-contrived house ynholmhnmrohlnw Yahoo. I found in the third year that I used it. Of a stone in the path; of the rain; and of the cord, once, on the slope, when my sleeve rode up and it caught on a thorn, so that I said the word aloud, and the nag turned his head. I looked at the cord. It had not minded.

I could, with great pleasure, enlarge further upon the manners and virtues of this excellent people; but, intending in a short time to publish a volume by itself, expressly upon that subject, I refer the reader thither, and, in the mean time, proceed to relate my own sad catastrophe.

The author's economy, and happy life among the Houyhnhnms; his great improvement in virtue, and in time. Their conversations. The author has notice from his master that he must depart, for a reason that was kept from him: that he might keep a count for the Yahoos. The word hnhloayn. He falls into a swoon in which there is nothing under the hoof, and submits. He contrives and finishes a canoe by the help of a fellow-servant, and puts to sea, paddling at forty-four.

I had settled my little economy to my own heart's content. My master had ordered a room to be made for me, after their manner, about six yards from the house, the sides and floors of which I plastered with clay, and covered with rush-mats of my own contriving. It was the farthest I had slept from a count since the long-boat, and I slept. I had beaten hemp, which there grows wild, and made of it a sort of ticking, which I filled with the feathers of several birds I had taken with springes made of Yahoos' hairs, and which were excellent food. The hair of a Yahoo I found to be very strong, much as the other kind is; it held. I had worked two chairs with my knife, the sorrel nag helping me in the grosser and more laborious part. When my clothes were worn to rags I made myself others with the skins of rabbits, and of a certain beautiful animal about the same size called nnuhnoh, the skin of which is covered with a fine down; of these I made very tolerable stockings. I soled my shoes with wood, which I cut from a tree and fitted to the upper-leather; and when this was worn out I supplied it with the skins of Yahoos dried in the sun. I often got honey out of hollow trees, which I mingled with water, or ate with my bread.

No man could more verify the truth of these two maxims: that nature is very easily satisfied, and that necessity is the mother of invention. I enjoyed perfect health of body and tranquillity of mind; I did not feel the treachery or inconstancy of a friend, nor the injuries of a secret or open enemy. I had no occasion of bribing, flattering or pimping to procure the favour of any great man or of his minion; I wanted no fence against fraud or oppression. Here was neither physician to read my wrist and send in his bill, nor lawyer to ruin my fortune; no informer to take my noon and put it in a book for a Treasurer, or forge accusations against me for hire; no gibers, censurers, backbiters, pickpockets, highwaymen, housebreakers, attorneys, bawds, buffoons, gamesters, politicians, wits, splenetics, tedious talkers, controvertists, ravishers, murderers, robbers, virtuosos; no leaders or followers of party and faction; no dungeon, axes, gibbets, whipping-posts or pillories; no cheating shopkeepers or mechanics; no fops, bullies, drunkards, strolling whores or poxes; no importunate, overbearing, quarrelsome, noisy, roaring, empty, conceited, swearing companions; no lords, fiddlers, judges or dancing-masters; and no one who went up when I came into the room.

I had the favour of being admitted to several Houyhnhnms who came to visit or dine with my master, where his honour graciously suffered me to wait in the room and listen to their discourse. Both he and his company would often descend to ask me questions, and receive my answers. I never presumed to speak except in answer to a question, and then I did it with inward regret, because it was a loss of so much time for improving myself; but I was infinitely delighted with the station of an humble auditor in such conversations, where nothing passed but what was useful, expressed in the fewest and most significant words; where the greatest decency was observed without the least degree of ceremony; where no person spoke without being pleased himself and pleasing his companions; where there was no interruption, tediousness, heat or difference of sentiments. They have a notion that when people are met together a short silence does much improve conversation; this I found to be true, for during those little intermissions of talk new ideas would arise in their minds, which very much enlivened the discourse. The silences were the rests, the places where all of them were at the same count and said nothing, and I sat in them as in a warm room. My presence often gave them sufficient matter for discourse, because it afforded my master an occasion of letting his friends into the history of me and my country, upon which they were all pleased to descant in a manner not very advantageous to humankind, and for that reason I shall not repeat what they said; only I may be allowed to observe that his honour, to my great admiration, appeared to understand the nature of Yahoos much better than myself. He went through all our vices and follies, and discovered many which I had never mentioned to him, by only supposing what qualities a Yahoo of their country, with a small proportion of reason, might be capable of exerting; and concluded, with too much probability, how vile, as well as miserable, such a creature must be.

I freely confess that all the little knowledge I have of any value was acquired by the lectures I received from my master, and from hearing the discourses of him and his friends, to which I should be prouder to listen than to dictate to the greatest and wisest assembly in Europe. I admired the strength, comeliness and speed of the inhabitants; and such a constellation of virtues in such amiable persons produced in me the highest veneration. At first, indeed, I did not feel that natural awe which the Yahoos and all other animals bear towards them; but it grew upon me by degrees, much sooner than I imagined, and was mingled with a respectful love and gratitude that they would condescend to distinguish me from the rest of my species. When I thought of my family, my friends, my countrymen, or the human race in general, I considered them as they really were, Yahoos in shape and disposition, perhaps a little more civilized, and qualified with the gift of speech; but making no other use of reason than to improve and multiply those vices whereof their brethren in this country had only the share that nature allotted them. When I happened to behold the reflection of my own form in a lake or fountain, I turned away my face in horror and detestation of myself, and could better endure the sight of a common Yahoo than of my own person. By conversing with the Houyhnhnms, and looking upon them with delight, I fell to imitate their gait and gesture, which is now grown into a habit; and my friends often tell me, in a blunt way, that I trot like a horse; which, however, I take for a great compliment. Neither shall I disown that in speaking I am apt to fall into the voice and manner of the Houyhnhnms, and hear myself ridiculed on that account without the least mortification.

In the midst of all this happiness, and when I looked upon myself to be fully settled for life, my master sent for me one morning a little earlier than his usual hour. I observed by his countenance that he was in some perplexity, and at a loss how to begin what he had to speak. He took my wrist before he spoke, and held it longer than he had in three years, as a surgeon takes the wrist before he gives the news. It was forty-seven. He was forty-six. I saw now that he had been so for a month, and that I had not looked, having been for a month at the words. After a short silence he told me he did not know how I would take what he was going to say.

That in the last general assembly, when the affair of the Yahoos was entered upon, the representatives had taken offence at his keeping a Yahoo (meaning myself) in his family more like a Houyhnhnm than a brute animal; that he was known frequently to converse with me, as if he could receive some advantage or pleasure in my company; that such a practice was not agreeable to reason or nature, or a thing ever heard of before among them; the assembly did therefore exhort him either to employ me like the rest of my species, or command me to swim back to the place whence I came: that the first of these expedients was utterly rejected by all the Houyhnhnms who had ever seen me at his house or their own; for they alleged that, because I had some rudiments of reason, added to the natural pravity of those animals, it was to be feared I might be able to seduce them into the woody and mountainous parts of the country, and bring them in troops by night to destroy the Houyhnhnms' cattle, as being naturally of the ravenous kind and averse from labour. His hoof was still on my wrist. At the words swim back I was a hundred and four. I thought of forty hands at forty wrists; of a cub that had looked up at the ninth saying; of a girl on a far bank with a hand at her neck. I did not say it was a groundless fear. They had seen, I suppose, what I had not been looking at.

My master added that he was daily pressed by the Houyhnhnms of the neighbourhood to have the assembly's exhortation executed, which he could not put off much longer. He doubted it would be impossible for me to swim to another country, and therefore wished I would contrive some sort of vehicle, resembling those I had described to him, that might carry me on the sea; in which work I should have the assistance of his own servants, as well as those of his neighbours. He concluded that for his own part he could have been content to keep me in his service as long as I lived, because he found I had cured myself of some bad habits and dispositions by endeavouring, as far as my inferior nature was capable, to imitate the Houyhnhnms. He meant my count. He had had it under his hoof a thousand mornings.

I should here observe to the reader that a decree of the general assembly in this country is expressed by the word hnhloayn, which signifies an exhortation, as near as I can render it; for they have no conception how a rational creature can be compelled, but only advised, or exhorted; because no person can disobey reason without giving up his claim to be a rational creature. I have thought since that it is not a word for an order but for the place of the count, told as one tells another the time: a Houyhnhnm who is not on it has not been commanded off it; he is simply not on it, and no more need be said, or can be. My master was not compelled. He was told where the count was. I was not banished. I was advised.

I was struck with the utmost grief and despair at my master's discourse; and, being unable to support the agonies I was under, I fell into a swoon at his feet. When I came to myself he told me that he concluded I had been dead; for these people are subject to no such imbecilities of nature. His hoof was where it had been. There had been nothing under it for the length of two measures; it was the first time in his life, I think, that he had held a wrist and found it not there.

I answered in a faint voice that death would have been too great a happiness; that although I could not blame the assembly's exhortation, or the urgency of his friends, yet in my weak and corrupt judgment I thought it might consist with reason to have been less rigorous; that I could not swim a league, and probably the nearest land to theirs might be distant above a hundred; that many materials necessary for making a small vessel to carry me off were wholly wanting in this country, which, however, I would attempt, in obedience and gratitude to his honour, although I concluded the thing to be impossible, and therefore looked on myself as already devoted to destruction; that the certain prospect of an unnatural death was the least of my evils; for, supposing I should escape with life by some strange adventure, how could I think with temper of passing my days among Yahoos, and going up again, as I knew I should, the day the hoof was off me, for want of a count to keep me within the paths of virtue? That I knew too well upon what solid reasons all the determinations of the wise Houyhnhnms were founded not to be shaken by arguments of mine, a miserable Yahoo; and therefore, after presenting him with my humble thanks for the offer of his servants' assistance in making a vessel, and desiring a reasonable time for so difficult a work, I told him I would endeavour to preserve a wretched being; and that if ever I returned to England I was not without hopes of being useful to my own species, by celebrating the praises of the renowned Houyhnhnms and proposing their virtues to the imitation of mankind.

My master, in a few words, made me a very gracious reply; allowed me the space of two months to finish my boat; and ordered the sorrel nag, my fellow-servant (for so, at this distance, I may presume to call him), to follow my instruction; because I told my master that his help would be sufficient, and I knew he had a tenderness for me. I had seen it in the way he walked, on the side the Yahoos would come from. I did not tell my master that. He would have asked what it was for.

In his company my first business was to go to that part of the coast where my rebellious crew had ordered me to be set on shore. I got upon a height, and looking on every side into the sea, fancied I saw a small island toward the north-east. I took out my pocket glass, and could then clearly distinguish it above five leagues off, as I computed; but it appeared to the sorrel nag to be only a blue cloud; for as he had no conception of any country beside his own, so he could not be as expert in distinguishing remote objects at sea as we who so much converse in that element. He looks at what is near enough to be in time with; nobody in that country had ever had to look at anything that could not be waited for. After I had discovered this island I considered no further, but resolved it should, if possible, be the first place of my banishment, leaving the consequence to fortune.

I returned home, and consulting with the sorrel nag, we went into a copse at some distance, where I with my knife, and he with a sharp flint, fastened very artificially after their manner to a wooden handle, cut down several oak wattles about the thickness of a walking-staff, and some larger pieces. But I shall not trouble the reader with a particular description of my own mechanics; let it suffice to say that in six weeks' time, with the help of the sorrel nag, who performed the parts that required most labour, I finished a sort of Indian canoe, but much larger, covering it with the skins of Yahoos, well stitched together with hempen threads of my own making. My sail was likewise composed of the skins of the same animal, but I made use of the youngest I could get, the older being too tough and thick. I turned the hair side in. I likewise provided myself with four paddles. I laid in a stock of boiled flesh of rabbits and fowls, and took with me two vessels, one filled with milk and the other with water.

I tried my canoe in a large pond near my master's house, and then corrected in it what was amiss, stopping all the chinks with Yahoos' tallow, till I found it staunch, and able to bear me and my freight; and when it was as complete as I could possibly make it, I had it drawn on a carriage very gently by Yahoos to the sea-side, under the conduct of the sorrel nag and another servant. The nag walked at the head at the pace of the house, and the Yahoos in the traces, who have no pace, went at his; it was the only time I saw them do a thing gently, and I do not say they liked it. One of them had black hair.

When all was ready, and the day came for my departure, I took leave of my master and lady and the whole family, my eyes flowing with tears and my heart quite sunk with grief. No one else's ran. The white mare looked at my face as at a thing she had been told of. But his honour, out of curiosity, and perhaps (if I may speak without vanity) partly out of kindness, was determined to see me in my canoe, and got several of his neighbouring friends to accompany him. I was forced to wait above an hour for the tide (by my pulse, I mean, which is how I have reckoned hours since I first went to sea, sixty to the minute; at the pace I had come to it was an hour and a quarter by the sun, and I did not correct it); and then, observing the wind very fortunately bearing toward the island to which I intended to steer my course, I took a second leave of my master; but as I was going to prostrate myself to kiss his hoof, he did me the honour to raise it gently to my mouth. It was at the hollow. It was forty-six. I am not ignorant how much I have been censured for mentioning this last particular. Detractors are pleased to think it improbable that so illustrious a person should descend to give so great a mark of distinction to a creature so inferior as I. Neither have I forgotten how apt some travellers are to boast of extraordinary favours they have received. But if these censurers were better acquainted with the noble and courteous disposition of the Houyhnhnms, they would soon change their opinion.

I paid my respects to the rest of the Houyhnhnms in his honour's company; then, getting into my canoe, I pushed off from shore. When I had cleared the rocks I looked back, and the Yahoos had been driven up the shingle, all but one, who stood by herself at the top of it, a small dark thing, and I could see that she had two fingers at her wrist. I laid two fingers on mine. It was too far for her to see it, and I have never been sure that this was why I did it then. I did not read it. I found after a while that I was paddling at forty-four, and that I could not stop it; and for some time I did not want to.

The author's dangerous voyage; the nag's cry has one beat over. He arrives at New Holland, hoping to settle there. Is wounded with an arrow by one of the natives. Is seized and carried by force into a Portuguese ship. The great civilities of the captain, who takes his wrist and finds a count that comes down in the telling. The author arrives at England, and is held at fifty-two for an hour by a hand he does not know.

I began this desperate voyage on February 15, 1714-15, at nine o'clock in the morning. The wind was very favourable; however, I made use at first only of my paddles; but considering I should soon be weary, and that the wind might chop about, I ventured to set up my little sail; and thus, with the help of the tide, I went at the rate of a league and a half an hour, as near as I could guess. My master and his friends continued on the shore till I was almost out of sight; and I often heard the sorrel nag (who always loved me) crying out, "Hnuy illa nyha, majah Yahoo": take care of thyself, gentle Yahoo. It came over the water in a measure of four, and there was one over. He had put me in as a fifth. I paddled to it as one paddles to a bell, till I could not hear it, and then to where it had been.

My design was, if possible, to discover some small island uninhabited, yet sufficient, by my labour, to furnish me with the necessaries of life, which I would have thought a greater happiness than to be first minister in the politest court of Europe; so horrible was the idea I conceived of returning to live in the society, and under the government, of Yahoos. For in such a solitude as I desired I could at least enjoy my own thoughts, and reflect with delight on the virtues of those inimitable Houyhnhnms, without an opportunity of degenerating into the vices and corruptions of my own species. I was to have nobody to go up for, and nobody to be read by. I did not think, on the water, of two creatures on a mountain.

The reader may remember what I related, when my crew conspired against me, and confined me to my cabin; how I continued there several weeks without knowing what course we took; and when I was put ashore in the long-boat, how the sailors told me, with oaths, whether true or false, that they knew not in what part of the world we were. However, I did then believe us to be about ten degrees southward of the Cape of Good Hope, or about forty-five degrees southern latitude, as I gathered from some general words I overheard among them, being, I supposed, to the south-east in their intended voyage to Madagascar. And although this were little better than conjecture, yet I resolved to steer my course eastward, hoping to reach the south-west coast of New Holland, and perhaps some such island as I desired lying westward of it. The wind was full west, and by six in the evening I computed I had gone eastward at least eighteen leagues, when I spied a very small island about half a league off, which I soon reached. It was nothing but a rock, with one creek naturally arched by the force of tempests. Here I put in my canoe, and, climbing a part of the rock, I could plainly discover land to the east, extending from south to north. I lay all night in my canoe, and at dawn I took my wrist, which I had not done since the shingle. It was fifty-eight. Repeating my voyage early in the morning, I arrived in seven hours to the south-east point of New Holland. This confirmed me in the opinion I have long entertained, that the maps and charts place this country at least three degrees more to the east than it really is; which thought I communicated many years ago to my worthy friend Mr. Herman Moll, who has rather chosen to follow other authors.

I saw no inhabitants in the place where I landed, and, being unarmed, I was afraid of venturing far into the country. I found some shellfish on the shore, and ate them raw, not daring to kindle a fire for fear of being discovered by the natives. I continued three days feeding on oysters and limpets, to save my own provisions, and I fortunately found a brook of excellent water, which gave me great relief. I was seventy-one on the second day, which is about what a man is among men; and I did not like how little it troubled me.

On the fourth day, venturing out early a little too far, I saw twenty or thirty natives upon a height not above five hundred yards from me. They were stark naked, men, women and children, round a fire, as I could discover by the smoke. I had not seen so many persons in one place for five years, and at that distance I could tell that no two of them were at the same count: they moved about the fire like the pieces of a thing that has come apart. One of them spied me and gave notice to the rest, and it went through them as wind goes through grass, not all at once, but in thirty ways; and five of them advanced toward me, leaving the women and children at the fire. I made what haste I could to the shore, and, getting into my canoe, shoved off: the savages, observing me retreat, ran after me; and before I could get far enough into the sea they discharged an arrow which wounded me deeply on the inside of my left knee. I shall carry the mark to my grave. I was a hundred and twenty-six. I apprehended the arrow might be poisoned, and, paddling out of the reach of their darts (being a calm day), I made a shift to suck the wound, and dress it as well as I could.

I was at a loss what to do, for I durst not return to the same landing-place, but stood to the north, and was forced to paddle, for the wind, though very gentle, was against me, blowing north-west. As I was looking about for a secure landing-place, I saw a sail to the north-north-east, which, appearing every minute more visible, I was in some doubt whether I should wait for them or not; but at last my detestation of the Yahoo race prevailed: and, turning my canoe, I sailed and paddled together to the south, and got into the same creek whence I set out in the morning, choosing rather to trust myself among these barbarians than live with European Yahoos. I drew up my canoe as close as I could to the shore, and hid myself behind a stone by the little brook, which, as I have already said, was excellent water. I lay with my wrist under me, so that it should not be taken. I think it was the first time in my life that I hid it.

The ship came within half a league of this creek, and sent her long-boat with vessels to take in fresh water (for the place, it seems, was very well known); but I did not observe it till the boat was almost on shore, and it was too late to seek another hiding-place. The seamen at their landing observed my canoe, and, rummaging it all over, easily conjectured that the owner could not be far off. Four of them, well armed, searched every cranny and lurking-hole, till at last they found me flat on my face behind the stone. They gazed awhile in admiration at my strange uncouth dress: my coat made of skins, my wooden-soled shoes, and my furred stockings; whence, however, they concluded I was not a native of the place, who all go naked. One of the seamen, in Portuguese, bid me rise, and asked who I was; and, as is done to a stranger before a question, he put two fingers to my wrist, courteously. I had it out of his hand before I knew. He looked at his fingers. It is a thing that is not done, and nobody among them had seen it done. I was a hundred and thirty-one.

I understood that language very well, and, getting upon my feet, I said I was a poor Yahoo banished from the Houyhnhnms, and desired they would please to let me depart. They admired to hear me answer them in their own tongue, and saw by my complexion I must be a European; but were at a loss to know what I meant by Yahoos and Houyhnhnms, and at the same time fell a-laughing at my strange tone in speaking, which resembled the neighing of a horse. It went round them one at a time, each when he had understood it, so that it lasted the length of a long sentence, and I stood at the end of it as at the end of a quay. I trembled all the while betwixt fear and hatred. I again desired leave to depart, and was gently moving to my canoe; but they laid hold of me, desiring to know what country I was of, whence I came, with many other questions. I told them I was born in England, whence I came about five years ago, and then their country and ours were at peace. I therefore hoped they would not treat me as an enemy, since I meant them no harm, but was a poor Yahoo seeking some desolate place where to pass the remainder of his unfortunate life.

When they began to talk, I thought I never heard or saw any thing more unnatural; for it appeared to me as monstrous as if a dog or a cow should speak in England, or a Yahoo in Houyhnhnmland. They spoke, each of them, at his own pace, and none at anybody's, ninety and sixty and a slow forty, over one another, like a street of clocks all wrong; and I had not heard it in five years. The honest Portuguese were equally amazed at my strange dress, and the odd manner of delivering my words, which, however, they understood very well. They spoke to me with great humanity, and said they were sure the captain would carry me gratis to Lisbon, whence I might return to my own country; that two of the seamen would go back to the ship, inform the captain of what they had seen, and receive his orders; in the mean time, unless I would give my solemn oath not to fly, they would secure me by force. I thought it best to comply with their proposal. They were very curious to know my story, but I gave them very little satisfaction, and they all conjectured that my misfortunes had impaired my reason. In two hours the boat, which went laden with vessels of water, returned, with the captain's command to fetch me on board. I fell on my knees to preserve my liberty; but all was in vain; and the men, having tied me with cords, heaved me into the boat, whence I was taken into the ship, and thence into the captain's cabin.

His name was Pedro de Mendez; he was a very courteous and generous person. He entreated me to give some account of myself, and desired to know what I would eat or drink; said I should be used as well as himself; and spoke so many obliging things that I wondered to find such civilities from a Yahoo. However, I remained silent and sullen; I was ready to faint at the very smell of him and his men. At last I desired something to eat out of my own canoe; but he ordered me a chicken and some excellent wine, and then directed that I should be put to bed in a very clean cabin. I would not undress myself, but lay on the bed-clothes, and in half an hour stole out, when I thought the crew was at dinner, and, getting to the side of the ship, was going to leap into the sea and swim for my life rather than continue among Yahoos. But one of the seamen prevented me, and, having informed the captain, I was chained to my cabin.

After dinner Don Pedro came to me, and desired to know my reason for so desperate an attempt; assured me he only meant to do me all the service he was able; and spoke so very movingly that at last I descended to treat him like an animal which had some little portion of reason. He took my wrist before I began, as a matter of course, and held it throughout, quite lightly, with the face of a man listening for a clock in the next room. It was a hundred and twelve, from the chain and the smell. I gave him a very short relation of my voyage; of the conspiracy against me by my own men; of the country where they set me on shore, and of my five years' residence there. All which he looked upon as if it were a dream or a vision; whereat I took great offence; for I had quite forgot the faculty of lying, so peculiar to Yahoos in all countries where they preside, and, consequently, their disposition of suspecting truth in others of their own species. I asked him whether it were the custom in his country to say the thing which was not. I assured him I had almost forgot what he meant by falsehood, and that if I had lived a thousand years in Houyhnhnmland I should never have heard a lie from the meanest servant; that I was altogether indifferent whether he believed me or not; but, however, in return for his favours, I would give so much allowance to the corruption of his nature as to answer any objection he would please to make, and then he might easily discover the truth.

The captain, a wise man, after many endeavours to catch me tripping in some part of my story, at last began to have a better opinion of my veracity. He told me why. A lie goes up, he said; a good lie stays; he had taken the wrist of a minister at Lisbon once, who was to tell the king a thing, and it had told him nothing at all. Mine had come down. It had come down as I told it, from the chain to fifty-one by the time I reached my master's name, and he had not seen that before in a man; he did not know what it meant, and he preferred it. But he added that since I professed so inviolable an attachment to truth, I must give him my word and honour to bear him company in this voyage without attempting any thing against my life, or else he would continue me a prisoner till we arrived at Lisbon. I gave him the promise he required; but at the same time protested that I would suffer the greatest hardships rather than return to live among Yahoos.

Our voyage passed without any considerable accident. In gratitude to the captain, I sometimes sat with him, at his earnest request, and strove to conceal my antipathy against humankind, although it often broke out; which he suffered to pass without observation. But the greatest part of the day I confined myself to my cabin, to avoid seeing any of the crew. The captain had often entreated me to strip myself of my savage dress, and offered to lend me the best suit of clothes he had. This I would not be prevailed on to accept, abhorring to cover myself with any thing that had been on the back of a Yahoo. I only desired he would lend me two clean shirts, which, having been washed since he wore them, I believed would not so much defile me. These I changed every second day, and washed them myself. He had seen the cord, when he took my wrist, and asked nothing. I would have given him credit for that if I had been giving credit to Yahoos.

We arrived at Lisbon, November 5, 1715. At our landing, the captain forced me to cover myself with his cloak, to prevent the rabble from crowding about me. I was conveyed to his own house; and at my earnest request he led me up to the highest room backwards. I conjured him to conceal from all persons what I had told him of the Houyhnhnms, because the least hint of such a story would not only draw numbers of people to see me, but probably put me in danger of being imprisoned, or burnt by the Inquisition. The captain persuaded me to accept a suit of clothes newly made; but I would not suffer the tailor to take my measure, who had begun, as they do, at the wrist; however, Don Pedro being almost of my size, they fitted me well enough. He accoutred me with other necessaries, all new, which I aired for twenty-four hours before I would use them.

The captain had no wife, nor above three servants, none of which were suffered to attend at meals; and his whole deportment was so obliging, added to very good human understanding, that I really began to tolerate his company. He gained so far upon me that I ventured to look out of the back window. By degrees I was brought into another room, whence I peeped into the street, but drew my head back in a fright. In a week's time he seduced me down to the door. I found my terror gradually lessened, but my hatred and contempt seemed to increase. I was at last bold enough to walk the street in his company, but kept my nose well stopped with rue, or sometimes with tobacco. I did not look at the faces. I looked at the way they walked, which was thirty ways at once; and I put my own foot down at the pace of the house, against the stream, and was taken twice for drunk and once for a priest.

In ten days Don Pedro, to whom I had given some account of my domestic affairs, put it upon me, as a matter of honour and conscience, that I ought to return to my native country, and live at home with my wife and children. He told me there was an English ship in the port just ready to sail, and he would furnish me with all things necessary. It would be tedious to repeat his arguments, and my contradictions. He said it was altogether impossible to find such a solitary island as I desired to live in; but I might command in my own house, and pass my time in a manner as recluse as I pleased.

I complied at last, finding I could not do better. I left Lisbon the 24th day of November, in an English merchantman, but who was the master I never inquired. Don Pedro accompanied me to the ship, and lent me twenty credits. I had money in my pocket, and did not take it out; it was easier, I do not know why, to owe a Yahoo than to spend what I had kept. He took kind leave of me, and embraced me at parting, which I bore as well as I could. He was seventy-four against my chest, and I was a hundred and eight, and I stood it for nine of his, and counted them. During this last voyage I had no commerce with the master or any of his men; but, pretending I was sick, kept close in my cabin. On the fifth of December, 1715, we cast anchor in the Downs, about nine in the morning, and at three in the afternoon I got safe to my house at Redriff.

My wife and family received me with great surprise and joy, because they concluded me certainly dead; but I must freely confess the sight of them filled me only with hatred, disgust and contempt; and the more by reflecting on the near alliance I had to them. For although, since my unfortunate exile from the Houyhnhnm country, I had compelled myself to tolerate the sight of Yahoos, and to converse with Don Pedro de Mendez, yet my memory and imagination were perpetually filled with the virtues and ideas of those exalted Houyhnhnms. And when I began to consider that, by copulating with one of the Yahoo species, I had become a parent of more, it struck me with the utmost shame, confusion and horror.

As soon as I entered the house, my wife took me in her arms and kissed me; at which, having not been used to the touch of that odious animal for so many years, I fell into a swoon for almost an hour. She had not taken my wrist, as she had at every door; she had put her arms round me instead, which she had never done at a door, and I stood it for the length of a breath. When I came to myself there was a hand at my wrist and a voice, low, saying a number over and over, as one says a name down a well to someone who has gone out of hearing. It was fifty-two. It went down at the end of each, in a way that nothing in that country had. I did not know whose it was. I was told after that it had been an hour, and that she had not stopped, and that for the first part there had been nothing for her to find. I took my wrist out of her hand. The hand let go at once. It had been expecting that.

At the time I am writing, it is five years since my last return to England. During the first year I could not endure my wife or children in my presence; the very smell of them was intolerable; much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room. To this hour they dare not presume to touch my bread, or drink out of the same cup, neither was I ever able to let one of them take me by the wrist. The first money I laid out was to buy two young stone-horses, which I keep in a good stable; and next to them the groom is my greatest favourite, for I feel my spirits revived by the smell he contracts in the stable. My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me and friendship to each other. I took their pasterns every morning for the first year. The bay is thirty-eight and the grey forty-one; they stand side by side, each at his own, and neither seems to mind. I say my words to them at forty-four, and they put their ears forward at the end of each measure, which I take for an answer.

The author's veracity, and the wrist laid in the Chancellor's hand. His design in publishing this work. His censure of those travellers who swerve from the truth. The author clears himself from any sinister ends in writing, and from a paragraph that was not his. An objection answered. The method of planting colonies, in which a stranger's number is read aloud to him and written in a book. His native country commended. The right of the crown to those countries described by the author is justified, and the difficulty of conquering them on one count. The author takes his last leave of the reader; proposes his manner of living for the future; gives good advice, and concludes at a long table, with two fingers.

Thus, gentle reader, I have given thee a faithful history of my travels for sixteen years and above seven months: wherein I have not been so studious of ornament as of truth. I could, perhaps, like others, have astonished thee with strange improbable tales; but I rather chose to relate plain matter of fact, in the simplest manner and style, because my principal design was to inform, and not to amuse thee. I have set down every figure as I took it. A traveller who gives you the country and leaves out the beat has given you the country as a man gives you a coat, with the wearer taken out; and this is the sense in which I have not been studious of ornament.

It is easy for us who travel into remote countries, which are seldom visited by Englishmen or other Europeans, to form descriptions of wonderful animals both at sea and land. Whereas a traveller's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad, as well as good, example of what they deliver concerning foreign places. I could heartily wish a law was enacted that every traveller, before he were permitted to publish his voyages, should be obliged to make oath before the Lord High Chancellor that all he intended to print was absolutely true to the best of his knowledge; and I would have him lay his wrist in the Chancellor's hand while he swore it, though I am told that the best of the profession would give the Chancellor nothing to read. For then the world would no longer be deceived, as it usually is, while some writers, to make their works pass the better upon the public, impose the grossest falsities on the unwary reader.

I have perused several books of travels with great delight in my younger days; but having since gone over most parts of the globe, and been able to contradict many fabulous accounts from my own observation, it has given me a great disgust against this part of reading, and some indignation to see the credulity of mankind so impudently abused. Therefore, since my acquaintance were pleased to think my poor endeavours might not be unacceptable to my country, I imposed on myself, as a maxim never to be swerved from, that I would strictly adhere to truth; neither indeed can I be ever under the least temptation to vary from it, while I retain in my mind the lectures and example of my noble master and the other illustrious Houyhnhnms of whom I had so long the honour to be an humble hearer. I say in my mind; I do not say in my wrist. I did not bring the number home. I am fifty-one at the table, and over sixty on the bad days. The lectures I have. A man may keep the one without the other, and I think it is the lectures that are meant.

—Nec si miserum Fortuna Sinonem / Finxit, vanum etiam, mendacemque improba finget.

I know very well how little reputation is to be got by writings which require neither genius nor learning, nor indeed any other talent, except a good memory, or an exact journal; and I had the second, which has four columns. I know likewise that writers of travels, like dictionary-makers, are sunk into oblivion by the weight and bulk of those who come last, and therefore lie uppermost. And it is highly probable that such travellers who shall hereafter visit the countries described in this work of mine may, by detecting my errors (if there be any), and adding many new discoveries of their own, jostle me out of vogue, and stand in my place, making the world forget that ever I was an author. This indeed would be too great a mortification if I wrote for fame; but as my sole intention was the public good, I cannot be altogether disappointed. For who can read of the virtues I have mentioned in the glorious Houyhnhnms, without being ashamed of his own vices, when he considers himself as the reasoning, governing animal of his country? I shall say nothing of those remote nations where Yahoos preside; among which the least corrupted are the Brobdingnagians, whose wise maxims in morality and government it would be our happiness to observe, if a reader had the time to hear them said at five. But I forbear descanting further, and rather leave the judicious reader to his own remarks and application.

I am not a little pleased that this work of mine can possibly meet with no censurers; for what objections can be made against a writer who relates only plain facts that happened in such distant countries, where we have not the least interest with respect either to trade or negotiations? I have carefully avoided every fault with which common writers of travels are often too justly charged. Besides, I meddle not the least with any party, but write without passion, prejudice or ill-will against any man, or number of men, whatsoever. I write for the noblest end, to inform and instruct mankind, over whom I may, without breach of modesty, pretend to some superiority from the advantages I received by conversing so long among the most accomplished Houyhnhnms. I write without any view to profit or praise. I never suffer a word to pass that may look like reflection, or possibly give the least offence, even to those who are most ready to take it. So that I hope I may with justice pronounce myself an author perfectly blameless, against whom the tribes of Answerers, Considerers, Observers, Reflectors, Detectors, Remarkers, will never be able to find matter for exercising their talents. There was a paragraph, in the first edition, in praise of her Serenity the Regent. It was not mine, and it was not true. I have said so in my letter, and I say it again here at the end, because it is the only thing in that book that I did not take at the wrist.

I confess it was whispered to me that I was bound in duty, as a subject of England, to have given in a memorial to a secretary of state at my first coming over; because whatever lands are discovered by a subject belong to the crown. But I doubt whether our conquests in the countries I treat of would be as easy as those of Ferdinando Cortez over the naked Americans. The Lilliputians, I think, are hardly worth the charge of a fleet and army to reduce them, the fleet arriving in the reign after the one it was sent against; and I question whether it might be prudent or safe to attempt the Brobdingnagians, who would be a quarter of an hour in understanding that they had been attacked, and the army another quarter in understanding that they had not minded; or whether an English army would be much at their ease with the Flying Island over their heads. The Houyhnhnms indeed appear not to be so well prepared for war, a science to which they are perfect strangers, and especially against missive weapons. However, supposing myself to be a minister of state, I could never give my advice for invading them. Their prudence, unanimity, unacquaintedness with fear, and their love of their country would amply supply all defects in the military art. Imagine twenty thousand of them breaking into the midst of an European army, confounding the ranks, overturning the carriages, battering the warriors' faces into mummy by terrible yerks from their hinder hoofs; and on one count, so that the twenty thousand hoofs would come down in the same instant, and it would be not an army broken but one blow. For they would well deserve the character given to Augustus, Recalcitrat undique tutus. But, instead of proposals for conquering that magnanimous nation, I rather wish they were in a capacity or disposition to send a sufficient number of their inhabitants for civilizing Europe, by teaching us the first principles of honour, justice, truth, temperance, public spirit, fortitude, chastity, friendship, benevolence and fidelity. The names of all which virtues are still retained among us in most languages, and are to be met with in modern as well as ancient authors; which I am able to assert from my own small reading. I have looked in it for the name of the thing my master said was the whole of reason, and have not found it; there are a great many names near.

But I had another reason which made me less forward to enlarge his majesty's dominions by my discoveries. To say the truth, I had conceived a few scruples with relation to the distributive justice of princes upon those occasions. For instance: a crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither; at length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and plunder; they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take the wrist of the first man who comes down to the shore, and read his number aloud to him in a language he has not got, and write it in a book; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank, or a stone, for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more, by force, for a sample; return home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free licence given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people!

But this description, I confess, does by no means affect the British nation, who may be an example to the whole world for their wisdom, care and justice in planting colonies; their liberal endowments for the advancement of religion and learning; their choice of devout and able pastors to propagate Christianity; their caution in stocking their provinces with people of sober lives and conversations from this the mother kingdom; their strict regard to the distribution of justice, in supplying the civil administration through all their colonies with officers of the greatest abilities, utter strangers to corruption; and, to crown all, by sending the most vigilant and virtuous governors, who have no other views than the happiness of the people over whom they preside, and the honour of the king their master.

But as those countries which I have described do not appear to have any desire of being conquered and enslaved, murdered or driven out by colonies, nor abound either in gold, silver, sugar or tobacco, I did humbly conceive they were by no means proper objects of our zeal, our valour or our interest. However, if those whom it more concerns think fit to be of another opinion, I am ready to depose, when I shall be lawfully called, that no European did ever visit those countries before me. I mean, if the inhabitants ought to be believed; unless a dispute may arise concerning the two Yahoos, said to have been seen many years ago upon a mountain in Houyhnhnmland, from whence the opinion is that the race of those brutes hath descended; and these, for anything I know, may have been English, which indeed I was apt to suspect from the lineaments of their posterity's countenances, although very much defaced. I took nine of those wrists, and the build is ours; the count was nobody's. But how far that will go to make out a title, I leave to the learned in colony-law. As to the formality of taking possession in my sovereign's name, it never came once into my thoughts; and if it had, yet, as my affairs then stood, I should perhaps, in point of prudence and self-preservation, have put it off to a better opportunity.

Having thus answered the only objection that can ever be raised against me as a traveller, I here take a final leave of all my courteous readers, and return to enjoy my own speculations in my little garden at Redriff; to apply those excellent lessons of virtue which I learned among the Houyhnhnms; to instruct the Yahoos of my own family, as far as I shall find them docible animals; to behold my figure often in a glass, and thus, if possible, habituate myself by time to tolerate the sight of a human creature; to lament the brutality to Houyhnhnms in my own country, but always treat their persons with respect, for the sake of my noble master, his family, his friends, and the whole Houyhnhnm race, whom these of ours have the honour to resemble in all their lineaments, however their intellectuals came to degenerate. I do it with my sleeve rolled back, so as to see the cord, which is the only part of my figure that I can look at for long.

My reconcilement to the Yahoo-kind in general might not be so difficult, if they would be content with those vices and follies only which nature has entitled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a politician, a whoremonger, a physician, an evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a traitor, or the like; this is all according to the due course of things: but when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience; neither shall I be ever able to comprehend how such an animal, and such a vice, could tally together. The wise and virtuous Houyhnhnms, who abound in all excellences that can adorn a rational creature, have no name for this vice in their language, which has no terms to express any thing that is evil, except those whereby they describe the detestable qualities of their Yahoos, among which they were not able to distinguish this of pride, for want of thoroughly understanding human nature, as it shows itself in other countries where that animal presides. But I, who had more experience, could plainly observe some rudiments of it among the wild Yahoos. It is a count that goes up when it is looked at, and stays up as long as the look; I saw it in the Yahoo that had the best stone, when the herd turned its heads. The Houyhnhnms have no name for it, there being nobody in their country who is looked at.

But the Houyhnhnms, who live under the government of reason, are no more proud of the good qualities they possess than I should be for not wanting a leg or an arm; which no man in his wits would boast of, although he must be miserable without them. I dwell the longer upon this subject from the desire I have to make the society of an English Yahoo by any means not insupportable; and therefore I here entreat those who have any tincture of this absurd vice that they will not presume to come in my sight.

I began last week to permit my wife to sit at dinner with me, at the farthest end of a long table, and to answer, but with the utmost brevity, the few questions I asked her. The table is eleven feet. I measured it, as I measure everything, and it is a foot short of four yards, which I did not intend and find I have been looking at. Yet, the smell of a Yahoo continuing very offensive, I always keep my nose well stopped with rue, lavender or tobacco leaves; and although it be hard for a man late in life to remove old habits, I am not altogether out of hopes, in some time, to suffer a neighbour Yahoo in my company, without the apprehensions I am yet under of his teeth or his claws. She answers in numbers when she can. I asked how the children did, and she said sixty-three, and fifty-eight, and ninety-four. Last Sunday I took out of my pocket, where it had been since Laputa, a bladder of eleven peas, and sent it down the table. It went the whole eleven feet on the cloth, and stopped against the boy's plate. He is five. He looked at it. His mother showed him, from where she sat; she shook it. It makes sixty in every language. He shook it himself, a good deal faster. I took my wrist, which I have not been doing in the house. I was fifty-one.

Last night, when the cloth was drawn, my wife, at the far end, with her hand lying on the board, put two fingers to the inside of her wrist. She did not look up. It was the right place. I do not think she knew I was looking. I have put two fingers on the table beside my wrist, on the side where the cord is. They are there now, as I write this. I have not yet laid them on it.

[Margin: At the foot of the last leaf of Mrs. Gulliver's copy, in pencil, in her hand, there is a number which is not in the text. It is fifty-two. R.S.]