By my new friend, Tgnagogu, I was presented to the King, a most enlightened monarch, who not only reigned over, but ruled absolutely, the most highly civilized people in the world.  He received me with gracious hospitality, quartered me in the palace of his Prime Minister, gave me for wives the three daughters of his Lord Chamberlain, and provided me with an ample income from the public revenues.  Within a year I had made a fair acquaintance with the Batrugian language, and was appointed royal interpreter, with a princely salary, although no one speaking any other tongue, myself and two native professors of rhetoric excepted, had ever been seen in the kingdom.

One day I heard a great tumult in the street, and going to a window saw, in a public square opposite, a crowd of persons surrounding some high officials who were engaged in cutting off a man’s head.  Just before the executioner delivered the fatal stroke, the victim was asked if he had anything to say.  He explained with earnestness that the deed for which he was about to suffer had been inspired and commanded by a brass-headed cow and four bushels of nightingales’ eggs!

“Hold! hold!” I shouted in Batrugian, leaping from the window and forcing a way through the throng; “the man is obviously insane!”

“Friend,” said a man in a long blue robe, gently restraining me, “it is not proper for you to interrupt these high proceedings with irrelevant remarks.  The luckless gentleman who, in accordance with my will as Lord Chief Justice, has just had the happiness to part with his head was so inconsiderate as to take the life of a fellow-subject.”

“But he was insane,” I persisted, “clearly and indisputably ptig nupy uggydug!”—­a phrase imperfectly translatable, meaning, as near as may be, having flitter-mice in his campanile.

“Am I to infer,” said the Lord Chief Justice, “that in your own honorable country a person accused of murder is permitted to plead insanity as a reason why he should not be put to death?”

“Yes, illustrious one,” I replied, respectfully, “we regard that as a good defense.”

“Well,” said he slowly, but with extreme emphasis, “I’ll be Gook swottled!”

("Gook,” I may explain, is the name of the Batrugian chief deity; but for the verb “to swottle” the English tongue has no equivalent.  It seems to signify the deepest disapproval, and by a promise to be “swottled” a Batrugian denotes acute astonishment.)

“Surely,” I said, “so wise and learned a person as you cannot think it just to punish with death one who does not know right from wrong.  The gentleman who has just now renounced his future believed himself to have been commanded to do what he did by a brass-headed cow and four bushels of nightingales’ eggs—­powers to which he acknowledged a spiritual allegiance.  To have disobeyed would have been, from his point of view, an infraction of a law higher than that of man.”