“Seems to me, our old friend must have been on his stilts that time,” interrupted Mohi.

“No, Braid-Beard.  But by way of apologizing for the unusual rigidity of his style in that chapter, he says in a note, that it was written upon a straight-backed settle, when he was ill of a lumbago, and a crick in the neck.”

“That incorrigible Azzageddi again,” said Media, “Proceed with your quotation, Babbalanja.”

“Where was I, Braid-Beard?”

“Battering occiputs at the last accounts,” said Mohi.

“Ah, yes.  And right well doth man love to bruise and batter all occiputs in his vicinity; he but follows his instincts; he is but one member of a fighting world.  Spiders, vixens, and tigers all war with a relish; and on every side is heard the howls of hyenas, the throttlings of mastiffs, the din of belligerant beetles, the buzzing warfare of the insect battalions:  and the shrill cries of lady Tartars rending their lords.  And all this existeth of necessity.  To war it is, and other depopulators, that we are beholden for elbow-room in Mardi and for all our parks an gardens, wherein we are wont to expatiate.  Come on, then, plague, war, famine and viragos!  Come on, I say, for who shall stay ye?  Come on, and healthfulize the census!  And more especially, oh War! do thou march forth with thy bludgeon!  Cracked are, our crowns by nature, and henceforth forever, cracked shall they be by hard raps.”

“And hopelessly cracked the skull, that hatched such a tirade of nonsense,” said Mohi.

“And think you not, old Bardianna knew that?” asked Babbalanja.  “He wrote an excellent chapter on that very subject.”

“What, on the cracks in his own pate?”

“Precisely.  And expressly asserts, that to those identical cracks, was he indebted for what little light he had in his brain.”

“I yield, Babbalanja; your old Ponderer is older than I.”

“Ay, ay, Braid-Beard; his crest was a tortoise; and this was the motto:—­’I bite, but am not to be bitten.’”

CHAPTER XXXV They Visit The Lords Piko And Hello

In good time, we landed at Diranda.  And that landing was like landing at Greenwich among the Waterloo pensioners.  The people were docked right and left; some without arms; some without legs; not one with a tail; but to a man, all had heads, though rather the worse for wear; covered with lumps and contusions.

Now, those very magnificent and illustrious lord seigniors, the lord seigniors Hello and Piko, lived in a palace, round which was a fence of the cane called Malacca, each picket helmed with a skull, of which there were fifty, one to each cane.  Over the door was the blended arms of the high and mighty houses of Hello and Piko:  a Clavicle crossed over an Ulna.

Escorted to the sign of the Skull-and-Cross-Bones, we received the very best entertainment which that royal inn could afford.  We found our hosts Hello and Piko seated together on a dais or throne, and now and then drinking some claret-red wine from an ivory bowl, too large to have been wrought from an elephant’s tusk.  They were in glorious good spirits, shaking ivory coins in a skull.