Gulliver lifted his hand, and a tempestuous silence fell once more.  “Yahoos!  Yahoos!” he bawled again.  Then he turned, and passed back into his hideous garden.  The gate was barred and bolted behind him.

Thus loosed and unrestrained, surged as if the wind drove them, that concourse upon the stockade.  Heavy though its timbers were, they seemed to stoop at the impact.  A kind of fury rose in me.  I lusted to go down and face the mutiny of the brutes; bit, and saddle, and scourge into obedience man’s serfs of the centuries.  I watched, on fire, the flame of the declining sun upon those sleek, vehement creatures of the dust.  And then, I know not by what subtle irony, my zeal turned back—­turned back and faded away into simple longing for my lost friend, my peaceful beast-of-evening, Rosinante.  I sat down again in the litter of my bed and earnestly wished myself home; wished, indeed, if I must confess it, for the familiar face of my Aunt Sophia, my books, my bed.  If these were this land’s horses, I thought, what men might here be met!  The unsavouriness, the solitude, the neighing and tumult and prancing induced in me nothing but dulness at last and disgust.

But at length, dismissing all such folly, at least from my face, I lifted the trap-door and descended the steep ladder into the room beneath.

Mr. Gulliver sat where I had left him.  Defeat stared from his eyes.  Lines of insane thought disfigured his face.  Yet he sat, stubborn and upright, heedless of the uproar, heedless even that the late beams of the sun had found him out in his last desolation.  So I too sat down without speech, and waited till he should come up out of his gloom, and find a friend in a stranger.

But day waned; the sunlight went out of the great wooden room; the tumult diminished; and finally silence and evening shadow descended on the beleaguered house.  And I was looking out of the darkened window at a star that had risen and stood shining in the sky, when I was startled by a voice so low and so different from any I had yet heard that I turned to convince myself it was indeed Mr. Gulliver’s.

“And the people of the Yahoos, Traveller,” he said, “do they still lie, and flatter, and bribe, and spill blood, and lust, and covet?  Are there yet in the country whence you come the breadless bellies, the sores and rags and lamentations of the poor?  Ay, Yahoo, and do vicious men rule, and attain riches; and impious women pomp and flattery?—­hypocrites, pandars, envious, treacherous, proud?” He stared with desolate sorrow and wrath into my eyes.

Words in disorder flocked to my tongue.  I grew hot and eager, yet by some instinct held my peace.  The fluttering of the dying flames, the starry darkness, silence itself; what were we who sat together?  Transient shadows both, phantom, unfathomable, mysterious as these.

I fancied he might speak again.  Once he started, raised his arm, and cried out as if acting again in dream some frenzy of the past.  And once he wheeled on me extraordinary eyes, as if he half-recognised some idol of the irrevocable in my face.  These were momentary, however.  Gloom returned to his forehead, vacancy to his eyes.