They got the young fellow into their cave.  Champagne, pate-de-foie-gras, and numberless good things, were handed about; and then, having eaten, the young man was devoured in his turn.  I believe these card and dice ogres have died away almost as entirely as the hasty-pudding giants whom Tom Thumb overcame.  Now, there are ogres in City courts who lure you into their dens.  About our Cornish mines I am told there are many most plausible ogres, who tempt you into their caverns and pick your bones there.  In a certain newspaper there used to be lately a whole column of advertisements from ogres who would put on the most plausible, nay, piteous appearance, in order to inveigle their victims.  You would read, “A tradesman, established for seventy years in the City, and known, and much respected by Messrs. N. M. Rothschild and Baring Brothers, has pressing need for three pounds until next Saturday.  He can give security for half a million, and forty thousand pounds will be given for the use of the loan,” and so on; or, “An influential body of capitalists are about to establish a company, of which the business will be enormous and the profits proportionately prodigious.  They will require A secretary, of good address and appearance, at a salary of two thousand per annum.  He need not be able to write, but address and manners are absolutely necessary.  As a mark of confidence in the company, he will have to deposit,” &c.; or, “A young widow (of pleasing manners and appearance) who has a pressing necessity for four pounds ten for three weeks, offers her Erard’s grand piano, valued at three hundred guineas; a diamond cross of eight hundred pounds; and board and lodging in her elegant villa near Banbury Cross, with the best references and society, in return for the loan.”  I suspect these people are ogres.  There are ogres and ogres.  Polyphemus was a great, tall, one-eyed, notorious ogre, fetching his victims out of a hole, and gobbling them one after another.  There could be no mistake about him.  But so were the Sirens ogres—­pretty blue-eyed things, peeping at you coaxingly from out of the water, and singing their melodious wheedles.  And the bones round their caves were more numerous than the ribs, skulls, and thigh-bones round the cavern of hulking Polypheme.

To the castle-gates of some of these monsters up rides the dapper champion of the pen; puffs boldly upon the horn which hangs by the chain; enters the hall resolutely, and challenges the big tyrant sulking within.  We defy him to combat, the enormous roaring ruffian!  We give him a meeting on the green plain before his castle.  Green?  No wonder it should be green:  it is manured with human bones.  After a few graceful wheels and curvets, we take our ground.  We stoop over our saddle.  ’Tis but to kiss the locket of our lady-love’s hair.  And now the vizor is up:  the lance is in rest (Gillott’s iron is the point for me).  A touch of the spur in the gallant sides of Pegasus, and we gallop at the great brute.