"A"
"A false start, giant! you were to begin with an O."
"I'll make you end with an O, Mr. William Cary!" roared the testy tower of buckram.
"And so I do, for I end with 'Fico!'"
"Be mollified, sweet giant," said Frank, "and spare the rash youth of yon foolish Knight. Shall elephants catch flies, or Hurlo-Thrumbo stain his club with brains of Dagonet the jester? Be mollified; leave thy caverned grumblings, like Etna when its windy wrath is past, and discourse eloquence from thy central omphalos, like Pythoness ventriloquizing."
"If you do begin laughing at me too, Mr. Leigh" said the giant's clock-face, in a piteous tone.
"I laugh not. Art thou not Ordulf the earl, and I thy humblest squire? Speak up, my Lord; your cousin, my Lady Bath, commands you."
And at last the giant began:—
"A giant I, Earl Ordulf men me call,—
'Gainst Paynim foes Devonia's champion tall;
In single fight six thousand Turks I slew;
Pull'd off a lion's head, and ate it too:
With one shrewd blow, to let Saint Edward in,
I smote the gates of Exeter in twain;
Till aged grown, by angels warn'd in dream,
I built an abbey fair by Tavy stream.
But treacherous time hath tripped my glories up,
The staunch old hound must yield to stauncher pup;
Here's one so tall as I, and twice so bold,
Where I took only cuffs, takes good red gold.
From pole to pole resound his wondrous works,
Who slew more Spaniards than I ere slew Turks;
I strode across the Tavy stream: but he
Strode round the world and back; and here 'a be!"
"Oh, bathos!" said Lady Bath, while the 'prentices shouted applause. "Is this hedgebantling to be fathered on you, Mr. Frank?"
"It is necessary, by all laws of the drama, Madam," said Frank, with a sly smile, "that the speech and the speaker shall fit each other. Pass on, Earl Ordulf; a more learned worthy waits."
Whereon, up came a fresh member of the procession; namely, no less a person than Vindex Brimblecombe, the ancient schoolmaster, with five-and-forty boys at his heels, who halting, pulled out his spectacles, and thus signified his forgiveness of his whilom broken head:—
"That the world should have been circumnavigated, ladies and gentles, were matter enough of jubilation to the student of Herodotus and Plato, Plinius and—ahem! much more when the circumnavigators are Britons; more, again, when Damnonians."
"Don't swear, master," said young Will Cary.
"Gulielme Gary, Gulielme Gary, hast thou forgotten thy"
"Whippings? Never, old lad! Go on; but let not the license of the scholar overtop the modesty of the Christian."
