u can hardly bite each other to any
purpose, unless by consent. Then as to the claws upon your feet before
and behind, they are so short and tender, that one of our _Yahoos_ would
drive a dozen of yours before him. And therefore, in recounting the
numbers of those who have been killed in battle, I cannot but think you
have said the thing which is not."

I could not forbear shaking my head, and smiling a little at his
ignorance. And being no stranger to the art of war, I gave him a
description of cannons, culverins, muskets, carabines, pistols, bullets,
powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines,
countermines, bombardments, sea fights, ships sunk with a thousand men,
twenty thousand killed on each side, dying groans, limbs flying in the
air, smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses' feet,
flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcases, left for food to
dogs and wolves and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing,
burning, and destroying. And to set forth the valour of my own dear
countrymen, I assured him, "that I had seen them blow up a hundred
enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship, and beheld the dead
bodies drop down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of the
spectators."

I was going on to more particulars, when my master commanded me silence.
He said, "whoever understood the nature of _Yahoos_, might easily believe
it possible for so vile an animal to be capable of every action I had
named, if their strength and cunning equalled their malice. But as my
discourse had increased his abhorrence of the whole species, so he found
it gave him a disturbance in his mind to which he was wholly a stranger
before. He thought his ears, being used to such abominable words, might,
by degrees, admit them with less detestation: that although he hated the
_Yahoos_ of this country, yet he no more blamed them for their odious
qualities, than he did a _gnnayh_ (a bird of prey) for its cruelty, or a
sharp stone for cutting his hoof. But when a creature pretending to
reason could be capable of such enormities, he dreaded lest the
corruption of that faculty might be worse than brutality itself. He
seemed therefore confident, that, instead of reason we were only
possessed of some quality fitted to increase our natural vices; as the
reflection from a troubled stream returns the image of an ill shapen
body, not only larger but more distorted."

H