iches, you
see, but it is merely for the sake of keeping up appearances; as I can
assure you, from my own personal knowledge, that they have no digestive
organs whatever. As for myself, I am a schoolmaster. I have been a hard
student all my life, at school and at college, and moreover I have had a
natural sympathy with my fellow-men, and so I am blessed with a brain
and heart entire. But see here." And he lifted up his cloak, and lo!
underneath, a skeleton, save just here! "See, here are the limbs I never
used, and therefore they have deserted me. All the solace I now have
consists in teaching the young children to avoid a similar doom. I
sometimes show them what I have shown you. I labor hard to convince them
that most assuredly the same misfortune will befall them which has
happened to me and to all the grown-up inhabitants; but even then, I
grieve to say, I cannot always succeed. Many believe that they will be
lucky enough to escape, and some of the grown-up inhabitants pad
themselves, and so cheat the poor children into the belief that they are
all right, though all the elder ones know better. You will now perceive
the reason why all the gentlemen you see wear such tight pantaloons,
they pretend that it is fashionable, but in reality it is in order to
prevent their false legs from tumbling out. Surely my case is miserable
enough; my only hope consists in the idea of educating the rising
generation to do better. No doubt it is easy to persuade them to do so
in the country from which you come, but I assure you," added he with a
heartfelt sigh, "that it is sometimes very hard to do so here. Nearly
all of us, then, have lost something of our bodies. Some have no head,
some no legs, some no heart, and so on; the less a man has lost, the
higher he ranks in the social scale; and our Aristocracy, the governing
body, consists of the few individuals who have used all their faculties,
and therefore now possess them all."

At this moment a dreadful earthquake broke out, and an extempore volcano
shot the gentleman who had listened to this interesting, narration right
up to the crust of the earth again, and by a strange and fortunate
chance shot him up into the very hole which he had been digging, and he
discovered himself lying down at the bottom of the hole, feeling just as
if he had awakened from a dream; and to his surprise, heard distinctly
the voice of his wife crying out from the top, "Come, come, dear, you're
very late, a