s mouth and shot two of them dead. He then begged
his friend to take the third and put it in a place of safety before
he should laugh again. His friend attempted to lift it from the box,
but it died on being touched.

The Giants

In the Country of the Giants the people are fifty feet in height. Their
footprints are six feet in length. Their teeth are like those of a
saw. Their finger-nails present the appearance of hooked claws, while
their diet consists wholly of uncooked animal food. Their eyebrows
are of such length as to protrude from the front of the carts in
which they ride, large though it is necessary for these vehicles to
be. Their bodies are covered with long black hair resembling that
of the bear. They live to the advanced age of eighteen thousand
years. Though cannibals, they never eat members of their own tribe,
confining their indulgence in human flesh chiefly to enemies taken in
battle. Their country extends some thousands of miles along certain
mountain ranges in North-eastern Asia, in the passes of which they
have strong iron gates, easy to close, but difficult to open; hence,
though their neighbours maintain large standing armies, they have
thus far never been conquered.

The Headless People

The Headless People inhabit the Long Sheep range, to which their
ancestors were banished in the remote past for an offence against the
gods. One of the said ancestors had entered into a controversy with
the rulers of the heavens, and they in their anger had transformed
his two breasts into eyes and his navel into a mouth, removed his
head, leaving him without nose and ears, thus cutting him off from
smell and sound, and banished him to the Long Sheep Mountains, where
with a shield and axe, the only weapons vouchsafed to the people of
the Headless Country, he and his posterity were compelled to defend
themselves from their enemies and provide their subsistence. This,
however, does not in the least seem to have affected their tempers,
as their bodies are wreathed in perpetual smiles, except when they
flourish their warlike weapons on the approach of an enemy. They are
not without understanding, because, according to Chinese notions of
physiology, "their bellies are full of wisdom."

The Armless People

In the Mountains of the Sun and Moon, which are in the Centre of the
Great Waste, are the people who have mo arms, but whose legs instead
grow out of their shoulders. They pick flowers with their toes. T