t. Far across
over the tossing host, rearing, leaping, craning dishevelled heads,
went pealing and eddying that hostile, brutal voice.

Gulliver lifted his hand, and a tempestuous silence fell once more.
"Yahoos! Yahoos!" he bawled again. Then he turned, and passed back
into his hideous garden. The gate was barred and bolted behind him.

Thus loosed and unrestrained, surged as if the wind drove them, that
concourse upon the stockade. Heavy though its timbers were, they
seemed to stoop at the impact. A kind of fury rose in me. I lusted to
go down and face the mutiny of the brutes; bit, and saddle, and
scourge into obedience man's serfs of the centuries. I watched, on
fire, the flame of the declining sun upon those sleek, vehement
creatures of the dust. And then, I know not by what subtle irony, my
zeal turned back--turned back and faded away into simple longing for
my lost friend, my peaceful beast-of-evening, Rosinante. I sat down
again in the litter of my bed and earnestly wished myself home;
wished, indeed, if I must confess it, for the familiar face of my Aunt
Sophia, my books, my bed. If these were this land's horses, I thought,
what men might here be met! The unsavouriness, the solitude, the
neighing and tumult and prancing induced in me nothing but dulness at
last and disgust.

But at length, dismissing all such folly, at least from my face, I
lifted the trap-door and descended the steep ladder into the room
beneath.

Mr. Gulliver sat where I had left him. Defeat stared from his eyes.
Lines of insane thought disfigured his face. Yet he sat, stubborn and
upright, heedless of the uproar, heedless even that the late beams of
the sun had found him out in his last desolation. So I too sat down
without speech, and waited till he should come up out of his gloom,
and find a friend in a stranger.

But day waned; the sunlight went out of the great wooden room; the
tumult diminished; and finally silence and evening shadow descended on
the beleaguered house. And I was looking out of the darkened window at
a star that had risen and stood shining in the sky, when I was
startled by a voice so low and so different from any I had yet heard
that I turned to convince myself it was indeed Mr. Gulliver's.

"And the people of the Yahoos, Traveller," he said, "do they still
lie, and flatter, and bribe, and spill blood, and lust, and covet? Are
there yet in the country whence you come the breadless bellies, the
sores and rags and