healthfulize the census! And more
especially, oh War! do thou march forth with thy bludgeon! Cracked
are, our crowns by nature, and henceforth forever, cracked shall they
be by hard raps."

"And hopelessly cracked the skull, that hatched such a tirade of
nonsense," said Mohi.

"And think you not, old Bardianna knew that?" asked Babbalanja. "He
wrote an excellent chapter on that very subject."

"What, on the cracks in his own pate?"

"Precisely. And expressly asserts, that to those identical cracks, was
he indebted for what little light he had in his brain."

"I yield, Babbalanja; your old Ponderer is older than I."

"Ay, ay, Braid-Beard; his crest was a tortoise; and this was the
motto:--'I bite, but am not to be bitten.'"

CHAPTER XXXV
They Visit The Lords Piko And Hello

In good time, we landed at Diranda. And that landing was like landing
at Greenwich among the Waterloo pensioners. The people were docked
right and left; some without arms; some without legs; not one with a
tail; but to a man, all had heads, though rather the worse for wear;
covered with lumps and contusions.

Now, those very magnificent and illustrious lord seigniors, the lord
seigniors Hello and Piko, lived in a palace, round which was a fence
of the cane called Malacca, each picket helmed with a skull, of which
there were fifty, one to each cane. Over the door was the blended arms
of the high and mighty houses of Hello and Piko: a Clavicle crossed
over an Ulna.

Escorted to the sign of the Skull-and-Cross-Bones, we received the
very best entertainment which that royal inn could afford. We found
our hosts Hello and Piko seated together on a dais or throne, and now
and then drinking some claret-red wine from an ivory bowl, too large
to have been wrought from an elephant's tusk. They were in glorious
good spirits, shaking ivory coins in a skull.

"What says your majesty?" said Piko. "Heads or tails?"

"Oh, heads, your majesty," said Hello.

"And heads say I," said Piko.

And heads it was. But it was heads on both sides, so both were sure
to win.

And thus they were used to play merrily all day long; beheading the
gourds of claret by one slicing blow with their sickle-shaped
scepters. Wide round them lay empty calabashes, all feathered, red
dyed, and betasseled, trickling red wine from their necks, like the
decapitated pullets in the old baronial barn yard at Kenilworth, the
night before Queen Bess dined with my lord Leicester