there would be no danger of a pestilence breaking out
from the dead body lying near the city. The skeleton, he said, could
then be put in the National Museum.

It was finally decided that this sentence should be carried out, and
twenty of the King's surgeons were ordered to be present in three
days' time to see the operation of putting out Gulliver's eyes
properly done. Sharp-pointed arrows were to be shot into the balls of
his eyes.

The courtier now left the house, as privately as he had come, and
Gulliver was left to decide what he should do.

At first he thought of attacking the city, and destroying it. But by
doing this he must have destroyed, with the city, a great many
thousands of innocent people, which he could not make up his mind to
do.

At last he wrote a letter to the Chief Secretary, saying that as the
King had himself told him that he might visit Blefuscu, he had decided
to do so that morning.

Without waiting for an answer, he set out for the coast, where he
seized a large man-of-war which was at anchor there, tied a cable to
her bow, and then putting his clothes and his blanket on board, he
drew the ship after him to Blefuscu. There he was well received by the
Emperor. But as there happened to be no house big enough for him, he
was forced, during his stay, to sleep each night on the ground,
wrapped in his blanket.

Three days after his arrival, when walking along the seashore, he
noticed something in the water which looked not unlike a boat
floating bottom up. Gulliver waded and swam out, and found that he was
right. It was a boat. By the help of some of the Blefsucan ships, with
much difficulty he got it ashore. When the tide had fallen, two
thousand of the Emperor's dockyard men helped him to turn it over, and
Gulliver found that but little damage had been done.

He now set to work to make oars and mast and sail for the boat, and to
fit it out and provision it for a voyage.

While this work was going on, there came from Lilliput a message
demanding that Gulliver should be bound hand and foot and returned to
that country as a prisoner, there to be punished as a traitor. To this
message the Emperor replied that it was not possible to bind him; that
moreover the Great Man Mountain had found a vessel of size great
enough to carry him over the sea, and that it was his purpose to leave
the Empire of Blefuscu in the course of a few weeks.

Gulliver did not delay his work, and in less than a month