pasture, paved with edible mushrooms which Lord Gall scattered and spurned like a great elephant and big, Belacqua would have staked his reputation, with truffles. Yet he did not dare suggest that they should stop and fill their hankies.
‘When our Lord’ said Lord Gall, ‘do you heed me?’
Belacqua felt that this was a piece of rhetoric. He was right.
‘When our Lord’ said Lord Gall for the third time ‘stood in need of a mount and before the ass, to her undying credit, agreed unconditionally to carry him, he made overtures to the horse, who required notice of the question, and to the mule and ginnet, who bluntly refused.’
‘The pigdogs!’ cried Belacqua.
‘Therefore’ proceeded Lord Gall ‘the Lord laid a curse on the mule and the ginnet, whose gist was that they should go no farther. With the twofold result that —’
‘Primo’ piped Belacqua.
‘Primo: they have a glorious time. Secun —’
‘In what sense’ said Belacqua ‘do they have a glorious time?’
As a train from a tunnel or a lady from a tank of warm water so now a wail, compound of impatience and rosy pudency, burst from the kidney-lipped maw of the raconteur.
‘You hog’s pudding’ he cried, ‘but inasmuch as they are not tenants in tail, what else?’
The oaths and groans of the unhappy man were happily to some extent drownded in a cyclone of wrath and disdain, something between the crowing of croop and a flushing-box doing its best, which at this juncture sprang up in his lights, bust all the bronchi, tattered the pleura, came thrashing and howling up his windpipe like an unclean spirit and left him quite breathless. But in his twenty-five stone of blubber, brawn, bone and bombast there was still ample motion to keep him going again his bellows should mend, which they very soon did he was thankful to say and did say.
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