ch might profess it, he very
keenly desired my safety.

He then stepped aside and bade me rather sharply enter the gate before
him. I tried to show none of the mistrust I felt at passing out of
these open lands into this repellent yard. I glanced at the
shock-haired creature, alert, half-human, beside me; across the
limitless savannah around me, echoing yet, it seemed, with the rumour
of innumerable hoofs; and bowing, as it were, to odds, I went in.

On the other hand, I felt my host had been frank with me. If this was
indeed the same Lemuel Gulliver whose repute my infancy had prized so
well, I need have no fear of blood and treachery at his hands, however
primitive and disgusting his household, or distorted his intellect
might be. He who had proved no tyrant in Lilliput, nor quailed before
the enormities of Brobdingnag, might abhor the sight of me; he would
not play me false.

His servant, or whatsoever else he might be, I considered not quite
so calmly. Yet even in _his_ broad countenance dwelt a something like
bright honesty, less malice than simplicity.

Wherefore, I say, I ordered down my cowardice, and, looking both of
them as squarely in the face as I knew how, passed out of the open
into the appalling yard of this wooden house.

I say "appalling," but without much reason. Perhaps it was the
unseemly hugeness of its balks, the foul piles of skins, the mounds of
refuse that lay about within; perhaps the all-pervading beastly
stench, the bareness and filthiness under so glassy-clear and fierce a
sun that revolted me. All man's seemliness and affection for the
natural things of earth were absent. Here was only a brutal and bald
order, as of an intelligence like that of the yellow-locked,
swift-footed creature behind me. Perhaps also it was the mere
unfamiliarity of much I saw there that estranged me. All lay in
neglect, cracked and marred with rough usage,--coarse strands of a
kind of rope, strips of hide, gaping tubs, a huge and rusty brazier,
and in one corner a great cage, many feet square and surmounted with
an iron ring.

I know not. I almost desired Sallow at my side, and would to heaven
Rosinante's nose lay in my palm.

Within the house a wood-fire burned in the sun, its smoke ascending to
the roof, and flowing thence through a rude chimney. A pot steamed
over the fire, burdening the air with a savour at first somewhat faint
and disgusting,--perhaps because it was merely strange to me. The
walls of