us ladies
were ready to furnish all comers with the most lavish hospitality.
They publicly proclaimed that he was guilty of the theft of the eighty
thousand trusses of straw for which an innocent man had been condemned
and was now imprisoned in the cage.

Maubec belonged to an illustrious family which was allied to the
Draconides. There is nothing that a democracy esteems more highly than
noble birth. Maubec had also served in the Penguin army, and since the
Penguins were all soldiers, they loved their army to idolatry. Maubec,
on the field of battle, had received the Cross, which is a sign of
honour among the Penguins and which they valued even more highly than
the embraces of their wives. All Penguinia declared for Maubec, and the
voice of the people which began to assume a threatening tone, demanded
severe punishments for the seven hundred calumniating Pyrotists.

Maubec was a nobleman; he challenged the seven hundred Pyrotists to
combat with either sword, sabre, pistols, carabines, or sticks.

"Vile dogs," he wrote to them in a famous letter, "you have crucified
my God and you want my life too; I warn you that I will not be such a
duffer as He was and that I will cut off your fourteen hundred ears.
Accept my boot on your seven hundred behinds."

The Chief of the Government at the time was a peasant called Robin
Mielleux, a man pleasant to the rich and powerful, but hard towards the
poor, a man of small courage and ignorant of his own interests. In a
public declaration he guaranteed Maubec's innocence and honour, and
presented the seven hundred Pyrotists: to the criminal courts where they
were condemned, as libellers, to imprisonment, to enormous fines, and to
all the damages that were claimed by their innocent victim.

It seemed as if Pyrot was destined to remain for ever shut in the cage
on which the ravens perched. But all the Penguins being anxious to know
and prove that this Jew was guilty, all the proofs brought forward were
found not to be good, while some of them were also contradictory. The
officers of the Staff showed zeal but lacked prudence. Whilst Greatauk
kept an admirable silence, General Panther made inexhaustible speeches
and every morning demonstrated in the newspapers that the condemned man
was guilty. He would have done better, perhaps, if he had said nothing.
The guilt was evident and what is evident cannot be demonstrated. So
much reasoning disturbed people's minds; their faith, though still