XXXII.

The belly and the members of the human body were in a riot. (This is
not the riot recorded by an inferior writer, but a more notable and
authentic one.) After exhausting the well-known arguments, they had
recourse to the appropriate threat, when the man to whom they
belonged thought it time for _him_ to be heard, in his capacity as a
unit.

"Deuce take you!" he roared. "Things have come to a pretty pass if a
fellow cannot walk out of a fine morning without alarming the town by
a disgraceful squabble between his component parts! I am reasonably
impartial, I hope, but man's devotion is due to his deity: I espouse
the cause of my belly."

Hearing this, the members were thrown into so extraordinary confusion
that the man was arrested for a windmill.

As a rule, don't "take sides." Sides of bacon, however, may be
temperately acquired.

LXXXIII.

A man dropping from a balloon struck against a soaring eagle.

"I beg your pardon," said he, continuing his descent; "I never _could_
keep off eagles when in my descending node."

"It is agreeable to meet so pleasing a gentleman, even without
previous appointment," said the bird, looking admiringly down upon the
lessening aeronaut; "he is the very pink of politeness. How extremely
nice his liver must be. I will follow him down and arrange his simple
obsequies."

This fable is narrated for its intrinsic worth.

LXXXIV.

To escape from a peasant who had come suddenly upon him, an opossum
adopted his favourite expedient of counterfeiting death.

"I suppose," said the peasant, "that ninety-nine men in a hundred
would go away and leave this poor creature's body to the beasts of
prey." [It is notorious that man is the only living thing that will
eat the animal.] "But _I_ will give him good burial."

So he dug a hole, and was about tumbling him into it, when a solemn
voice appeared to emanate from the corpse: "Let the dead bury their
dead!"

"Whatever spirit hath wrought this miracle," cried the peasant,
dropping upon his knees, "let him but add the trifling explanation of
_how_ the dead can perform this or any similar rite, and I am
obedience itself. Otherwise, in goes Mr. 'Possum by these hands."

"Ah!" meditated the unhappy beast, "I have performed one miracle, but
I can't keep it up all day, you know. The explanation demanded is a
trifle too heavy for even the ponderous ingenuity of a marsupial."

And he permitted himself to be sodded over