with their
clamor! Round and round they wheeled, the blows of their feet falling
"like lightnings from the mountain cloud." They plunged and reared
backward upon their knees, struck savagely at each other with awkward
descending blows of both fists at once, and dropped again upon their
hands as if unable to maintain the upright position of the body.
Grass and pebbles were torn from the soil by hands and feet; clothing,
hair, faces inexpressibly defiled with dust and blood. Wild,
inarticulate screams of rage attested the delivery of the blows;
groans, grunts and gasps their receipt. Nothing more truly military
was ever seen at Gettysburg or Waterloo: the valor of my dear parents
in the hour of danger can never cease to be to me a source of pride
and gratification. At the end of it all two battered, tattered,
bloody and fragmentary vestiges of mortality attested the solemn fact
that the author of the strife was an orphan.

Arrested for provoking a breach of the peace, I was, and have ever
since been, tried in the Court of Technicalities and Continuances
whence, after fifteen years of proceedings, my attorney is moving
heaven and earth to get the case taken to the Court of Remandment for
New Trials.

Such are a few of my principal experiments in the mysterious force or
agency known as hypnotic suggestion. Whether or not it could be
employed by a bad man for an unworthy purpose I am unable to say.

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