ons and giants, who
swallowed up men and women as bears swallow white ants; and his
highness, Krishna, came down to destroy them. His own mother's
brother, Kans, who then reigned at Mathura over Govardhan, was one of
these horrible demons. Hearing that his sister would give birth to a
son that was to destroy him, he put to death several of her progeny
as soon as they were born.[5] When Krishna was seven days old, he
sent a nurse, with poison on her nipple, to destroy him likewise; but
his highness gave such a pull at it, that the nurse dropped down
dead. In falling, she resumed her real shape of a she-demon, and her
body covered no less than six square miles, and it took several
thousand men to cut her up and burn her, to prevent the pestilence
that must have followed. His uncle then sent a crane, which caught up
his highness, who always looked very small for his age, and swallowed
him as he would swallow a frog. But his highness kicked up such a
rumpus in the bird's stomach that he was immediately thrown up again.
When he was seven years old his uncle invited him to a feast, and got
the largest and most ferocious elephant in India to tread him to
death as he alighted at the door. His highness, though then not
higher than my waist, took the enormous beast by one tusk, and, after
whirling him round in the air with one hand half a dozen times, he
dashed him on the ground and killed him.[6] Unable any longer to
stand the wickedness of his uncle, he seized him by the beard,
dragged him from his throne, and dashed him to the ground in the same
manner.'

I thought of poor old Father Gregory and the mustard-seeds again, and
told my rich old friend that it all appeared to us indeed passing
strange.

The orthodox belief among the Muhammadans is that Moses was sixty
yards high; that he carried a mace sixty yards long; and that he
sprang sixty yards from the ground when he aimed the fatal blow at
the giant Uj, the son of Anak, who came from the land of Canaan, with
a mountain on his back, to crush the army of Israelites. Still, the
head of his mace could reach only to the ankle-bone of the giant.
This was broken with the blow. The giant fell, and was crushed under
the weight of his own mountain. Now a person whose ankle-bone was one
hundred and eighty yards high must have been almost as prodigious as
he who carried the fragment of the Himalaya upon his back; and he who
believes in the one cannot fairly find fault with his neigh