Page:Artabanzanus (Ferrar, 1896).djvu/104

96 had a narrow escape, and you may thank my powerful medicines for it, especially my taxacorum puffinalis; that's better than a blacksmith's bellows for building up a man. To whom were you talking before you came to your senses? Somebody was lying on your chest, and you were imploring him to get off. Who was it?'

'If it was not Timour the Tartar, Doctor, it must have been ——,' and I mentioned the name of another great conqueror.' He fell on my breast at the close of the battle, and his enemies nicked at him with their swords and lances as they passed by. I got a few good cuts and stabs as I lay under him, but the weight of his murderous carcase nearly killed me.'

'I think it did, and no wonder,' said the Doctor. 'Your whole body was completely mangled, and your breast-bone badly fractured. I never saw such a sight in my life; and as for your outcries, why, as I have been informed, Alexander the Great condescended to pause in one of his grand charges, and ask who it was that was being butchered like a pig. I have that hero whom you mentioned (great Emperor as he calls himself) in the hospital now, and he roars and groans more than any poor soldier there. How did you come to be in that battle? You are not a soldier; you did not die in the world above; you are not one of us.'

'The Demon, sir, or Artabanzanus, which he says is his proper name, took me to see the grand review in his artillery wagonette, drawn by twenty-four gigantic negroes, for whom my very heart bled. A friend, a General, too, to whom the Demon had previously introduced me, calling him Astoragus, got into the dickey by some means, and stung me with his finger at the back of my neck out of pure spite. His master, who had declared that no larrikin should dare to play a trick on him, with his tail hurled him out over my head. He fell with a crashing scramble amongst the