Page:Letters to Squire Pedant in the East.pdf/30

SQUIRE PEDANT. 23 Those who, by a spectation either into aqueous liquids or upon the nodosities of a caduceus, or upon the corrugations of their manual extremities, or by any other medium of auguration or vaticination, were favored with a perception of their future beatitudes, became salient with delectation and emitted the most obstreporous cachinnations — whilst others, beholding either their proximity to the returnless bourne, or much amaritude immixed with the evolution of the filaments of their sublunary vitality, became atrabilarian, queremonious and exacerbated.

In the elongation of our peregrination, our vision was regaled with an occiduous, floriferous savanna, extremely immane, having in its septentrional, oriental, austral, and occidental sections, a slight subsidency. Its floral, herbaceous, and gramineous garniture was just renascent, posterior to an autumnal conflagration. Its terreous surface was a perfect chessom, and very scatebrous. Its aqueous meanders were not diaphanous but semipellucid, anatiferous, and tardy in their profluence; and their margins were replete with spinous, asperfolious, bacciferous, and arundineous bushments.

Prior to our perambulation of the prairie, I invested my crural organs with good gambados or spatterdashes, and had my pedal extremities well calceated, as a propugnation against the mordacity of amphisbænas.

In my transcursion to a designated point, I was arrested by the audition of very puissant sibilation in great propinquity to Indagator. He gave a subitaneous resilience. By chary scrutiny I perceived a dipsas, circularly recumbent. His cutaneous envelope was squameous, cupreous and fulgid, and his caudal extremity was cuspidated with a corneous apex. Indagator made an assault upon him, but received such a sideration as immediately induced incessant jactitation. –