Smiling acquiescently, therefore, this person returned in their
midst, and receiving a new weapon, his own club having been
absent-mindedly mislaid, he again set forth warily to the encounter.
Yet in this he did not altogether neglect a discreet prudence. The
sympathetic person to whom he was indebted for the pointed allusion
had specifically declared that they who used their feet with the
desperate savagery of baffled spectres guarded the nearer limits of
their position, the intention of his timely hint assuredly being that
I should seek to approach from the opposite end, where, doubtless, the
more humane and conciliatory grass-hoppers were assembled. Thus guided
I now set forth in a widely-circuitous direction, having the point
where I meant to open an attack clearly before my eyes, yet seeking to
deliver a more effective onslaught by reaching it to some extent
unperceived and to this end creeping forward in the protecting shadow
of the long grass and untrimmed herbage.
Whether the one already referred to had incapably failed to express
his real meaning, or whether he was tremulous by nature and
inordinately self-deficient, concerns the narration less than the fact
that he had admittedly produced a state of things largely in excess of
the actual. There is no longer any serviceable pretext for maintaining
that those guarding any point of their position were other than mild
and benevolent, while the only edged weapon displayed was one
courteously produced to aid this person's ineffectual struggles to
extricate himself when, by some obscure movement, he had most ignobly
entangled his pigtail about the claws of his sandal.
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