proceed to govern the country at their ease, and with results: they
would at once levy severer taxes, and pick a quarrel with the most

powerful of their neighbours. Everything settled, they agreed to
retire, and have a few hours' quiet sleep first - all but the

secretary, who was to sit up and call them at the proper moment.
Curdie allowed them half an hour to get to bed, and then set about

completing his purgation of the palace.
First he called Lina, and opened the door of the room where the

secretary sat. She crept in, and laid herself down against it.
When the secretary, rising to stretch his legs, caught sight of her

eyes, he stood frozen with terror. She made neither motion nor
sound. Gathering courage, and taking the thing for a spectral

illusion, he made a step forward. She showed her other teeth, with
a growl neither more than audible nor less than horrible. The

secretary sank fainting into a chair. He was not a brave man, and
besides, his conscience had gone over to the enemy, and was sitting

against the door by Lina.
To the lord chamberlain's door next, Curdie conducted the

legserpent, and let him in.
Now His Lordship had had a bedstead made for himself, sweetly

fashioned of rods of silver gilt: upon it the legserpent found him
asleep, and under it he crept. But out he came on the other side,

and crept over it next, and again under it, and so over it, under
it, over it, five or six times, every time leaving a coil of

himself behind him, until he had softly folded all his length about
the lord chamberlain and his bed. This done, he set up his head,

looking down with curved neck right over His Lordship's, and began
to hiss in his face.

He woke in terrorunspeakable, and would have started up but the
moment he moved, the legserpent drew his coils closer, and closer

still, and drew and drew until the quaking traitor heard the joints
of his bedstead grinding and gnarring. Presently he persuaded

himself that it was only a horridnightmare, and began to struggle
with all his strength to throw it off. Thereupon the legserpent

gave his hooked nose such a bite that his teeth met through it -
but it was hardly thicker than the bowl of a spoon; and then the

vulture knew that he was in the grasp of his enemy the snake, and
yielded.

As soon as he was quiet the legserpent began to untwist and
retwist, to uncoil and recoil himself, swinging and swaying,

knotting and relaxing himself with strangest curves and
convolutions, always, however, leaving at least one coil around his

victim. At last he undid himself entirely, and crept from the bed.
Then first the lord chamberlain discovered that his tormentor had

bent and twisted the bedstead, legs and canopy and all, so about
him that he was shut in a silver cage out of which it was

impossible for him to find a way. Once more, thinking his enemy
was gone, he began to shout for help. But the instant he opened

his mouth his keeper darted at him and bit him, and after three or
four such essays, he lay still.

The master of the horse Curdie gave in charge to the tapir. When
the soldier saw him enter - for he was not yet asleep - he sprang

from his bed, and flew at him with his sword. But the creature's
hide was invulnerable to his blows, and he pecked at his legs with

his proboscis until he jumped into bed again, groaning, and covered
himself up; after which the tapir contented himself with now and

then paying a visit to his toes.
As for the attorney-general, Curdie led to his door a huge spider,

about two feet long in the body, which, having made an excellent
supper, was full of webbing. The attorney-general had not gone to

bed, but sat in a chair asleep before a great mirror. He had been
trying the effect of a diamond star which he had that morning taken

from the jewel room. When he woke he fancied himself paralysed;
every limb, every finger even, was motionless: coils and coils of

broad spiderribbon bandaged his members to his body, and all to
the chair. In the glass he saw himself wound about with slavery

infinite. On a footstool a yard off sat the spider glaring at him.
Clubhead had mounted guard over the butler, where he lay tied hand

and foot under the third cask. From that cask he had seen the wine
run into a great bath, and therein he expected to be drowned. The

doctor, with his crushed leg, needed no one to guard him.
And now Curdie proceeded to the expulsion of the rest. Great men

or underlings, he treated them all alike. From room to room over
the house he went, and sleeping or waking took the man by the hand.

Such was the state to which a year of wicked rule had reduced the
moral condition of the court, that in it all he found but three

with human hands. The possessors of these he allowed to dress
themselves and depart in peace. When they perceived his mission,

and how he was backed, they yielded.
Then commenced a general hunt, to clear the house of the vermin.

Out of their beds in their night clothing, out of their rooms,
gorgeous chambers or garret nooks, the creatures hunted them. Not

one was allowed to escape. Tumult and noise there was little, for
fear was too deadly for outcry. Ferreting them out everywhere,

following them upstairs and downstairs, yielding no instant of
repose except upon the way out, the avengers persecuted the

miscreants, until the last of them was shivering outside the palace
gates, with hardly sense enough left to know where to turn.

When they set out to look for shelter, they found every inn full of
the servants expelled before them, and not one would yield his

place to a superior suddenly levelled with himself. Most houses
refused to admit them on the ground of the wickedness that must

have drawn on them such a punishment; and not a few would have been
left in the streets all night, had not Derba, roused by the vain

entreaties at the doors on each side of her cottage, opened hers,
and given up everything to them. The lord chancellor was only too

glad to share a mattress with a stableboy, and steal his bare feet
under his jacket.

In the morning Curdie appeared, and the outcasts were in terror,
thinking he had come after them again. But he took no notice of

them: his object was to request Derba to go to the palace: the king
required her services. She need take no trouble about her cottage,

he said; the palace was henceforward her home: she was the king's
chatelaine over men and maidens of his household. And this very

morning she must cook His Majesty a nice breakfast.
CHAPTER 28

The Preacher
Various reports went undulating through the city as to the nature

of what had taken place in the palace. The people gathered, and
stared at the house, eyeing it as if it had sprung up in the night.

But it looked sedate enough, remaining closed and silent, like a
house that was dead. They saw no one come out or go in. Smoke

arose from a chimney or two; there was hardly another sign of life.
It was not for some little time generally understood that the

highest officers of the crown as well as the lowest menials of the
palace had been dismissed in disgrace: for who was to recognize a

lord chancellor in his nightshirt? And what lord chancellor would,
so attired in the street, proclaim his rank and office aloud?

Before it was day most of the courtiers crept down to the river,
hired boats, and betook themselves to their homes or their friends

in the country. It was assumed in the city that the domestics had
been discharged upon a sudden discovery of general and unpardonable

peculation; for, almost everybody being guilty of it himself, petty
dishonesty was the crime most easily credited and least easily

passed over in Gwyntystorm.
Now that same day was Religion day, and not a few of the clergy,

always glad to seize on any passing event to give interest to the
dull and monotonic grind of their intellectual machines, made this

remarkable one the ground of discourse to their congregations.
More especially than the rest, the first priest of the great temple

where was the royal pew, judged himself, from his relation to the
palace, called upon to 'improve the occasion', for they talked ever

about improvement at Gwyntystorm, all the time they were going down
hill with a rush.