Page:The Curious Republic of Gondour, and Other Whimsical Sketches.djvu/52

---

---

as “steeds,” “destriers,” and “chargers,” and divested of their friendly, humble names—these meek old “Jims” and “Bobs” and “Charleys,” and renamed “Mohammed,” “Bucephalus,” and “Saladin”—in Brooklyn; mounted thus, and armed with swords and shields and wooden lances, and cased in paste board hauberks, morions, greaves, and gauntlets, and addressed as “Sir” Smith, and “Sir” Jones, and bearing such titled grandeurs as “The Disinherited Knight,” the “Knight of Shenandoah,” the “Knight of the Blue Ridge,” the “Knight of Maryland,” and the “Knight of the Secret Sorrow”—in Brooklyn; and at the toot of the horn charging fiercely upon a helpless ring hung on a post, and prodding at it intrepidly with their wooden sticks, and by and by skewering it and cavorting back to the judges’ stand covered with glory—this in Brooklyn; and each noble success like this duly and promptly announced by an applauding toot from the herald’s horn, and “the band playing three bars of an old circus tune”—all