but at the same time stopped up the passage so entirely, that all the
enchantress's husbands were stifled for want of air. As it was a
collection she had made with great care and cost, it is easy to imagine
her vexation and rage. She raised a storm of thunder and lightning that
lasted eight hundred and four years; and having conjured up an army of
two thousand devils, she ordered them to flay the elephant alive, and
dress it for her supper with anchovy sauce. Nothing could have saved the
poor beast, if, struggling to get loose from the chimney, he had not
happily broken wind, which it seems is a great preservative against
devils. They all flew a thousand ways, and in their hurry carried away
half the brazen tower, by which means the elephant, the car, the
ladybird, and Pissimissi got loose; but in their fall tumbled through
the roof of an apothecary's shop, and broke all his bottles of physic.
The elephant, who was very dry with his fatigue, and who had not much
taste, immediately sucked up all the medicines with his proboscis, which
occasioned such a variety of effects in his bowels, that it was well
he had such a strong constitution, or he must have died of it. His
evacuations were so plentiful, that he not only drowned the tower of
Babel, near which the apothecary's shop stood, but the current ran
fourscore leagues till it came to the sea, and there poisoned so many
whales and leviathans, that a pestilence ensued, and lasted three years,
nine months and sixteen days. As the elephant was extremely weakened by
what had happened, it was impossible for him to draw the car for
eighteen months, which was a cruel delay to Pissimissi's impatience,
who during all that time could not travel above a hundred miles a day,
for as she carried the sick animal in her lap, the poor ladybird could
not make longer stages with no assistance. Besides, Pissimissi bought
every thing she saw wherever she came; and all was crouded into the car
and stuffed into the seat. She had purchased ninety-two dolls, seventeen
baby-houses, six cart-loads of sugar-plumbs, a thousand ells of