style which even the wildest Jacobins in Robespierre's day could hardly
have surpassed.

But long before either song was ended, all three broke out into a
dance, wild, insensate, furious, delirious, paroxysmatical. No Orphic
festivals on Mount Cithaeron ever raged more wildly. No Bacchic revels
on Mount Parnassus were ever more corybantic. Diana, demented by the
maddening example, joined in the orgie, howling and barking frantically
in her turn, and wildly jumping as high as the ceiling of the
Projectile. Then came new accessions to the infernal din. Wings suddenly
began to flutter, cocks to crow, hens to cluck; and five or six
chickens, managing to escape out of their coop, flew backwards and
forwards blindly, with frightened screams, dashing against each other
and against the walls of the Projectile, and altogether getting up as
demoniacal a hullabaloo as could be made by ten thousand bats that you
suddenly disturbed in a cavern where they had slept through the winter.

Then the three companions, no longer able to withstand the overpowering
influence of the mysterious force that mastered them, intoxicated, more
than drunk, burned by the air that scorched their organs of respiration,
dropped at last, and lay flat, motionless, senseless as dabs of clay, on
the floor of the Projectile.

[Illustration: A DEMONIACAL HULLABALOO.]




CHAPTER VIII.