tree, which was eight feet through the butt, for a walking
stick. It took a far-sighted Pygmy, I can assure you, to
discern his summit without the help of a telescope; and
sometimes, in misty weather, they could not see his upper half,
but only his long legs, which seemed to be striding about by
themselves. But at noonday in a clear atmosphere, when the sun
shone brightly over him, the Giant Antaeus presented a very
grand spectacle. There he used to stand, a perfect mountain of
a man, with his great countenance smiling down upon his little
brothers, and his one vast eye (which was as big as a cart
wheel, and placed right in the center of his forehead) giving a
friendly wink to the whole nation at once.

The Pygmies loved to talk with Antaeus; and fifty times a day,
one or another of them would turn up his head, and shout
through the hollow of his fists, "Halloo, brother Antaeus! How
are you, my good fellow?" And when the small distant squeak of
their voices reached his ear, the Giant would make answer,
"Pretty well, brother Pygmy, I thank you," in a thunderous roar
that would have shaken down the walls of their strongest
temple, only that it came from so far aloft.

It was a happy circumstance that Antaeus was the Pygmy people's
friend; for there was more strength in his little finger than
in ten million of such bodies as this. If he had been as
ill-natured to them as he was to everybody else, he might have
beaten down their biggest city at one kick, and hardly have
known that he did it. With the tornado of his breath, he could
have stripped the roofs from a hundred dwellings and sent
thousands of the inhabitants whirling through the air. He might