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You turn to the city, and see children, dwarfed by distance into pigmies, at play about suburban doorsteps; you have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are densely moving; you note ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind another, and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs.
Another minute or so and the great ship swept close past them, her white ensign drooping from the peak and her pennant streaming out from her main-royal mast-head like a fiery gleam in the sunset glow, the look-out men on her forecastle and the officers on her bridge dwarfed to pigmies by comparison with the huge structure which bore them.
It is barely three hundred years old, and at the time of Gustavus Adolphus it did not contain a thousand inhabitants. But now it is second only to London." "That is wonderful. How can you account for New York becoming so large? Stockholm and Bremen are pigmies beside it. I have never seen the like in my life.
The pit, 480 feet deep, with its colossal doors and entrances leading into the galleries, looks like a picture of the lower world, from which bridges of rocks, projections, arches and caverns formed in the walls, ascend to the upper world. The men look like pigmies, and one cannot follow their movements until the eye has accustomed itself to the depth and to the darkness prevailing below.
Formerly it must have swarmed with great monsters: now we find mere pigmies, compared with the antecedent, allied races. If Buffon had known of the gigantic sloth and armadillo-like animals, and of the lost Pachydermata, he might have said with a greater semblance of truth that the creative force in America had lost its power, rather than that it had never possessed great vigour.
In his Harmas he is like a stranger discovering an unknown world; "like a kindly giant from Sirius, holding a magnifying glass to his eye, retaining his breath, lest it should overturn and sweep away the pigmies which he is observing." His passion for interrogating the Sphinx of life, everywhere and at all moments, sufficed to fill his days from one end of the year to the other.
In the art of dwarfing trees, if such distortion and crippling of Nature deserves to be called an art, the Chinese are certainly most accomplished experts; but what can we think of the taste, or want of taste, which prefers pigmies three feet high to the lofty and far-shadowing trees which embellish our English parks and gardens?
After that he was rolled up in blankets and left to slumber. Compton was next treated in the same way, and then Mr. Hume busied himself with his note- book. When the boys woke up in the afternoon, much refreshed, Muata had returned. "Fall in, lads." "Has he found them?" and the boys were up and glancing round for the pigmies. "Yes; we are to go 'upstairs' at once." "But where are they?"
We were like pigmies to them; like little gnomes which had sprung out of the ground at their feet. One of the giants seized some kind of a weapon and started forward with a threatening gesture. The Girl Appeals to Us. The girl sprang to my side and grasped my arm with a cry of fear. This seemed to throw the Martian into a sudden frenzy, and he raised his arms to strike.
Even as she looked, Chilcoot was wrapped in rolling mist and whirling cloud, and a storm of sleet and wind roared down upon the toiling pigmies. The light was swept out of the day, and a deep gloom prevailed; but Frona knew that somewhere up there, clinging and climbing and immortally striving, the long line of ants still twisted towards the sky.
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