When they perceived his mission,
and how he was backed, they yielded.
Then commenced a general hunt, to clear the house of the vermin.
Out of their beds in their night clothing, out of their rooms,
gorgeous chambers or garret nooks, the creatures hunted them. Not
one was allowed to escape. Tumult and noise there was little, for
fear was too deadly for outcry. Ferreting them out everywhere,
following them upstairs and downstairs, yielding no instant of
repose except upon the way out, the avengers persecuted the
miscreants, until the last of them was shivering outside the palace
gates, with hardly sense enough left to know where to turn.
When they set out to look for shelter, they found every inn full of
the servants expelled before them, and not one would yield his
place to a superior suddenly levelled with himself. Most houses
refused to admit them on the ground of the wickedness that must
have drawn on them such a punishment; and not a few would have been
left in the streets all night, had not Derba, roused by the vain
entreaties at the doors on each side of her cottage, opened hers,
and given up everything to them. The lord chancellor was only too
glad to share a mattress with a stableboy, and steal his bare feet
under his jacket.
In the morning Curdie appeared, and the outcasts were in terror,
thinking he had come after them again.
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