Colonel Starbottle, stertorous and purple, advanced to the railing.
There he unbuttoned his collar and laid his neckcloth aside, then
with his eye fixed on his antagonist he drew off his blue frock
coat, and thrusting one hand into his ruffled shirt front, and
raising the other to the dark canopy above him, he opened his
vindictive lips. The action, the attitude, were Starbottle's. But
the voice was not. For at that supreme moment, a bray--so
profound, so appalling, so utterly soul-subduing, so paralyzing
that everything else sank to mere insignificance beside it--filled
woods, and sky, and air. For a moment only the multitude gasped in
speechless astonishment--it was a moment only--and then the welkin
roared with their shouts. In vain silence was commanded, in vain
Colonel Starbottle, with a ghastly smile, remarked that he
recognized in the interruption the voice and the intellect of the
opposition; the laugh continued, the more as it was discovered that
Jinny had not yet finished, and was still recurring to her original
theme.
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