I Forbid the Banns! — page 288: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XXXIX. ON THE LOCUST AS A COMESTIBLE, HERE is scarcely anything more humiliating to persons of intelligence—that is, to ourselves—than to be made the subject of hostile prophecy by men whom we believe to be old fools. It was, possibly, this fact that caused the death rate among the Hebrew prophets to reach such a high percentage. One could hardly imagine a greater source of irritation than a prophet turning up every now and again, just when things were becoming pleasant—when the nightingales were singing around the summer palaces and the eleven hundredth wife was turning out a success— and prophesying unpleasant things in the presence of a monarch who preferred the scents of the harem to those of the wilderness. The music of the sackbut, the psaltery, and the dulcimer, accompanying the songs of the singing girls, arranged for a chorus of female voices by that distin- guished composer the chief musician upon Jonath-Elem- Rechokim, was certainly preferable to the fervid and disturbing recitatives of those fierce, unkempt men detest- ably zealous, who came straight from their meals of locusts, Or some other abomination of the desert, and droned out the effects of their dyspepsia in the presence of the king. The rigid adherence to the locust as an article of diet _ produced several prophets of the highest order of dys- peptics. The worst of the matter was that they were so frequently right, though few of them were sufficiently nimble in avoid- ing javelins to be in a position to live to see their predictions realized It speaks volumes in favor of the assumption that 278 Eomicbooks (€(0)