Young Ofeg's Ditties/Ditty 26
XXVI.
My street was tightly packed with people, and the windows of the houses were thronged with faces. All wore masks, and all flung abusive epithets at me; and these foul terms sprang up like nettles between the paving stones, through which my feet were forced to wade, and they hung out of the windows in thorny garlands.
The mid-day sun sat aloft in the vault of heaven white with heat. I had been wandering from early morning, and as far as I could see before me the street lay just as tightly packed with people with masks upon their faces; the horizon was covered with them like swarms of blowflies.
So I halted and dried the sweat of my brow and said, "Ye slanderers, take off your masks! Ye nettle stingers, why do you hide your countenances? Whom are ye, and what do ye look like? I know ye not at all, I have never seen ye.
"Thou who screechest that I have evil disease, dost thou carry red blisters on thine own face? Ye who shriek that I see all things askew, do perhaps not your own eyes squint like the wings of a weather vane? Ye whom I never see, but whose raven's croak I hear inside the gloomy rooms, do you croak mayhap because I shall some day seize the spoil that never was yours, although ye stand right in the sunshine. I know not, I have never seen ye.
"But now ye shall hear! What avails it that ye plant nettles in my path? I wade through them with my bare feet and they sting me not. What matters it that ye hurl your evil thoughts after me like evil-smelling, rotten eggs? They never reach me. They rebound to yourselves, and squirt their impurity in your own eyes. Just look! I grip handfuls of these thorny branches and they never even prick me.
"And now ye shall hear! Why you occupy the throne, why? He lies, ye say, he is ashamed to own how sorely he is hurt. Oh you blowfly brood, there is only one thing exceeds your malice,—your stupidity, your inconceivable, boundless, elephant-footed stupidity. You can't understand that it was you yourselves who turned aside the point of the thorns. If you had never donned masks I might have met a worthy face and looked in honest eyes, then my feet would have swelled up and my body been as full of prickles as a hedgehog's; but now you stand there with masks before your features, or hide yourselves in dark rooms, and therefore your nettles are but a verdant mass that strikes softly and coolly to my naked feet."