"Oh, no; not at all," answered the Captain.
"If you sat down on him once you could have sold him for a bundle of tissue paper, couldn't you?"
"That is not it, my boy," said the Captain. "She didn't have any big brother."
"Oh, yes, I see."
Then the discourse turned into other channels, intended to be of special interest to splacmucks—as the Brobdignaggians called ordinary mortals—who are contemplating marriage with giantesses.
"I suppose Mrs. Bates does not wield an ordinary rolling-pin?" the reporter half queried, addressing himself to Capt. Bates.
"No, indeed," the lady herself replied, laughingly. "I have one made expressly for my own use, from one of the largest of the Yosemite Valley trees."
"And you lay it on the old man now and then?" the reporter asked.
"I can answer for that," put in the Captain. "She sometimes brings it down so heavily on the rear elevation of my skull that it feels as if I had run against a pile-driver on a drunk or lost my way under the hammers of a quartz mill."
Mrs. Bates certainly had the physical strength to make a rolling-pin dance a lively jig in any direction, and if the weapon is anything at all like what it is here represented to be, Thor's celebrated hammer will have to go to the hospital as a weak and debilitated concern until the giants lay their domestic difficulties aside and retire permanently from active service.