All the children are brought up very well indeed, and taught to be honorable, courageous, and truthful men and women.
The nurses are forbidden to tell the children foolish or frightening stories, and if they are found to do so, they are soundly whipped and sent to a most lonely part of the country.
And now I will give a further account of my own way of living among these strange little people.
I had made myself a table and chair, as large as I could get out of the biggest tree in the royal park. Two hundred sewing women were employed to make my shirts and the linen for my bed and table. They got the strongest and coarsest linen the island could produce, and even then they were obliged to sew several folds together to make it strong enough for my use. The sewing women took my measure as I lay upon the ground, one standing at my neck and another at my leg, with a strong cord that each held, one at one end and one at the other.
One clever woman fitted me for a shirt by simply taking the width of my right thumb, for she said that twice round the thumb is once round the wrist, and twice round the wrist is once round the neck, and twice round the neck is once round the waist. By this means she was able to fit me exactly.
The three hundred tailors who were employed to make my clothes had another way of measuring me. I knelt down, and they raised a ladder from the ground to my neck; upon this ladder one man mounted, and let fall a cord from my collar to the floor, which was the length for my coat. My waist and arms I measured myself. As the largest piece of cloth made in the island was only about the size of a yard of wide ribbon, my clothes looked like a patchwork quilt; only, the cloth was all of the same color.
I had three hundred cooks to prepare my food, and each one cooked me two dishes. When I was ready for my meal, I took up twenty waiters in my hand and placed them upon the table; a hundred more attended on the ground, carrying the dishes. The waiters upon the table drew these things up by cords, as we might draw a bucket from a well.
One joint of meat generally made a mouthful for me, but once I actually had a sirloin of beef so large that I was forced to make three bites of it. I never had another as big. The geese and turkeys also only made a mouthful, and of the small fowl I could take up twenty at a time on my fork.
GULLIVER ESCAPES TO BLEFUSCU
I must now tell my reader of a great plot that had been formed against me in the island of Lilliput.