noon
However he had nullified the force of the enchantment by prayer , and had killed my thirteen knights in a three hours ' battle , and taken me prisoner , sparing my life in order that so strange a curiosity as I was might be exhibited to the wonder and admiration of the king and the court . He spoke of me all the time , in the blandest way , as `` this prodigious giant , '' and `` this horrible sky-towering monster , '' and `` this tusked and taloned man-devouring ogre '' , and everybody took in all this bosh in the naivest way , and never smiled or seemed to notice that there was any discrepancy between these watered statistics and me . He said that in trying to escape from him I sprang into the top of a tree two hundred cubits high at a single bound , but he dislodged me with a stone the size of a cow , which `` all-to brast '' the most of my bones , and then swore me to appear at Arthur 's court for sentence . He ended by condemning me to die at noon on the 21st ; and was so little concerned about it that he stopped to yawn before he named the date . I was in a dismal state by this time ; indeed , I was hardly enough in my right mind to keep the run of a dispute that sprung up as to how I had better be killed , the possibility of the killing being doubted by some , because of the enchantment in my clothes . And yet it was nothing but an ordinary suit of fifteen-dollar slop-shops . Still , I was sane enough to notice this detail , to wit : many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen in the land would have made a Comanche blush .