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The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby

by Charles Kingsley · English · Gutenberg #25564 · 388,925 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby

Author: Charles Kingsley

Illustrator: Warwick Goble


        
Release date: May 23, 2008 [eBook #25564]
                Most recently updated: November 27, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WATER-BABIES: A FAIRY TALE FOR A LAND-BABY ***

[Illustration: Cover]

[Illustration: "The thing whirred up into the air, and hung poised on
its wings, . . . a dragon fly, . . . the king of all the flies."--P. 74.
(_Frontispiece_)]





THE WATER-BABIES

A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby

BY CHARLES KINGSLEY

          WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR BY
          WARWICK GOBLE

          MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
          ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
          1922




  _First Published 1863_
  _Edition with 32 Illustrations in Colour by Warwick Goble, Crown
      4to, 1909_
  _With 16 Illustrations in Colour by Warwick Goble, Demy 8vo, October
      1910_
  _Reprinted November 1910, 1912_
  _With 16 Illustrations in Colour by Warwick Goble, Medium 8vo, 1922_

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




                      TO

                MY YOUNGEST SON

                GRENVILLE ARTHUR

                     AND

         TO ALL OTHER GOOD LITTLE BOYS


  COME READ ME MY RIDDLE, EACH GOOD LITTLE MAN;
   IF YOU CANNOT READ IT, NO GROWN-UP FOLK CAN.




ILLUSTRATIONS

                                                          FACING PAGE

  The thing whirred up into the air, and hung poised on its
     wings, . . . a dragon fly, ... the king of all the
     flies.--p. 74                                        _Frontispiece_

  In rushed a stout old nurse from the next room                20

  Play by me, bathe in me, mother and child                     32

  A quiet, silent, rich, happy place                            35

  She was the Queen of them all                                 44

  From which great trout rushed out on Tom                      88

  He watched the moonlight on the rippling river               101

  Tom had never seen a lobster before                          113

  The fairies came flying in at the window and brought her
      such a pretty pair of wings                              126

  A real live water-baby, sitting on the white sand            146

  Tom found that the isle stood all on pillars, and that its
     roots were full of caves                                  151

  He crept away among the rocks, and got to the cabinet, and
     behold! it was open                                       172

  There he saw the last of the Gairfowl, standing up on the
     Allalonestone, all alone                                  201

  The most beautiful bird of paradise                          210

  "That's Mother Carey"                                        219

  Pandora and her box                                          224





          "I heard a thousand blended notes,
            While in a grove I sate reclined;
          In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
            Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

          "To her fair works did Nature link
            The human soul that through me ran;
          And much it grieved my heart to think,
            What man has made of man."

                                WORDSWORTH.




CHAPTER I


ONCE upon a time there was a little chimney-sweep, and his name was Tom.
That is a short name, and you have heard it before, so you will not have
much trouble in remembering it. He lived in a great town in the North
country, where there were plenty of chimneys to sweep, and plenty of
money for Tom to earn and his master to spend. He could not read nor
write, and did not care to do either; and he never washed himself, for
there was no water up the court where he lived. He had never been taught
to say his prayers. He never had heard of God, or of Christ, except in
words which you never have heard, and which it would have been well if
he had never heard. He cried half his time, and laughed the other half.
He cried when he had to climb the dark flues, rubbing his poor knees and
elbows raw; and when the soot got into his eyes, which it did every day
in the week; and when his master beat him, which he did every day in the
week; and when he had not enough to eat, which happened every day in the
week likewise. And he laughed the other half of the day, when he was
tossing halfpennies with the other boys, or playing leap-frog over the
posts, or bowling stones at the horses' legs as they trotted by, which
last was excellent fun, when there was a wall at hand behind which to
hide. As for chimney-sweeping, and being hungry, and being beaten, he
took all that for the way of the world, like the rain and snow and
thunder, and stood manfully with his back to it till it was over, as his
old donkey did to a hail-storm; and then shook his ears and was as jolly
as ever; and thought of the fine times coming, when he would be a man,
and a master sweep, and sit in the public-house with a quart of beer and
a long pipe, and play cards for silver money, and wear velveteens and
ankle-jacks, and keep a white bull-dog with one grey ear, and carry her
puppies in his pocket, just like a man. And he would have apprentices,
one, two, three, if he could. How he would bully them, and knock them
about, just as his master did to him; and make them carry home the soot
sacks, while he rode before them on his donkey, with a pipe in his mouth
and a flower in his button-hole, like a king at the head of his army.
Yes, there were good times coming; and, when his master let him have a
pull at the leavings of his beer, Tom was the jolliest boy in the whole
town.

One day a smart little groom rode into the court where Tom lived. Tom
was just hiding behind a wall, to heave half a brick at his horse's
legs, as is the custom of that country when they welcome strangers; but
the groom saw him, and halloed to him to know where Mr. Grimes, the
chimney-sweep, lived. Now, Mr. Grimes was Tom's own master, and Tom was
a good man of business, and always civil to customers, so he put the
half-brick down quietly behind the wall, and proceeded to take orders.

Mr. Grimes was to come up next morning to Sir John Harthover's, at the
Place, for his old chimney-sweep was gone to prison, and the chimneys
wanted sweeping. And so he rode away, not giving Tom time to ask what
the sweep had gone to prison for, which was a matter of interest to Tom,
as he had been in prison once or twice himself. Moreover, the groom
looked so very neat and clean, with his drab gaiters, drab breeches,
drab jacket, snow-white tie with a smart pin in it, and clean round
ruddy face, that Tom was offended and disgusted at his appearance, and
considered him a stuck-up fellow, who gave himself airs because he wore
smart clothes, and other people paid for them; and went behind the wall
to fetch the half-brick after all; but did not, remembering that he had
come in the way of business, and was, as it were, under a flag of truce.

His master was so delighted at his new customer that he knocked Tom down
out of hand, and drank more beer that night than he usually did in two,
in order to be sure of getting up in time next morning; for the more a
man's head aches when he wakes, the more glad he is to turn out, and
have a breath of fresh air. And, when he did get up at four the next
morning, he knocked Tom down again, in order to teach him (as young
gentlemen used to be taught at public schools) that he must be an extra
good boy that day, as they were going to a very great house, and might
make a very good thing of it, if they could but give satisfaction.

And Tom thought so likewise, and, indeed, would have done and behaved
his best, even without being knocked down. For, of all places upon
earth, Harthover Place (which he had never seen) was the most wonderful,
and, of all men on earth, Sir John (whom he had seen, having been sent
to gaol by him twice) was the most awful.

Harthover Place was really a grand place, even for the rich North
country; with a house so large that in the frame-breaking riots, which
Tom could just remember, the Duke of Wellington, and ten thousand
soldiers to match, were easily housed therein; at least, so Tom
believed; with a park full of deer, which Tom believed to be monsters
who were in the habit of eating children; with miles of game-preserves,
in which Mr. Grimes and the collier lads poached at times, on which
occasions Tom saw pheasants, and wondered what they tasted like; with a
noble salmon-river, in which Mr. Grimes and his friends would have liked
to poach; but then they must have got into cold water, and that they did
not like at all. In short, Harthover was a grand place, and Sir John a
grand old man, whom even Mr. Grimes respected; for not only could he
send Mr. Grimes to prison when he deserved it, as he did once or twice
a week; not only did he own all the land about for miles; not only was
he a jolly, honest, sensible squire, as ever kept a pack of hounds, who
would do what he thought right by his neighbours, as well as get what he
thought right for himself; but, what was more, he weighed full fifteen
stone, was nobody knew how many inches round the chest, and could have
thrashed Mr. Grimes himself in fair fight, which very few folk round
there could do, and which, my dear little boy, would not have been right
for him to do, as a great many things are not which one both can do, and
would like very much to do. So Mr. Grimes touched his hat to him when he
rode through the town, and called him a "buirdly awd chap," and his
young ladies "gradely lasses," which are two high compliments in the
North country; and thought that that made up for his poaching Sir John's
pheasants; whereby you may perceive that Mr. Grimes had not been to a
properly-inspected Government National School.

Now, I dare say, you never got up at three o'clock on a midsummer
morning. Some people get up then because they want to catch salmon; and
some because they want to climb Alps; and a great many more because they
must, like Tom. But, I assure you, that three o'clock on a midsummer
morning is the pleasantest time of all the twenty-four hours, and all
the three hundred and sixty-five days; and why every one does not get up
then, I never could tell, save that they are all determined to spoil
their nerves and their complexions by doing all night what they might
just as well do all day. But Tom, instead of going out to dinner at
half-past eight at night, and to a ball at ten, and finishing off
somewhere between twelve and four, went to bed at seven, when his master
went to the public-house, and slept like a dead pig; for which reason he
was as piert as a game-cock (who always gets up early to wake the maids),
and just ready to get up when the fine gentlemen and ladies were just
ready to go to bed.

So he and his master set out; Grimes rode the donkey in front, and Tom
and the brushes walked behind; out of the court, and up the street, past
the closed window-shutters, and the winking weary policemen, and the
roofs all shining grey in the grey dawn.

They passed through the pitmen's village, all shut up and silent now,
and through the turnpike; and then they were out in the real country,
and plodding along the black dusty road, between black slag walls, with
no sound but the groaning and thumping of the pit-engine in the next
field. But soon the road grew white, and the walls likewise; and at the
wall's foot grew long grass and gay flowers, all drenched with dew; and
instead of the groaning of the pit-engine, they heard the skylark saying
his matins high up in the air, and the pit-bird warbling in the sedges,
as he had warbled all night long.

All else was silent. For old Mrs. Earth was still fast asleep; and, like
many pretty people, she looked still prettier asleep than awake. The
great elm-trees in the gold-green meadows were fast asleep above, and
the cows fast asleep beneath them; nay, the few clouds which were about
were fast asleep likewise, and so tired that they had lain down on the
earth to rest, in long white flakes and bars, among the stems of the
elm-trees, and along the tops of the alders by the stream, waiting for
the sun to bid them rise and go about their day's business in the clear
blue overhead.

On they went; and Tom looked, and looked, for he never had been so far
into the country before; and longed to get over a gate, and pick
buttercups, and look for birds' nests in the hedge; but Mr. Grimes was a
man of business, and would not have heard of that.

Soon they came up with a poor Irishwoman, trudging along with a bundle
at her back. She had a grey shawl over her head, and a crimson madder
petticoat; so you may be sure she came from Galway. She had neither
shoes nor stockings, and limped along as if she were tired and footsore;
but she was a very tall handsome woman, with bright grey eyes, and heavy
black hair hanging about her cheeks. And she took Mr. Grimes' fancy so
much, that when he came alongside he called out to her:

"This is a hard road for a gradely foot like that. Will ye up, lass, and
ride behind me?"

But, perhaps, she did not admire Mr. Grimes' look and voice; for she
answered quietly:

"No, thank you; I'd sooner walk with your little lad here."

"You may please yourself," growled Grimes, and went on smoking.

So she walked beside Tom, and talked to him, and asked him where he
lived, and what he knew, and all about himself, till Tom thought he had
never met such a pleasant-spoken woman. And she asked him, at last,
whether he said his prayers! and seemed sad when he told her that he
knew no prayers to say.

Then he asked her where she lived, and she said far away by the sea. And
Tom asked her about the sea; and she told him how it rolled and roared
over the rocks in winter nights, and lay still in the bright summer
days, for the children to bathe and play in it; and many a story more,
till Tom longed to go and see the sea, and bathe in it likewise.

At last, at the bottom of a hill, they came to a spring; not such a
spring as you see here, which soaks up out of a white gravel in the bog,
among red fly-catchers, and pink bottle-heath, and sweet white orchis;
nor such a one as you may see, too, here, which bubbles up under the
warm sandbank in the hollow lane, by the great tuft of lady ferns, and
makes the sand dance reels at the bottom, day and night, all the year
round; not such a spring as either of those; but a real North country
limestone fountain, like one of those in Sicily or Greece, where the old
heathen fancied the nymphs sat cooling themselves the hot summer's day,
while the shepherds peeped at them from behind the bushes. Out of a low
cave of rock, at the foot of a limestone crag, the great fountain rose,
quelling, and bubbling, and gurgling, so clear that you could not tell
where the water ended and the air began; and ran away under the road, a
stream large enough to turn a mill; among blue geranium, and golden
globe-flower, and wild raspberry, and the bird-cherry with its tassels
of snow.

And there Grimes stopped, and looked; and Tom looked too. Tom was
wondering whether anything lived in that dark cave, and came out at
night to fly in the meadows. But Grimes was not wondering at all.
Without a word, he got off his donkey, and clambered over the low road
wall, and knelt down, and began dipping his ugly head into the
spring--and very dirty he made it.

Tom was picking the flowers as fast as he could. The Irishwoman helped
him, and showed him how to tie them up; and a very pretty nosegay they
had made between them. But when he saw Grimes actually wash, he stopped,
quite astonished; and when Grimes had finished, and began shaking his
ears to dry them, he said:

"Why, master, I never saw you do that before."

"Nor will again, most likely. 'Twasn't for cleanliness I did it, but for
coolness. I'd be ashamed to want washing every week or so, like any
smutty collier lad."

"I wish I might go and dip my head in," said poor little Tom. "It must
be as good as putting it under the town-pump; and there is no beadle
here to drive a chap away."

"Thou come along," said Grimes; "what dost want with washing thyself?
Thou did not drink half a gallon of beer last night, like me."

"I don't care for you," said naughty Tom, and ran down to the stream,
and began washing his face.

Grimes was very sulky, because the woman preferred Tom's company to his;
so he dashed at him with horrid words, and tore him up from his knees,
and began beating him. But Tom was accustomed to that, and got his head
safe between Mr. Grimes' legs, and kicked his shins with all his might.

"Are you not ashamed of yourself, Thomas Grimes?" cried the Irishwoman
over the wall.

Grimes looked up, startled at her knowing his name; but all he answered
was, "No, nor never was yet"; and went on beating Tom.

"True for you. If you ever had been ashamed of yourself, you would have
gone over into Vendale long ago."

"What do you know about Vendale?" shouted Grimes; but he left off
beating Tom.

"I know about Vendale, and about you, too. I know, for instance, what
happened in Aldermire Copse, by night, two years ago come Martinmas."

"You do?" shouted Grimes; and leaving Tom, he climbed up over the wall,
and faced the woman. Tom thought he was going to strike her; but she
looked him too full and fierce in the face for that.

"Yes; I was there," said the Irishwoman quietly.

"You are no Irishwoman, by your speech," said Grimes, after many bad
words.

"Never mind who I am. I saw what I saw; and if you strike that boy
again, I can tell what I know."

Grimes seemed quite cowed, and got on his donkey without another word.

"Stop!" said the Irishwoman. "I have one more word for you both; for you
will both see me again before all is over. Those that wish to be clean,
clean they will be; and those that wish to be foul, foul they will be.
Remember."

And she turned away, and through a gate into the meadow. Grimes stood
still a moment, like a man who had been stunned. Then he rushed after
her, shouting, "You come back." But when he got into the meadow, the
woman was not there.

Had she hidden away? There was no place to hide in. But Grimes looked
about, and Tom also, for he was as puzzled as Grimes himself at her
disappearing so suddenly; but look where they would, she was not there.

Grimes came back again, as silent as a post, for he was a little
frightened; and, getting on his donkey, filled a fresh pipe, and smoked
away, leaving Tom in peace.

And now they had gone three miles and more, and came to Sir John's
lodge-gates.

Very grand lodges they were, with very grand iron gates and stone
gate-posts, and on the top of each a most dreadful bogy, all teeth,
horns, and tail, which was the crest which Sir John's ancestors wore in
the Wars of the Roses; and very prudent men they were to wear it, for
all their enemies must have run for their lives at the very first sight
of them.

Grimes rang at the gate, and out came a keeper on the spot, and opened.

"I was told to expect thee," he said. "Now thou'lt be so good as to keep
to the main avenue, and not let me find a hare or a rabbit on thee when
thou comest back. I shall look sharp for one, I tell thee."

"Not if it's in the bottom of the soot-bag," quoth Grimes, and at that
he laughed; and the keeper laughed and said:

"If that's thy sort, I may as well walk up with thee to the hall."

"I think thou best had. It's thy business to see after thy game, man,
and not mine."

So the keeper went with them; and, to Tom's surprise, he and Grimes
chatted together all the way quite pleasantly. He did not know that a
keeper is only a poacher turned outside in, and a poacher a keeper
turned inside out.

They walked up a great lime avenue, a full mile long, and between their
stems Tom peeped trembling at the horns of the sleeping deer, which
stood up among the ferns. Tom had never seen such enormous trees, and as
he looked up he fancied that the blue sky rested on their heads. But he
was puzzled very much by a strange murmuring noise, which followed them
all the way. So much puzzled, that at last he took courage to ask the
keeper what it was.

He spoke very civilly, and called him Sir, for he was horribly afraid of
him, which pleased the keeper, and he told him that they were the bees
about the lime flowers.

"What are bees?" asked Tom.

"What make honey."

"What is honey?" asked Tom.

"Thou hold thy noise," said Grimes.

"Let the boy be," said the keeper. "He's a civil young chap now, and
that's more than he'll be long if he bides with thee."

Grimes laughed, for he took that for a compliment.

"I wish I were a keeper," said Tom, "to live in such a beautiful place,
and wear green velveteens, and have a real dog-whistle at my button,
like you."

The keeper laughed; he was a kind-hearted fellow enough.

"Let well alone, lad, and ill too at times. Thy life's safer than mine
at all events, eh, Mr. Grimes?"

And Grimes laughed again, and then the two men began talking quite low.
Tom could hear, though, that it was about some poaching fight; and at
last Grimes said surlily, "Hast thou anything against me?"

"Not now."

"Then don't ask me any questions till thou hast, for I am a man of
honour."

And at that they both laughed again, and thought it a very good joke.

And by this time they were come up to the great iron gates in front of
the house; and Tom stared through them at the rhododendrons and azaleas,
which were all in flower; and then at the house itself, and wondered how
many chimneys there were in it, and how long ago it was built, and what
was the man's name that built it, and whether he got much money for his
job?

These last were very difficult questions to answer. For Harthover had
been built at ninety different times, and in nineteen different styles,
and looked as if somebody had built a whole street of houses of every
imaginable shape, and then stirred them together with a spoon.

          _For the attics were Anglo-Saxon._

          _The third floor Norman._

          _The second Cinque-cento._

          _The first-floor Elizabethan._

          _The right wing Pure Doric._

          _The centre Early English, with a huge portico
          copied from the Parthenon._

          _The left wing pure B[oe]otian, which the country
          folk admired most of all, because it was just like
          the new barracks in the town, only three times as
          big._

          _The grand staircase was copied from the Catacombs
          at Rome._

          _The back staircase from the Tajmahal at Agra.
          This was built by Sir John's
          great-great-great-uncle, who won, in Lord Clive's
          Indian Wars, plenty of money, plenty of wounds,
          and no more taste than his betters._

          _The cellars were copied from the caves of
          Elephanta._

          _The offices from the Pavilion at Brighton._

And the rest from nothing in heaven, or earth, or under the earth.

So that Harthover House was a great puzzle to antiquarians, and a
thorough Naboth's vineyard to critics, and architects, and all persons
who like meddling with other men's business, and spending other men's
money. So they were all setting upon poor Sir John, year after year, and
trying to talk him into spending a hundred thousand pounds or so, in
building, to please them and not himself. But he always put them off,
like a canny North-countryman as he was. One wanted him to build a
Gothic house, but he said he was no Goth; and another to build an
Elizabethan, but he said he lived under good Queen Victoria, and not
good Queen Bess; and another was bold enough to tell him that his house
was ugly, but he said he lived inside it, and not outside; and another,
that there was no unity in it, but he said that that was just why he
liked the old place. For he liked to see how each Sir John, and Sir
Hugh, and Sir Ralph, and Sir Randal, had left his mark upon the place,
each after his own taste; and he had no more notion of disturbing his
ancestors' work than of disturbing their graves. For now the house
looked like a real live house, that had a history, and had grown and
grown as the world grew; and that it was only an upstart fellow who did
not know who his own grandfather was, who would change it for some spick
and span new Gothic or Elizabethan thing, which looked as if it had been
all spawned in a night, as mushrooms are. From which you may collect (if
you have wit enough) that Sir John was a very sound-headed,
sound-hearted squire, and just the man to keep the country side in
order, and show good sport with his hounds.

But Tom and his master did not go in through the great iron gates, as if
they had been Dukes or Bishops, but round the back way, and a very long
way round it was; and into a little back-door, where the ash-boy let
them in, yawning horribly; and then in a passage the housekeeper met
them, in such a flowered chintz dressing-gown, that Tom mistook her for
My Lady herself, and she gave Grimes solemn orders about "You will take
care of this, and take care of that," as if he was going up the
chimneys, and not Tom. And Grimes listened, and said every now and then,
under his voice, "You'll mind that, you little beggar?" and Tom did
mind, all at least that he could. And then the housekeeper turned them
into a grand room, all covered up in sheets of brown paper, and bade
them begin, in a lofty and tremendous voice; and so after a whimper or
two, and a kick from his master, into the grate Tom went, and up the
chimney, while a housemaid stayed in the room to watch the furniture; to
whom Mr. Grimes paid many playful and chivalrous compliments, but met
with very slight encouragement in return.

How many chimneys Tom swept I cannot say; but he swept so many that he
got quite tired, and puzzled too, for they were not like the town flues
to which he was accustomed, but such as you would find--if you would
only get up them and look, which perhaps you would not like to do--in
old country-houses, large and crooked chimneys, which had been altered
again and again, till they ran one into another, anastomosing (as
Professor Owen would say) considerably. So Tom fairly lost his way in
them; not that he cared much for that, though he was in pitchy darkness,
for he was as much at home in a chimney as a mole is underground; but at
last, coming down as he thought the right chimney, he came down the
wrong one, and found himself standing on the hearthrug in a room the
like of which he had never seen before.

Tom had never seen the like. He had never been in gentlefolks' rooms but
when the carpets were all up, and the curtains down, and the furniture
huddled together under a cloth, and the pictures covered with aprons and
dusters; and he had often enough wondered what the rooms were like when
they were all ready for the quality to sit in. And now he saw, and he
thought the sight very pretty.

The room was all dressed in white,--white window-curtains, white
bed-curtains, white furniture, and white walls, with just a few lines of
pink here and there. The carpet was all over gay little flowers; and the
walls were hung with pictures in gilt frames, which amused Tom very
much. There were pictures of ladies and gentlemen, and pictures of
horses and dogs. The horses he liked; but the dogs he did not care for
much, for there were no bull-dogs among them, not even a terrier. But
the two pictures which took his fancy most were, one a man in long
garments, with little children and their mothers round him, who was
laying his hand upon the children's heads. That was a very pretty
picture, Tom thought, to hang in a lady's room. For he could see that it
was a lady's room by the dresses which lay about.

The other picture was that of a man nailed to a cross, which surprised
Tom much. He fancied that he had seen something like it in a
shop-window. But why was it there? "Poor man," thought Tom, "and he
looks so kind and quiet. But why should the lady have such a sad picture
as that in her room? Perhaps it was some kinsman of hers, who had been
murdered by the savages in foreign parts, and she kept it there for a
remembrance." And Tom felt sad, and awed, and turned to look at
something else.

The next thing he saw, and that too puzzled him, was a washing-stand,
with ewers and basins, and soap and brushes, and towels, and a large
bath full of clean water--what a heap of things all for washing! "She
must be a very dirty lady," thought Tom, "by my master's rule, to want
as much scrubbing as all that. But she must be very cunning to put the
dirt out of the way so well afterwards, for I don't see a speck about
the room, not even on the very towels."

And then, looking toward the bed, he saw that dirty lady, and held his
breath with astonishment.

Under the snow-white coverlet, upon the snow-white pillow, lay the most
beautiful little girl that Tom had ever seen. Her cheeks were almost as
white as the pillow, and her hair was like threads of gold spread all
about over the bed. She might have been as old as Tom, or maybe a year
or two older; but Tom did not think of that. He thought only of her
delicate skin and golden hair, and wondered whether she was a real live
person, or one of the wax dolls he had seen in the shops. But when he
saw her breathe, he made up his mind that she was alive, and stood
staring at her, as if she had been an angel out of heaven.

No. She cannot be dirty. She never could have been dirty, thought Tom to
himself. And then he thought, "And are all people like that when they
are washed?" And he looked at his own wrist, and tried to rub the soot
off, and wondered whether it ever would come off. "Certainly I should
look much prettier then, if I grew at all like her."

And looking round, he suddenly saw, standing close to him, a little
ugly, black, ragged figure, with bleared eyes and grinning white teeth.
He turned on it angrily. What did such a little black ape want in that
sweet young lady's room? And behold, it was himself, reflected in a
great mirror, the like of which Tom had never seen before.

And Tom, for the first time in his life, found out that he was dirty;
and burst into tears with shame and anger; and turned to sneak up the
chimney again and hide; and upset the fender and threw the fire-irons
down, with a noise as of ten thousand tin kettles tied to ten thousand
mad dogs' tails.

[Illustration: "In rushed a stout old nurse from the next room."--_P.
20._]

Up jumped the little white lady in her bed, and, seeing Tom, screamed as
shrill as any peacock. In rushed a stout old nurse from the next room,
and seeing Tom likewise, made up her mind that he had come to rob,
plunder, destroy, and burn; and dashed at him, as he lay over the
fender, so fast that she caught him by the jacket.

But she did not hold him. Tom had been in a policeman's hands many a
time, and out of them too, what is more; and he would have been ashamed
to face his friends for ever if he had been stupid enough to be caught
by an old woman; so he doubled under the good lady's arm, across the
room, and out of the window in a moment.

He did not need to drop out, though he would have done so bravely
enough. Nor even to let himself down a spout, which would have been an
old game to him; for once he got up by a spout to the church roof, he
said to take jackdaws' eggs, but the policeman said to steal lead; and,
when he was seen on high, sat there till the sun got too hot, and came
down by another spout, leaving the policemen to go back to the
stationhouse and eat their dinners.

But all under the window spread a tree, with great leaves and sweet
white flowers, almost as big as his head. It was magnolia, I suppose;
but Tom knew nothing about that, and cared less; for down the tree he
went, like a cat, and across the garden lawn, and over the iron
railings, and up the park towards the wood, leaving the old nurse to
scream murder and fire at the window.

The under gardener, mowing, saw Tom, and threw down his scythe; caught
his leg in it, and cut his shin open, whereby he kept his bed for a
week; but in his hurry he never knew it, and gave chase to poor Tom. The
dairymaid heard the noise, got the churn between her knees, and tumbled
over it, spilling all the cream; and yet she jumped up, and gave chase
to Tom. A groom cleaning Sir John's hack at the stables let him go
loose, whereby he kicked himself lame in five minutes; but he ran out
and gave chase to Tom. Grimes upset the soot-sack in the new-gravelled
yard, and spoilt it all utterly; but he ran out and gave chase to Tom.
The old steward opened the park-gate in such a hurry, that he hung up
his pony's chin upon the spikes, and, for aught I know, it hangs there
still; but he jumped off, and gave chase to Tom. The ploughman left his
horses at the headland, and one jumped over the fence, and pulled the
other into the ditch, plough and all; but he ran on, and gave chase to
Tom. The keeper, who was taking a stoat out of a trap, let the stoat go,
and caught his own finger; but he jumped up, and ran after Tom; and
considering what he said, and how he looked, I should have been sorry
for Tom if he had caught him. Sir John looked out of his study window
(for he was an early old gentleman) and up at the nurse, and a marten
dropped mud in his eye, so that he had at last to send for the doctor;
and yet he ran out, and gave chase to Tom. The Irishwoman, too, was
walking up to the house to beg,--she must have got round by some
byway,--but she threw away her bundle, and gave chase to Tom likewise.
Only my Lady did not give chase; for when she had put her head out of
the window, her night-wig fell into the garden, and she had to ring up
her lady's-maid, and send her down for it privately, which quite put her
out of the running, so that she came in nowhere, and is consequently not
placed.

In a word, never was there heard at Hall Place--not even when the fox
was killed in the conservatory, among acres of broken glass, and tons of
smashed flower-pots--such a noise, row, hubbub, babel, shindy,
hullabaloo, stramash, charivari, and total contempt of dignity, repose,
and order, as that day, when Grimes, gardener, the groom, the dairymaid,
Sir John, the steward, the ploughman, the keeper, and the Irishwoman,
all ran up the park, shouting "Stop thief," in the belief that Tom had
at least a thousand pounds' worth of jewels in his empty pockets; and
the very magpies and jays followed Tom up, screaking and screaming, as
if he were a hunted fox, beginning to droop his brush.

And all the while poor Tom paddled up the park with his little bare
feet, like a small black gorilla fleeing to the forest. Alas for him!
there was no big father gorilla therein to take his part--to scratch
out the gardener's inside with one paw, toss the dairymaid into a tree
with another, and wrench off Sir John's head with a third, while he
cracked the keeper's skull with his teeth as easily as if it had been a
cocoa-nut or a paving-stone.

However, Tom did not remember ever having had a father; so he did not
look for one, and expected to have to take care of himself; while as for
running, he could keep up for a couple of miles with any stage-coach, if
there was the chance of a copper or a cigar-end, and turn coach-wheels
on his hands and feet ten times following, which is more than you can
do. Wherefore his pursuers found it very difficult to catch him; and we
will hope that they did not catch him at all.

Tom, of course, made for the woods. He had never been in a wood in his
life; but he was sharp enough to know that he might hide in a bush, or
swarm up a tree, and, altogether, had more chance there than in the
open. If he had not known that, he would have been foolisher than a
mouse or a minnow.

But when he got into the wood, he found it a very different sort of
place from what he had fancied. He pushed into a thick cover of
rhododendrons, and found himself at once caught in a trap. The boughs
laid hold of his legs and arms, poked him in his face and his stomach,
made him shut his eyes tight (though that was no great loss, for he
could not see at best a yard before his nose); and when he got through
the rhododendrons, the hassock-grass and sedges tumbled him over, and
cut his poor little fingers afterwards most spitefully; the birches
birched him as soundly as if he had been a nobleman at Eton, and over
the face too (which is not fair swishing, as all brave boys will agree);
and the lawyers tripped him up, and tore his shins as if they had
sharks' teeth--which lawyers are likely enough to have.

"I must get out of this," thought Tom, "or I shall stay here till
somebody comes to help me--which is just what I don't want."

But how to get out was the difficult matter. And indeed I don't think he
would ever have got out at all, but have stayed there till the
cock-robins covered him with leaves, if he had not suddenly run his head
against a wall.

Now running your head against a wall is not pleasant, especially if it
is a loose wall, with the stones all set on edge, and a sharp cornered
one hits you between the eyes and makes you see all manner of beautiful
stars. The stars are very beautiful, certainly; but unfortunately they
go in the twenty-thousandth part of a split second, and the pain which
comes after them does not. And so Tom hurt his head; but he was a brave
boy, and did not mind that a penny. He guessed that over the wall the
cover would end; and up it he went, and over like a squirrel.

And there he was, out on the great grouse-moors, which the country folk
called Harthover Fell--heather and bog and rock, stretching away and
up, up to the very sky.

Now, Tom was a cunning little fellow--as cunning as an old Exmoor stag.
Why not? Though he was but ten years old, he had lived longer than most
stags, and had more wits to start with into the bargain.

He knew as well as a stag that if he backed he might throw the hounds
out. So the first thing he did when he was over the wall was to make the
neatest double sharp to his right, and run along under the wall for
nearly half a mile.

Whereby Sir John, and the keeper, and the steward, and the gardener, and
the ploughman, and the dairymaid, and all the hue-and-cry together, went
on ahead half a mile in the very opposite direction, and inside the
wall, leaving him a mile off on the outside; while Tom heard their
shouts die away in the woods and chuckled to himself merrily.

At last he came to a dip in the land, and went to the bottom of it, and
then he turned bravely away from the wall and up the moor; for he knew
that he had put a hill between him and his enemies, and could go on
without their seeing him.

But the Irishwoman, alone of them all, had seen which way Tom went. She
had kept ahead of every one the whole time; and yet she neither walked
nor ran. She went along quite smoothly and gracefully, while her feet
twinkled past each other so fast that you could not see which was
foremost; till every one asked the other who the strange woman was; and
all agreed, for want of anything better to say, that she must be in
league with Tom.

But when she came to the plantation, they lost sight of her; and they
could do no less. For she went quietly over the wall after Tom, and
followed him wherever he went. Sir John and the rest saw no more of her;
and out of sight was out of mind.

And now Tom was right away into the heather, over just such a moor as
those in which you have been bred, except that there were rocks and
stones lying about everywhere, and that, instead of the moor growing
flat as he went upwards, it grew more and more broken and hilly, but not
so rough but that little Tom could jog along well enough, and find time,
too, to stare about at the strange place, which was like a new world to
him.

He saw great spiders there, with crowns and crosses marked on their
backs, who sat in the middle of their webs, and when they saw Tom
coming, shook them so fast that they became invisible. Then he saw
lizards, brown and grey and green, and thought they were snakes, and
would sting him; but they were as much frightened as he, and shot away
into the heath. And then, under a rock, he saw a pretty sight--a great
brown, sharp-nosed creature, with a white tag to her brush, and round
her four or five smutty little cubs, the funniest fellows Tom ever saw.
She lay on her back, rolling about, and stretching out her legs and head
and tail in the bright sunshine; and the cubs jumped over her, and ran
round her, and nibbled her paws, and lugged her about by the tail; and
she seemed to enjoy it mightily. But one selfish little fellow stole
away from the rest to a dead crow close by, and dragged it off to hide
it, though it was nearly as big as he was. Whereat all his little
brothers set off after him in full cry, and saw Tom; and then all ran
back, and up jumped Mrs. Vixen, and caught one up in her mouth, and the
rest toddled after her, and into a dark crack in the rocks; and there
was an end of the show.

And next he had a fright; for, as he scrambled up a sandy
brow--whirr-poof-poof-cock-cock-kick--something went off in his face,
with a most horrid noise. He thought the ground had blown up, and the
end of the world come.

And when he opened his eyes (for he shut them very tight) it was
only an old cock-grouse, who had been washing himself in sand,
like an Arab, for want of water; and who, when Tom had all but
trodden on him, jumped up with a noise like the express train,
leaving his wife and children to shift for themselves, like an
old coward, and went off, screaming "Cur-ru-u-uck, cur-ru-u-uck--murder,
thieves, fire--cur-u-uck-cock-kick--the end of the world is
come--kick-kick-cock-kick." He was always fancying that the end of the
world was come, when anything happened which was farther off than the
end of his own nose. But the end of the world was not come, any more
than the twelfth of August was; though the old grouse-cock was quite
certain of it.

So the old grouse came back to his wife and family an hour afterwards,
and said solemnly, "Cock-cock-kick; my dears, the end of the world is
not quite come; but I assure you it is coming the day after
to-morrow--cock." But his wife had heard that so often that she knew all
about it, and a little more. And, besides, she was the mother of a
family, and had seven little poults to wash and feed every day; and that
made her very practical, and a little sharp-tempered; so all she
answered was: "Kick-kick-kick--go and catch spiders, go and catch
spiders--kick."

So Tom went on and on, he hardly knew why; but he liked the great wide
strange place, and the cool fresh bracing air. But he went more and more
slowly as he got higher up the hill; for now the ground grew very bad
indeed. Instead of soft turf and springy heather, he met great patches
of flat limestone rock, just like ill-made pavements, with deep cracks
between the stones and ledges, filled with ferns; so he had to hop from
stone to stone, and now and then he slipped in between, and hurt his
little bare toes, though they were tolerably tough ones; but still he
would go on and up, he could not tell why.

What would Tom have said if he had seen, walking over the moor behind
him, the very same Irishwoman who had taken his part upon the road? But
whether it was that he looked too little behind him, or whether it was
that she kept out of sight behind the rocks and knolls, he never saw
her, though she saw him.

And now he began to get a little hungry, and very thirsty; for he had
run a long way, and the sun had risen high in heaven, and the rock was
as hot as an oven, and the air danced reels over it, as it does over a
limekiln, till everything round seemed quivering and melting in the
glare.

But he could see nothing to eat anywhere, and still less to drink.

The heath was full of bilberries and whimberries; but they were only in
flower yet, for it was June. And as for water, who can find that on the
top of a limestone rock? Now and then he passed by a deep dark
swallow-hole, going down into the earth, as if it was the chimney of
some dwarf's house underground; and more than once, as he passed, he
could hear water falling, trickling, tinkling, many many feet below. How
he longed to get down to it, and cool his poor baked lips! But, brave
little chimney-sweep as he was, he dared not climb down such chimneys as
those.

So he went on and on, till his head spun round with the heat, and he
thought he heard church-bells ringing, a long way off.

"Ah!" he thought, "where there is a church there will be houses and
people; and, perhaps, some one will give me a bit and a sup." So he set
off again, to look for the church; for he was sure that he heard the
bells quite plain.

And in a minute more, when he looked round, he stopped again, and said,
"Why, what a big place the world is!"

And so it was; for, from the top of the mountain he could see--what
could he not see?

Behind him, far below, was Harthover, and the dark woods, and the
shining salmon river; and on his left, far below, was the town, and the
smoking chimneys of the collieries; and far, far away, the river widened
to the shining sea; and little white specks, which were ships, lay on
its bosom. Before him lay, spread out like a map, great plains, and
farms, and villages, amid dark knots of trees. They all seemed at his
very feet; but he had sense to see that they were long miles away.

And to his right rose moor after moor, hill after hill, till they faded
away, blue into blue sky. But between him and those moors, and really at
his very feet, lay something, to which, as soon as Tom saw it, he
determined to go, for that was the place for him.

A deep, deep green and rocky valley, very narrow, and filled with wood;
but through the wood, hundreds of feet below him, he could see a clear
stream glance. Oh, if he could but get down to that stream! Then, by the
stream, he saw the roof of a little cottage, and a little garden set out
in squares and beds. And there was a tiny little red thing moving in the
garden, no bigger than a fly. As Tom looked down, he saw that it was a
woman in a red petticoat. Ah! perhaps she would give him something to
eat. And there were the church-bells ringing again. Surely there must be
a village down there. Well, nobody would know him, or what had happened
at the Place. The news could not have got there yet, even if Sir John
had set all the policemen in the county after him; and he could get down
there in five minutes.

Tom was quite right about the hue-and-cry not having got thither; for he
had come without knowing it, the best part of ten miles from Harthover;
but he was wrong about getting down in five minutes, for the cottage was
more than a mile off, and a good thousand feet below.

[Illustration: "Play by me, bathe in me, mother and child."--_P. 32._]

However, down he went, like a brave little man as he was, though he was
very footsore, and tired, and hungry, and thirsty; while the
church-bells rang so loud, he began to think that they must be inside
his own head, and the river chimed and tinkled far below; and this was
the song which it sang:--

              _Clear and cool, clear and cool,
            By laughing shallow, and dreaming pool;
              Cool and clear, cool and clear,
            By shining shingle, and foaming wear;
          Under the crag where the ouzel sings,
          And the ivied wall where the church-bell rings,
                Undefiled, for the undefiled;
              Play by me, bathe in me, mother and child._

              _Dank and foul, dank and foul,
            By the smoky town in its murky cowl;
              Foul and dank, foul and dank,
            By wharf and sewer and slimy bank;
          Darker and darker the farther I go,
          Baser and baser the richer I grow;
                Who dare sport with the sin-defiled?
              Shrink from me, turn from me, mother and child._

              _Strong and free, strong and free,
            The floodgates are open, away to the sea,
              Free and strong, free and strong,
            Cleansing my streams as I hurry along,
          To the golden sands, and the leaping bar,
          And the taintless tide that awaits me afar.
          As I lose myself in the infinite main,
          Like a soul that has sinned and is pardoned again.
                Undefiled, for the undefiled;
              Play by me, bathe in me, mother and child._

So Tom went down; and all the while he never saw the Irishwoman going
down behind him.

          "And is there care in heaven? and is there love
           In heavenly spirits to these creatures base
           That may compassion of their evils move?
           There is:--else much more wretched were the case
           Of men than beasts: But oh! the exceeding grace
           Of Highest God that loves His creatures so,
           And all His works with mercy doth embrace,
           That blessed Angels He sends to and fro,
           To serve to wicked man, to serve His wicked foe!"

                                             SPENSER.





CHAPTER II


[Illustration: "A quiet, silent, rich, happy place."--_P. 35._]

A MILE off, and a thousand feet down.

So Tom found it; though it seemed as if he could have chucked a pebble
on to the back of the woman in the red petticoat who was weeding in the
garden, or even across the dale to the rocks beyond. For the bottom of
the valley was just one field broad, and on the other side ran the
stream; and above it, grey crag, grey down, grey stair, grey moor walled
up to heaven.

A quiet, silent, rich, happy place; a narrow crack cut deep into the
earth; so deep, and so out of the way, that the bad bogies can hardly
find it out. The name of the place is Vendale; and if you want to see it
for yourself, you must go up into the High Craven, and search from
Bolland Forest north by Ingleborough, to the Nine Standards and Cross
Fell; and if you have not found it, you must turn south, and search the
Lake Mountains, down to Scaw Fell and the sea; and then, if you have not
found it, you must go northward again by merry Carlisle, and search the
Cheviots all across, from Annan Water to Berwick Law; and then, whether
you have found Vendale or not, you will have found such a country, and
such a people, as ought to make you proud of being a British boy.

So Tom went to go down; and first he went down three hundred feet of
steep heather, mixed up with loose brown gritstone, as rough as a file;
which was not pleasant to his poor little heels, as he came bump, stump,
jump, down the steep. And still he thought he could throw a stone into
the garden.

Then he went down three hundred feet of limestone terraces, one below
the other, as straight as if a carpenter had ruled them with his ruler
and then cut them out with his chisel. There was no heath there, but--

First, a little grass slope, covered with the prettiest flowers,
rockrose and saxifrage, and thyme and basil, and all sorts of sweet
herbs.

Then bump down a two-foot step of limestone.

Then another bit of grass and flowers.

Then bump down a one-foot step.

Then another bit of grass and flowers for fifty yards, as steep as the
house-roof, where he had to slide down on his dear little tail.

Then another step of stone, ten feet high; and there he had to stop
himself, and crawl along the edge to find a crack; for if he had rolled
over, he would have rolled right into the old woman's garden, and
frightened her out of her wits.

Then, when he had found a dark narrow crack, full of green-stalked fern,
such as hangs in the basket in the drawing-room, and had crawled down
through it, with knees and elbows, as he would down a chimney, there
was another grass slope, and another step, and so on, till--oh, dear me!
I wish it was all over; and so did he. And yet he thought he could throw
a stone into the old woman's garden.

At last he came to a bank of beautiful shrubs; white-beam with its great
silver-backed leaves, and mountain-ash, and oak; and below them cliff
and crag, cliff and crag, with great beds of crown-ferns and wood-sedge;
while through the shrubs he could see the stream sparkling, and hear it
murmur on the white pebbles. He did not know that it was three hundred
feet below.

You would have been giddy, perhaps, at looking down: but Tom was not. He
was a brave little chimney-sweep; and when he found himself on the top
of a high cliff, instead of sitting down and crying for his baba (though
he never had had any baba to cry for), he said, "Ah, this will just suit
me!" though he was very tired; and down he went, by stock and stone,
sedge and ledge, bush and rush, as if he had been born a jolly little
black ape, with four hands instead of two.

And all the while he never saw the Irishwoman coming down behind him.

But he was getting terribly tired now. The burning sun on the fells had
sucked him up; but the damp heat of the woody crag sucked him up still
more; and the perspiration ran out of the ends of his fingers and toes,
and washed him cleaner than he had been for a whole year. But, of
course, he dirtied everything terribly as he went. There has been a
great black smudge all down the crag ever since. And there have been
more black beetles in Vendale since than ever were known before; all, of
course, owing to Tom's having blacked the original papa of them all,
just as he was setting off to be married, with a sky-blue coat and
scarlet leggings, as smart as a gardener's dog with a polyanthus in his
mouth.

At last he got to the bottom. But, behold, it was not the bottom--as
people usually find when they are coming down a mountain. For at the
foot of the crag were heaps and heaps of fallen limestone of every size
from that of your head to that of a stage-waggon, with holes between
them full of sweet heath-fern; and before Tom got through them, he was
out in the bright sunshine again; and then he felt, once for all and
suddenly, as people generally do, that he was b-e-a-t, beat.

You must expect to be beat a few times in your life, little man, if you
live such a life as a man ought to live, let you be as strong and
healthy as you may: and when you are, you will find it a very ugly
feeling. I hope that that day you may have a stout staunch friend by you
who is not beat; for, if you have not, you had best lie where you are,
and wait for better times, as poor Tom did.

He could not get on. The sun was burning, and yet he felt chill all
over. He was quite empty, and yet he felt quite sick. There was but two
hundred yards of smooth pasture between him and the cottage, and yet he
could not walk down it. He could hear the stream murmuring only one
field beyond it, and yet it seemed to him as if it was a hundred miles
off.

He lay down on the grass till the beetles ran over him, and the flies
settled on his nose. I don't know when he would have got up again, if
the gnats and the midges had not taken compassion on him. But the gnats
blew their trumpets so loud in his ear, and the midges nibbled so at his
hands and face wherever they could find a place free from soot, that at
last he woke up, and stumbled away, down over a low wall, and into a
narrow road, and up to the cottage door.

And a neat pretty cottage it was, with clipped yew hedges all round the
garden, and yews inside too, cut into peacocks and trumpets and teapots
and all kinds of queer shapes. And out of the open door came a noise
like that of the frogs on the Great-A, when they know that it is going
to be scorching hot to-morrow--and how they know that I don't know, and
you don't know, and nobody knows.

He came slowly up to the open door, which was all hung round with
clematis and roses; and then peeped in, half afraid.

And there sat by the empty fireplace, which was filled with a pot of
sweet herbs, the nicest old woman that ever was seen, in her red
petticoat, and short dimity bedgown, and clean white cap, with a black
silk handkerchief over it, tied under her chin. At her feet sat the
grandfather of all the cats; and opposite her sat, on two benches,
twelve or fourteen neat, rosy, chubby little children, learning their
Chris-cross-row; and gabble enough they made about it.

Such a pleasant cottage it was, with a shiny clean stone floor, and
curious old prints on the walls, and an old black oak sideboard full of
bright pewter and brass dishes, and a cuckoo clock in the corner, which
began shouting as soon as Tom appeared: not that it was frightened at
Tom, but that it was just eleven o'clock.

All the children started at Tom's dirty black figure,--the girls began
to cry, and the boys began to laugh, and all pointed at him rudely
enough; but Tom was too tired to care for that.

"What art thou, and what dost want?" cried the old dame. "A
chimney-sweep! Away with thee! I'll have no sweeps here."

"Water," said poor little Tom, quite faint.

"Water? There's plenty i' the beck," she said, quite sharply.

"But I can't get there; I'm most clemmed with hunger and drought." And
Tom sank down upon the door-step, and laid his head against the post.

And the old dame looked at him through her spectacles one minute, and
two, and three; and then she said, "He's sick; and a bairn's a bairn,
sweep or none."

"Water," said Tom.

"God forgive me!" and she put by her spectacles, and rose, and came to
Tom. "Water's bad for thee; I'll give thee milk." And she toddled off
into the next room, and brought a cup of milk and a bit of bread.

Tom drank the milk off at one draught, and then looked up, revived.

"Where didst come from?" said the dame.

"Over Fell, there," said Tom, and pointed up into the sky.

"Over Harthover? and down Lewthwaite Crag? Art sure thou art not lying?"

"Why should I?" said Tom, and leant his head against the post.

"And how got ye up there?"

"I came over from the Place"; and Tom was so tired and desperate he had
no heart or time to think of a story, so he told all the truth in a few
words.

"Bless thy little heart! And thou hast not been stealing, then?"

"No."

"Bless thy little heart! and I'll warrant not. Why, God's guided the
bairn, because he was innocent! Away from the Place, and over Harthover
Fell, and down Lewthwaite Crag! Who ever heard the like, if God hadn't
led him? Why dost not eat thy bread?"

"I can't."

"It's good enough, for I made it myself."

"I can't," said Tom, and he laid his head on his knees, and then asked--

"Is it Sunday?"

"No, then; why should it be?"

"Because I hear the church-bells ringing so."

"Bless thy pretty heart! The bairn's sick. Come wi' me, and I'll hap
thee up somewhere. If thou wert a bit cleaner I'd put thee in my own
bed, for the Lord's sake. But come along here."

But when Tom tried to get up, he was so tired and giddy that she had to
help him and lead him.

She put him in an outhouse upon soft sweet hay and an old rug, and bade
him sleep off his walk, and she would come to him when school was over,
in an hour's time.

And so she went in again, expecting Tom to fall fast asleep at once.

But Tom did not fall asleep.

Instead of it he turned and tossed and kicked about in the strangest
way, and felt so hot all over that he longed to get into the river and
cool himself; and then he fell half asleep, and dreamt that he heard the
little white lady crying to him, "Oh, you're so dirty; go and be
washed"; and then that he heard the Irishwoman saying, "Those that wish
to be clean, clean they will be." And then he heard the church-bells
ring so loud, close to him too, that he was sure it must be Sunday, in
spite of what the old dame had said; and he would go to church, and see
what a church was like inside, for he had never been in one, poor little
fellow, in all his life. But the people would never let him come in, all
over soot and dirt like that. He must go to the river and wash first.
And he said out loud again and again, though being half asleep he did
not know it, "I must be clean, I must be clean."

And all of a sudden he found himself, not in the outhouse on the hay,
but in the middle of a meadow, over the road, with the stream just
before him, saying continually, "I must be clean, I must be clean." He
had got there on his own legs, between sleep and awake, as children will
often get out of bed, and go about the room, when they are not quite
well. But he was not a bit surprised, and went on to the bank of the
brook, and lay down on the grass, and looked into the clear, clear
limestone water, with every pebble at the bottom bright and clean, while
the little silver trout dashed about in fright at the sight of his black
face; and he dipped his hand in and found it so cool, cool, cool; and he
said, "I will be a fish; I will swim in the water; I must be clean, I
must be clean."

So he pulled off all his clothes in such haste that he tore some of
them, which was easy enough with such ragged old things. And he put his
poor hot sore feet into the water; and then his legs; and the farther he
went in, the more the church-bells rang in his head.

"Ah," said Tom, "I must be quick and wash myself; the bells are ringing
quite loud now; and they will stop soon, and then the door will be shut,
and I shall never be able to get in at all."

Tom was mistaken: for in England the church doors are left open all
service time, for everybody who likes to come in, Churchman or
Dissenter; ay, even if he were a Turk or a Heathen; and if any man dared
to turn him out, as long as he behaved quietly, the good old English law
would punish that man, as he deserved, for ordering any peaceable person
out of God's house, which belongs to all alike. But Tom did not know
that, any more than he knew a great deal more which people ought to
know.

[Illustration: "She was the Queen of them all."--_P. 44._]

And all the while he never saw the Irishwoman, not behind him this time,
but before.

For just before he came to the river side, she had stept down into the
cool clear water; and her shawl and her petticoat floated off her, and
the green water-weeds floated round her sides, and the white
water-lilies floated round her head, and the fairies of the stream came
up from the bottom and bore her away and down upon their arms; for she
was the Queen of them all; and perhaps of more besides.

"Where have you been?" they asked her.

"I have been smoothing sick folks' pillows, and whispering sweet dreams
into their ears; opening cottage casements, to let out the stifling air;
coaxing little children away from gutters, and foul pools where fever
breeds; turning women from the gin-shop door, and staying men's hands as
they were going to strike their wives; doing all I can to help those who
will not help themselves; and little enough that is, and weary work for
me. But I have brought you a new little brother, and watched him safe
all the way here."

Then all the fairies laughed for joy at the thought that they had a
little brother coming.

"But mind, maidens, he must not see you, or know that you are here. He
is but a savage now, and like the beasts which perish; and from the
beasts which perish he must learn. So you must not play with him, or
speak to him, or let him see you: but only keep him from being harmed."

Then the fairies were sad, because they could not play with their new
brother, but they always did what they were told.

And their Queen floated away down the river; and whither she went,
thither she came. But all this Tom, of course, never saw or heard: and
perhaps if he had it would have made little difference in the story; for
he was so hot and thirsty, and longed so to be clean for once, that he
tumbled himself as quick as he could into the clear cool stream.

And he had not been in it two minutes before he fell fast asleep, into
the quietest, sunniest, cosiest sleep that ever he had in his life; and
he dreamt about the green meadows by which he had walked that morning,
and the tall elm-trees, and the sleeping cows; and after that he dreamt
of nothing at all.

The reason of his falling into such a delightful sleep is very simple;
and yet hardly any one has found it out. It was merely that the fairies
took him.

Some people think that there are no fairies. Cousin Cramchild tells
little folks so in his Conversations. Well, perhaps there are none--in
Boston, U.S., where he was raised. There are only a clumsy lot of
spirits there, who can't make people hear without thumping on the table:
but they get their living thereby, and I suppose that is all they want.
And Aunt Agitate, in her Arguments on political economy, says there are
none. Well, perhaps there are none--in her political economy. But it is
a wide world, my little man--and thank Heaven for it, for else, between
crinolines and theories, some of us would get squashed--and plenty of
room in it for fairies, without people seeing them; unless, of course,
they look in the right place. The most wonderful and the strongest
things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.
There is life in you; and it is the life in you which makes you grow,
and move, and think: and yet you can't see it. And there is steam in a
steam-engine; and that is what makes it move: and yet you can't see it;
and so there may be fairies in the world, and they may be just what
makes the world go round to the old tune of

          "_C'est l'amour, l'amour, l'amour
            Qui fait le monde à la ronde:_"

and yet no one may be able to see them except those whose hearts are
going round to that same tune. At all events, we will make believe that
there are fairies in the world. It will not be the last time by many a
one that we shall have to make believe. And yet, after all, there is no
need for that. There must be fairies; for this is a fairy tale: and how
can one have a fairy tale if there are no fairies?

You don't see the logic of that? Perhaps not. Then please not to see the
logic of a great many arguments exactly like it, which you will hear
before your beard is grey.

The kind old dame came back at twelve, when school was over, to look at
Tom: but there was no Tom there. She looked about for his footprints;
but the ground was so hard that there was no slot, as they say in dear
old North Devon. And if you grow up to be a brave healthy man, you may
know some day what no slot means, and know too, I hope, what a slot does
mean--a broad slot, with blunt claws, which makes a man put out his
cigar, and set his teeth, and tighten his girths, when he sees it; and
what his rights mean, if he has them, brow, bay, tray, and points; and
see something worth seeing between Haddon Wood and Countisbury Cliff,
with good Mr. Palk Collyns to show you the way, and mend your bones as
fast as you smash them. Only when that jolly day comes, please don't
break your neck; stogged in a mire you never will be, I trust; for you
are a heath-cropper bred and born.

So the old dame went in again quite sulky, thinking that little Tom had
tricked her with a false story, and shammed ill, and then run away
again.

But she altered her mind the next day. For, when Sir John and the rest
of them had run themselves out of breath, and lost Tom, they went back
again, looking very foolish.

And they looked more foolish still when Sir John heard more of the story
from the nurse; and more foolish still, again, when they heard the whole
story from Miss Ellie, the little lady in white. All she had seen was a
poor little black chimney-sweep, crying and sobbing, and going to get
up the chimney again. Of course, she was very much frightened: and no
wonder. But that was all. The boy had taken nothing in the room; by the
mark of his little sooty feet, they could see that he had never been off
the hearthrug till the nurse caught hold of him. It was all a mistake.

So Sir John told Grimes to go home, and promised him five shillings if
he would bring the boy quietly up to him, without beating him, that he
might be sure of the truth. For he took for granted, and Grimes too,
that Tom had made his way home.

But no Tom came back to Mr. Grimes that evening; and he went to the
police-office, to tell them to look out for the boy. But no Tom was
heard of. As for his having gone over those great fells to Vendale, they
no more dreamed of that than of his having gone to the moon.

So Mr. Grimes came up to Harthover next day with a very sour face; but
when he got there, Sir John was over the hills and far away; and Mr.
Grimes had to sit in the outer servants' hall all day, and drink strong
ale to wash away his sorrows; and they were washed away long before Sir
John came back.

For good Sir John had slept very badly that night; and he said to his
lady, "My dear, the boy must have got over into the grouse-moors, and
lost himself; and he lies very heavily on my conscience, poor little
lad. But I know what I will do."

So, at five the next morning up he got, and into his bath, and into his
shooting-jacket and gaiters, and into the stableyard, like a fine old
English gentleman, with a face as red as a rose, and a hand as hard as a
table, and a back as broad as a bullock's; and bade them bring his
shooting pony, and the keeper to come on his pony, and the huntsman, and
the first whip, and the second whip, and the under-keeper with the
bloodhound in a leash--a great dog as tall as a calf, of the colour of a
gravel-walk, with mahogany ears and nose, and a throat like a
church-bell. They took him up to the place where Tom had gone into the
wood; and there the hound lifted up his mighty voice, and told them all
he knew.

Then he took them to the place where Tom had climbed the wall; and they
shoved it down, and all got through.

And then the wise dog took them over the moor, and over the fells, step
by step, very slowly; for the scent was a day old, you know, and very
light from the heat and drought. But that was why cunning old Sir John
started at five in the morning.

And at last he came to the top of Lewthwaite Crag, and there he bayed,
and looked up in their faces, as much as to say, "I tell you he is gone
down here!"

They could hardly believe that Tom would have gone so far; and when they
looked at that awful cliff, they could never believe that he would have
dared to face it. But if the dog said so, it must be true.

"Heaven forgive us!" said Sir John. "If we find him at all, we shall
find him lying at the bottom." And he slapped his great hand upon his
great thigh, and said--

"Who will go down over Lewthwaite Crag, and see if that boy is alive? Oh
that I were twenty years younger, and I would go down myself!" And so he
would have done, as well as any sweep in the county. Then he said--

"Twenty pounds to the man who brings me that boy alive!" and as was his
way, what he said he meant.

Now among the lot was a little groom-boy, a very little groom indeed;
and he was the same who had ridden up the court, and told Tom to come to
the Hall; and he said--

"Twenty pounds or none, I will go down over Lewthwaite Crag, if it's
only for the poor boy's sake. For he was as civil a spoken little chap
as ever climbed a flue."

So down over Lewthwaite Crag he went: a very smart groom he was at the
top, and a very shabby one at the bottom; for he tore his gaiters, and
he tore his breeches, and he tore his jacket, and he burst his braces,
and he burst his boots, and he lost his hat, and what was worst of all,
he lost his shirt pin, which he prized very much, for it was gold, and
he had won it in a raffle at Malton, and there was a figure at the top
of it, of t'ould mare, noble old Beeswing herself, as natural as life;
so it was a really severe loss: but he never saw anything of Tom.

And all the while Sir John and the rest were riding round, full three
miles to the right, and back again, to get into Vendale, and to the foot
of the crag.

When they came to the old dame's school, all the children came out to
see. And the old dame came out too; and when she saw Sir John, she
curtsied very low, for she was a tenant of his.

"Well, dame, and how are you?" said Sir John.

"Blessings on you as broad as your back, Harthover," says she--she
didn't call him Sir John, but only Harthover, for that is the fashion in
the North country--"and welcome into Vendale: but you're no hunting the
fox this time of the year?"

"I am hunting, and strange game too," said he.

"Blessings on your heart, and what makes you look so sad the morn?"

"I'm looking for a lost child, a chimney-sweep, that is run away."

"Oh, Harthover, Harthover," says she, "ye were always a just man and a
merciful; and ye'll no harm the poor little lad if I give you tidings of
him?"

"Not I, not I, dame. I'm afraid we hunted him out of the house all on a
miserable mistake, and the hound has brought him to the top of
Lewthwaite Crag, and----"

Whereat the old dame broke out crying, without letting him finish his
story.

"So he told me the truth after all, poor little dear! Ah, first
thoughts are best, and a body's heart'll guide them right, if they will
but hearken to it." And then she told Sir John all.

"Bring the dog here, and lay him on," said Sir John, without another
word, and he set his teeth very hard.

And the dog opened at once; and went away at the back of the cottage,
over the road, and over the meadow, and through a bit of alder copse;
and there, upon an alder stump, they saw Tom's clothes lying. And then
they knew as much about it all as there was any need to know.

And Tom?

Ah, now comes the most wonderful part of this wonderful story. Tom, when
he woke, for of course he woke--children always wake after they have
slept exactly as long as is good for them--found himself swimming about
in the stream, being about four inches, or--that I may be
accurate--3.87902 inches long, and having round the parotid region of
his fauces a set of external gills (I hope you understand all the big
words) just like those of a sucking eft, which he mistook for a lace
frill, till he pulled at them, found he hurt himself, and made up his
mind that they were part of himself, and best left alone.

In fact, the fairies had turned him into a water-baby.

A water-baby? You never heard of a water-baby. Perhaps not. That is the
very reason why this story was written. There are a great many things in
the world which you never heard of; and a great many more which nobody
ever heard of; and a great many things, too, which nobody will ever hear
of, at least until the coming of the Cocqcigrues, when man shall be the
measure of all things.

"But there are no such things as water-babies."

How do you know that? Have you been there to see? And if you had been
there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there were
none. If Mr. Garth does not find a fox in Eversley Wood--as folks
sometimes fear he never will--that does not prove that there are no such
things as foxes. And as is Eversley Wood to all the woods in England, so
are the waters we know to all the waters in the world. And no one has a
right to say that no water-babies exist, till they have seen no
water-babies existing; which is quite a different thing, mind, from not
seeing water-babies; and a thing which nobody ever did, or perhaps ever
will do.

"But surely if there were water-babies, somebody would have caught one
at least?"

Well. How do you know that somebody has not?

"But they would have put it into spirits, or into the _Illustrated
News_, or perhaps cut it into two halves, poor dear little thing, and
sent one to Professor Owen, and one to Professor Huxley, to see what
they would each say about it."

Ah, my dear little man! that does not follow at all, as you will see
before the end of the story.

"But a water-baby is contrary to nature."

Well, but, my dear little man, you must learn to talk about such things,
when you grow older, in a very different way from that. You must not
talk about "ain't" and "can't" when you speak of this great wonderful
world round you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest
corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking
up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean.

You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to
nature. You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody
knows; not even Sir Roderick Murchison, or Professor Owen, or Professor
Sedgwick, or Professor Huxley, or Mr. Darwin, or Professor Faraday, or
Mr. Grove, or any other of the great men whom good boys are taught to
respect. They are very wise men; and you must listen respectfully to all
they say: but even if they should say, which I am sure they never would,
"That cannot exist. That is contrary to nature," you must wait a little,
and see; for perhaps even they may be wrong. It is only children who
read Aunt Agitate's Arguments, or Cousin Cramchild's Conversations; or
lads who go to popular lectures, and see a man pointing at a few big
ugly pictures on the wall, or making nasty smells with bottles and
squirts, for an hour or two, and calling that anatomy or chemistry--who
talk about "cannot exist," and "contrary to nature." Wise men are afraid
to say that there is anything contrary to nature, except what is
contrary to mathematical truth; for two and two cannot make five, and
two straight lines cannot join twice, and a part cannot be as great as
the whole, and so on (at least, so it seems at present): but the wiser
men are, the less they talk about "cannot." That is a very rash,
dangerous word, that "cannot"; and if people use it too often, the Queen
of all the Fairies, who makes the clouds thunder and the fleas bite, and
takes just as much trouble about one as about the other, is apt to
astonish them suddenly by showing them, that though they say she cannot,
yet she can, and what is more, will, whether they approve or not.

And therefore it is, that there are dozens and hundreds of things in the
world which we should certainly have said were contrary to nature, if we
did not see them going on under our eyes all day long. If people had
never seen little seeds grow into great plants and trees, of quite
different shape from themselves, and these trees again produce fresh
seeds, to grow into fresh trees, they would have said, "The thing cannot
be; it is contrary to nature." And they would have been quite as right
in saying so, as in saying that most other things cannot be.

Or suppose again, that you had come, like M. Du Chaillu, a traveller
from unknown parts; and that no human being had ever seen or heard of an
elephant. And suppose that you described him to people, and said, "This
is the shape, and plan, and anatomy of the beast, and of his feet, and
of his trunk, and of his grinders, and of his tusks, though they are
not tusks at all, but two fore teeth run mad; and this is the section of
his skull, more like a mushroom than a reasonable skull of a reasonable
or unreasonable beast; and so forth, and so forth; and though the beast
(which I assure you I have seen and shot) is first cousin to the little
hairy coney of Scripture, second cousin to a pig, and (I suspect)
thirteenth or fourteenth cousin to a rabbit, yet he is the wisest of all
beasts, and can do everything save read, write, and cast accounts."
People would surely have said, "Nonsense; your elephant is contrary to
nature"; and have thought you were telling stories--as the French
thought of Le Vaillant when he came back to Paris and said that he had
shot a giraffe; and as the king of the Cannibal Islands thought of the
English sailor, when he said that in his country water turned to marble,
and rain fell as feathers. They would tell you, the more they knew of
science, "Your elephant is an impossible monster, contrary to the laws
of comparative anatomy, as far as yet known." To which you would answer
the less, the more you thought.

Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years,
that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know
that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world?
People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are
ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying
dragons could exist.

The truth is, that folks' fancy that such and such things cannot be,
simply because they have not seen them, is worth no more than a savage's
fancy that there cannot be such a thing as a locomotive, because he
never saw one running wild in the forest. Wise men know that their
business is to examine what is, and not to settle what is not. They know
that there are elephants; they know that there have been flying dragons;
and the wiser they are, the less inclined they will be to say positively
that there are no water-babies.

No water-babies, indeed? Why, wise men of old said that everything on
earth had its double in the water; and you may see that that is, if not
quite true, still quite as true as most other theories which you are
likely to hear for many a day. There are land-babies--then why not
water-babies? _Are there not water-rats, water-flies, water-crickets,
water-crabs, water-tortoises, water-scorpions, water-tigers and
water-hogs, water-cats and water-dogs, sea-lions and sea-bears,
sea-horses and sea-elephants, sea-mice and sea-urchins, sea-razors and
sea-pens, sea-combs and sea-fans; and of plants, are there not
water-grass, and water-crowfoot, water-milfoil, and so on, without end?_

"But all these things are only nicknames; the water things are not
really akin to the land things."

That's not always true. They are, in millions of cases, not only of the
same family, but actually the same individual creatures. Do not even you
know that a green drake, and an alder-fly, and a dragon-fly, live under
water till they change their skins, just as Tom changed his? And if a
water animal can continually change into a land animal, why should not
a land animal sometimes change into a water animal? Don't be put down by
any of Cousin Cramchild's arguments, but stand up to him like a man, and
answer him (quite respectfully, of course) thus:--

If Cousin Cramchild says, that if there are water-babies, they must grow
into water-men, ask him how he knows that they do not? and then, how he
knows that they must, any more than the Proteus of the Adelsberg caverns
grows into a perfect newt.

If he says that it is too strange a transformation for a land-baby to
turn into a water-baby, ask him if he ever heard of the transformation
of Syllis, or the Distomas, or the common jelly-fish, of which M.
Quatrefages says excellently well--"Who would not exclaim that a miracle
had come to pass, if he saw a reptile come out of the egg dropped by the
hen in his poultry-yard, and the reptile give birth at once to an
indefinite number of fishes and birds? Yet the history of the jelly-fish
is quite as wonderful as that would be." Ask him if he knows about all
this; and if he does not, tell him to go and look for himself; and
advise him (very respectfully, of course) to settle no more what strange
things cannot happen, till he has seen what strange things do happen
every day.

If he says that things cannot degrade, that is, change downwards into
lower forms, ask him, who told him that water-babies were lower than
land-babies? But even if they were, does he know about the strange
degradation of the common goose-barnacles, which one finds sticking on
ships' bottoms; or the still stranger degradation of some cousins of
theirs, of which one hardly likes to talk, so shocking and ugly it is?

And, lastly, if he says (as he most certainly will) that these
transformations only take place in the lower animals, and not in the
higher, say that that seems to little boys, and to some grown people, a
very strange fancy. For if the changes of the lower animals are so
wonderful, and so difficult to discover, why should not there be changes
in the higher animals far more wonderful, and far more difficult to
discover? And may not man, the crown and flower of all things, undergo
some change as much more wonderful than all the rest, as the Great
Exhibition is more wonderful than a rabbit-burrow? Let him answer that.
And if he says (as he will) that not having seen such a change in his
experience, he is not bound to believe it, ask him respectfully, where
his microscope has been? Does not each of us, in coming into this world,
go through a transformation just as wonderful as that of a sea-egg, or a
butterfly? and do not reason and analogy, as well as Scripture, tell us
that that transformation is not the last? and that, though what we shall
be, we know not, yet we are here but as the crawling caterpillar, and
shall be hereafter as the perfect fly. The old Greeks, heathens as they
were, saw as much as that two thousand years ago; and I care very little
for Cousin Cramchild, if he sees even less than they. And so forth, and
so forth, till he is quite cross. And then tell him that if there are
no water-babies, at least there ought to be; and that, at least, he
cannot answer.

And meanwhile, my dear little man, till you know a great deal more about
nature than Professor Owen and Professor Huxley put together, don't tell
me about what cannot be, or fancy that anything is too wonderful to be
true. "We are fearfully and wonderfully made," said old David; and so we
are; and so is everything around us, down to the very deal table. Yes;
much more fearfully and wonderfully made, already, is the table, as it
stands now, nothing but a piece of dead deal wood, than if, as foxes
say, and geese believe, spirits could make it dance, or talk to you by
rapping on it.

Am I in earnest? Oh dear no! Don't you know that this is a fairy tale,
and all fun and pretence; and that you are not to believe one word of
it, even if it is true?

But at all events, so it happened to Tom. And, therefore, the keeper,
and the groom, and Sir John made a great mistake, and were very unhappy
(Sir John at least) without any reason, when they found a black thing in
the water, and said it was Tom's body, and that he had been drowned.
They were utterly mistaken. Tom was quite alive; and cleaner, and
merrier, than he ever had been. The fairies had washed him, you see, in
the swift river, so thoroughly, that not only his dirt, but his whole
husk and shell had been washed quite off him, and the pretty little real
Tom was washed out of the inside of it, and swam away, as a caddis does
when its case of stones and silk is bored through, and away it goes on
its back, paddling to the shore, there to split its skin, and fly away
as a caperer, on four fawn-coloured wings, with long legs and horns.
They are foolish fellows, the caperers, and fly into the candle at
night, if you leave the door open. We will hope Tom will be wiser, now
he has got safe out of his sooty old shell.

But good Sir John did not understand all this, not being a fellow of the
Linnæan Society; and he took it into his head that Tom was drowned. When
they looked into the empty pockets of his shell, and found no jewels
there, nor money--nothing but three marbles, and a brass button with a
string to it--then Sir John did something as like crying as ever he did
in his life, and blamed himself more bitterly than he need have done. So
he cried, and the groom-boy cried, and the huntsman cried, and the dame
cried, and the little girl cried, and the dairymaid cried, and the old
nurse cried (for it was somewhat her fault), and my lady cried, for
though people have wigs, that is no reason why they should not have
hearts; but the keeper did not cry, though he had been so good-natured
to Tom the morning before; for he was so dried up with running after
poachers, that you could no more get tears out of him than milk out of
leather: and Grimes did not cry, for Sir John gave him ten pounds, and
he drank it all in a week. Sir John sent, far and wide, to find Tom's
father and mother: but he might have looked till Doomsday for them, for
one was dead, and the other was in Botany Bay. And the little girl would
not play with her dolls for a whole week, and never forgot poor little
Tom. And soon my lady put a pretty little tombstone over Tom's shell in
the little churchyard in Vendale, where the old dalesmen all sleep side
by side between the limestone crags. And the dame decked it with
garlands every Sunday, till she grew so old that she could not stir
abroad; then the little children decked it for her. And always she sang
an old old song, as she sat spinning what she called her wedding-dress.
The children could not understand it, but they liked it none the less
for that; for it was very sweet, and very sad; and that was enough for
them. And these are the words of it:--

          _When all the world is young, lad,
            And all the trees are green;
          And every goose a swan, lad,
            And every lass a queen;
          Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
            And round the world away;
          Young blood must have its course, lad,
            And every dog his day._

          _When all the world is old, lad,
            And all the trees are brown;
          And all the sport is stale, lad,
            And all the wheels run down;
          Creep home, and take your place there,
            The spent and maimed among:
          God grant you find one face there,
            You loved when all was young._

Those are the words: but they are only the body of it: the soul of the
song was the dear old woman's sweet face, and sweet voice, and the sweet
old air to which she sang; and that, alas! one cannot put on paper. And
at last she grew so stiff and lame, that the angels were forced to carry
her; and they helped her on with her wedding-dress, and carried her up
over Harthover Fells, and a long way beyond that too; and there was a
new schoolmistress in Vendale, and we will hope that she was not
certificated.

And all the while Tom was swimming about in the river, with a pretty
little lace-collar of gills about his neck, as lively as a grig, and as
clean as a fresh-run salmon.

Now if you don't like my story, then go to the schoolroom and learn your
multiplication-table, and see if you like that better. Some people, no
doubt, would do so. So much the better for us, if not for them. It takes
all sorts, they say, to make a world.

          "He prayeth well who loveth well
           Both men and bird and beast;
           He prayeth best who loveth best
           All things both great and small:
           For the dear God who loveth us,
           He made and loveth all."

                                  COLERIDGE.





CHAPTER III


TOM was now quite amphibious. You do not know what that means?

You had better, then, ask the nearest Government pupil-teacher, who may
possibly answer you smartly enough, thus--

"Amphibious. Adjective, derived from two Greek words, _amphi_, a fish,
and _bios_, a beast. An animal supposed by our ignorant ancestors to be
compounded of a fish and a beast; which therefore, like the
hippopotamus, can't live on the land, and dies in the water."

However that may be, Tom was amphibious: and what is better still, he
was clean. For the first time in his life, he felt how comfortable it
was to have nothing on him but himself. But he only enjoyed it: he did
not know it, or think about it; just as you enjoy life and health, and
yet never think about being alive and healthy; and may it be long before
you have to think about it!

He did not remember having ever been dirty. Indeed, he did not remember
any of his old troubles, being tired, or hungry, or beaten, or sent up
dark chimneys. Since that sweet sleep, he had forgotten all about his
master, and Harthover Place, and the little white girl, and in a word,
all that had happened to him when he lived before; and what was best of
all, he had forgotten all the bad words which he had learned from
Grimes, and the rude boys with whom he used to play.

That is not strange: for you know, when you came into this world, and
became a land-baby, you remembered nothing. So why should he, when he
became a water-baby?

Then have you lived before?

My dear child, who can tell? One can only tell that, by remembering
something which happened where we lived before; and as we remember
nothing, we know nothing about it; and no book, and no man, can ever
tell us certainly.

There was a wise man once, a very wise man, and a very good man, who
wrote a poem about the feelings which some children have about having
lived before; and this is what he said--

          "_Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
            The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
                Hath elsewhere had its setting,
                  And cometh from afar:
              Not in entire forgetfulness,
              And not in utter nakedness,
            But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
                From God, who is our home._"

There, you can know no more than that. But if I was you, I would believe
that. For then the great fairy Science, who is likely to be queen of
all the fairies for many a year to come, can only do you good, and never
do you harm; and instead of fancying, with some people, that your body
makes your soul, as if a steam-engine could make its own coke; or, with
some people, that your soul has nothing to do with your body, but is
only stuck into it like a pin into a pin-cushion, to fall out with the
first shake;--you will believe the one true,

          _orthodox_,        _inductive_,
          _rational_,        _deductive_,
          _philosophical_,   _seductive_,
          _logical_,         _productive_,
          _irrefragable_,    _salutary_,
          _nominalistic_,    _comfortable_,
          _realistic_,
          _and on-all-accounts-to-be-received_

doctrine of this wonderful fairy tale; which is, that your soul makes
your body, just as a snail makes his shell. For the rest, it is enough
for us to be sure that whether or not we lived before, we shall live
again; though not, I hope, as poor little heathen Tom did. For he went
downward into the water: but we, I hope, shall go upward to a very
different place.

But Tom was very happy in the water. He had been sadly overworked in the
land-world; and so now, to make up for that, he had nothing but holidays
in the water-world for a long, long time to come. He had nothing to do
now but enjoy himself, and look at all the pretty things which are to
be seen in the cool clear water-world, where the sun is never too hot,
and the frost is never too cold.

And what did he live on? Water-cresses, perhaps; or perhaps water-gruel,
and water-milk; too many land-babies do so likewise. But we do not know
what one-tenth of the water-things eat; so we are not answerable for the
water-babies.

Sometimes he went along the smooth gravel water-ways, looking at the
crickets which ran in and out among the stones, as rabbits do on land;
or he climbed over the ledges of rock, and saw the sand-pipes hanging in
thousands, with every one of them a pretty little head and legs peeping
out; or he went into a still corner, and watched the caddises eating
dead sticks as greedily as you would eat plum-pudding, and building
their houses with silk and glue. Very fanciful ladies they were; none of
them would keep to the same materials for a day. One would begin with
some pebbles; then she would stick on a piece of green wood; then she
found a shell, and stuck it on too; and the poor shell was alive, and
did not like at all being taken to build houses with: but the caddis did
not let him have any voice in the matter, being rude and selfish, as
vain people are apt to be; then she stuck on a piece of rotten wood,
then a very smart pink stone, and so on, till she was patched all over
like an Irishman's coat. Then she found a long straw, five times as long
as herself, and said, "Hurrah! my sister has a tail, and I'll have one
too"; and she stuck it on her back, and marched about with it quite
proud, though it was very inconvenient indeed. And, at that, tails
became all the fashion among the caddis-baits in that pool, as they were
at the end of the Long Pond last May, and they all toddled about with
long straws sticking out behind, getting between each other's legs, and
tumbling over each other, and looking so ridiculous, that Tom laughed at
them till he cried, as we did. But they were quite right, you know; for
people must always follow the fashion, even if it be spoon-bonnets.

Then sometimes he came to a deep still reach; and there he saw the
water-forests. They would have looked to you only little weeds: but Tom,
you must remember, was so little that everything looked a hundred times
as big to him as it does to you, just as things do to a minnow, who sees
and catches the little water-creatures which you can only see in a
microscope.

And in the water-forest he saw the water-monkeys and water-squirrels
(they had all six legs, though; everything almost has six legs in the
water, except efts and water-babies); and nimbly enough they ran among
the branches. There were water-flowers there too, in thousands; and Tom
tried to pick them: but as soon as he touched them, they drew themselves
in and turned into knots of jelly; and then Tom saw that they were all
alive--bells, and stars, and wheels, and flowers, of all beautiful
shapes and colours; and all alive and busy, just as Tom was. So now he
found that there was a great deal more in the world than he had fancied
at first sight.

There was one wonderful little fellow, too, who peeped out of the top of
a house built of round bricks. He had two big wheels, and one little
one, all over teeth, spinning round and round like the wheels in a
thrashing-machine; and Tom stood and stared at him, to see what he was
going to make with his machinery. And what do you think he was doing?
Brick-making. With his two big wheels he swept together all the mud
which floated in the water: all that was nice in it he put into his
stomach and ate; and all the mud he put into the little wheel on his
breast, which really was a round hole set with teeth; and there he spun
it into a neat hard round brick; and then he took it and stuck it on the
top of his house-wall, and set to work to make another. Now was not he a
clever little fellow?

Tom thought so: but when he wanted to talk to him the brick-maker was
much too busy and proud of his work to take notice of him.

Now you must know that all the things under the water talk; only not
such a language as ours; but such as horses, and dogs, and cows, and
birds talk to each other; and Tom soon learned to understand them and
talk to them; so that he might have had very pleasant company if he had
only been a good boy. But I am sorry to say, he was too like some other
little boys, very fond of hunting and tormenting creatures for mere
sport. Some people say that boys cannot help it; that it is nature, and
only a proof that we are all originally descended from beasts of prey.
But whether it is nature or not, little boys can help it, and must help
it. For if they have naughty, low, mischievous tricks in their nature,
as monkeys have, that is no reason why they should give way to those
tricks like monkeys, who know no better. And therefore they must not
torment dumb creatures; for if they do, a certain old lady who is coming
will surely give them exactly what they deserve.

But Tom did not know that; and he pecked and howked the poor
water-things about sadly, till they were all afraid of him, and got out
of his way, or crept into their shells; so he had no one to speak to or
play with.

The water-fairies, of course, were very sorry to see him so unhappy, and
longed to take him, and tell him how naughty he was, and teach him to be
good, and to play and romp with him too: but they had been forbidden to
do that. Tom had to learn his lesson for himself by sound and sharp
experience, as many another foolish person has to do, though there may
be many a kind heart yearning over them all the while, and longing to
teach them what they can only teach themselves.

At last one day he found a caddis, and wanted it to peep out of its
house: but its house-door was shut. He had never seen a caddis with a
house-door before: so what must he do, the meddlesome little fellow, but
pull it open, to see what the poor lady was doing inside. What a shame!
How should you like to have any one breaking your bedroom-door in, to
see how you looked when you were in bed? So Tom broke to pieces the
door, which was the prettiest little grating of silk, stuck all over
with shining bits of crystal; and when he looked in, the caddis poked
out her head, and it had turned into just the shape of a bird's. But
when Tom spoke to her she could not answer; for her mouth and face were
tight tied up in a new night-cap of neat pink skin. However, if she
didn't answer, all the other caddises did; for they held up their hands
and shrieked like the cats in Struwwelpeter: "_Oh, you nasty horrid boy;
there you are at it again! And she had just laid herself up for a
fortnight's sleep, and then she would have come out with such beautiful
wings, and flown about, and laid such lots of eggs: and now you have
broken her door, and she can't mend it because her mouth is tied up for
a fortnight, and she will die. Who sent you here to worry us out of our
lives?_"

So Tom swam away. He was very much ashamed of himself, and felt all the
naughtier; as little boys do when they have done wrong and won't say so.

Then he came to a pool full of little trout, and began tormenting them,
and trying to catch them: but they slipped through his fingers, and
jumped clean out of water in their fright. But as Tom chased them, he
came close to a great dark hover under an alder root, and out floushed a
huge old brown trout ten times as big as he was, and ran right against
him, and knocked all the breath out of his body; and I don't know which
was the more frightened of the two.

Then he went on sulky and lonely, as he deserved to be; and under a
bank he saw a very ugly dirty creature sitting, about half as big as
himself; which had six legs, and a big stomach, and a most ridiculous
head with two great eyes and a face just like a donkey's.

"Oh," said Tom, "you are an ugly fellow to be sure!" and he began making
faces at him; and put his nose close to him, and halloed at him, like a
very rude boy.

When, hey presto; all the thing's donkey-face came off in a moment, and
out popped a long arm with a pair of pincers at the end of it, and
caught Tom by the nose. It did not hurt him much; but it held him quite
tight.

"Yah, ah! Oh, let me go!" cried Tom.

"Then let me go," said the creature. "I want to be quiet. I want to
split."

Tom promised to let him alone, and he let go. "Why do you want to
split?" said Tom.

"Because my brothers and sisters have all split, and turned into
beautiful creatures with wings; and I want to split too. Don't speak to
me. I am sure I shall split. I will split!"

Tom stood still, and watched him. And he swelled himself, and puffed,
and stretched himself out stiff, and at last--crack, puff, bang--he
opened all down his back, and then up to the top of his head.

And out of his inside came the most slender, elegant, soft creature, as
soft and smooth as Tom: but very pale and weak, like a little child who
has been ill a long time in a dark room. It moved its legs very feebly;
and looked about it half ashamed, like a girl when she goes for the
first time into a ballroom; and then it began walking slowly up a grass
stem to the top of the water.

Tom was so astonished that he never said a word: but he stared with all
his eyes. And he went up to the top of the water too, and peeped out to
see what would happen.

And as the creature sat in the warm bright sun, a wonderful change came
over it. It grew strong and firm; the most lovely colours began to show
on its body, blue and yellow and black, spots and bars and rings; out of
its back rose four great wings of bright brown gauze; and its eyes grew
so large that they filled all its head, and shone like ten thousand
diamonds.

"Oh, you beautiful creature!" said Tom; and he put out his hand to catch
it.

But the thing whirred up into the air, and hung poised on its wings a
moment, and then settled down again by Tom quite fearless.

"No!" it said, "you cannot catch me. I am a dragon-fly now, the king of
all the flies; and I shall dance in the sunshine, and hawk over the
river, and catch gnats, and have a beautiful wife like myself. I know
what I shall do. Hurrah!" And he flew away into the air, and began
catching gnats.

"Oh! come back, come back," cried Tom, "you beautiful creature. I have
no one to play with, and I am so lonely here. If you will but come back
I will never try to catch you."

"I don't care whether you do or not," said the dragon-fly; "for you
can't. But when I have had my dinner, and looked a little about this
pretty place, I will come back, and have a little chat about all I have
seen in my travels. Why, what a huge tree this is! and what huge leaves
on it!"

It was only a big dock: but you know the dragon-fly had never seen any
but little water-trees; starwort, and milfoil, and water-crowfoot, and
such like; so it did look very big to him. Besides, he was very
short-sighted, as all dragon-flies are; and never could see a yard
before his nose; any more than a great many other folks, who are not
half as handsome as he.

The dragon-fly did come back, and chatted away with Tom. He was a little
conceited about his fine colours and his large wings; but you know, he
had been a poor dirty ugly creature all his life before; so there were
great excuses for him. He was very fond of talking about all the
wonderful things he saw in the trees and the meadows; and Tom liked to
listen to him, for he had forgotten all about them. So in a little while
they became great friends.

And I am very glad to say, that Tom learned such a lesson that day, that
he did not torment creatures for a long time after. And then the
caddises grew quite tame, and used to tell him strange stories about the
way they built their houses, and changed their skins, and turned at last
into winged flies; till Tom began to long to change his skin, and have
wings like them some day.

And the trout and he made it up (for trout very soon forget if they have
been frightened and hurt). So Tom used to play with them at hare and
hounds, and great fun they had; and he used to try to leap out of the
water, head over heels, as they did before a shower came on; but somehow
he never could manage it. He liked most, though, to see them rising at
the flies, as they sailed round and round under the shadow of the great
oak, where the beetles fell flop into the water, and the green
caterpillars let themselves down from the boughs by silk ropes for no
reason at all; and then changed their foolish minds for no reason at all
either; and hauled themselves up again into the tree, rolling up the
rope in a ball between their paws; which is a very clever rope-dancer's
trick, and neither Blondin nor Leotard could do it: but why they should
take so much trouble about it no one can tell; for they cannot get their
living, as Blondin and Leotard do, by trying to break their necks on a
string.

And very often Tom caught them just as they touched the water; and
caught the alder-flies, and the caperers, and the cock-tailed duns and
spinners, yellow, and brown, and claret, and grey, and gave them to his
friends the trout. Perhaps he was not quite kind to the flies; but one
must do a good turn to one's friends when one can.

And at last he gave up catching even the flies; for he made acquaintance
with one by accident and found him a very merry little fellow. And this
was the way it happened; and it is all quite true.

He was basking at the top of the water one hot day in July, catching
duns and feeding the trout, when he saw a new sort, a dark grey little
fellow with a brown head. He was a very little fellow indeed: but he
made the most of himself, as people ought to do. He cocked up his head,
and he cocked up his wings, and he cocked up his tail, and he cocked up
the two whisks at his tail-end, and, in short, he looked the cockiest
little man of all little men. And so he proved to be; for instead of
getting away, he hopped upon Tom's finger, and sat there as bold as nine
tailors; and he cried out in the tiniest, shrillest, squeakiest little
voice you ever heard,

"Much obliged to you, indeed; but I don't want it yet."

"Want what?" said Tom, quite taken aback by his impudence.

"Your leg, which you are kind enough to hold out for me to sit on. I
must just go and see after my wife for a few minutes. Dear me! what a
troublesome business a family is!" (though the idle little rogue did
nothing at all, but left his poor wife to lay all the eggs by herself).
"When I come back, I shall be glad of it, if you'll be so good as to
keep it sticking out just so"; and off he flew.

Tom thought him a very cool sort of personage; and still more so, when,
in five minutes he came back, and said--"Ah, you were tired waiting?
Well, your other leg will do as well."

And he popped himself down on Tom's knee, and began chatting away in his
squeaking voice.

"So you live under the water? It's a low place. I lived there for some
time; and was very shabby and dirty. But I didn't choose that that
should last. So I turned respectable, and came up to the top, and put on
this grey suit. It's a very business-like suit, you think, don't you?"

"Very neat and quiet indeed," said Tom.

"Yes, one must be quiet and neat and respectable, and all that sort of
thing for a little, when one becomes a family man. But I'm tired of it,
that's the truth. I've done quite enough business, I consider, in the
last week, to last me my life. So I shall put on a ball-dress, and go
out and be a smart man, and see the gay world, and have a dance or two.
Why shouldn't one be jolly if one can?"

"And what will become of your wife?"

"Oh! she is a very plain stupid creature, and that's the truth; and
thinks about nothing but eggs. If she chooses to come, why she may; and
if not, why I go without her;--and here I go."

And, as he spoke, he turned quite pale, and then quite white.

"Why, you're ill!" said Tom. But he did not answer.

"You're dead," said Tom, looking at him as he stood on his knee as white
as a ghost.

"No, I ain't!" answered a little squeaking voice over his head. "This is
me up here, in my ball-dress; and that's my skin. Ha, ha! you could not
do such a trick as that!"

And no more Tom could, nor Houdin, nor Robin, nor Frikell, nor all the
conjurers in the world. For the little rogue had jumped clean out of his
own skin, and left it standing on Tom's knee, eyes, wings, legs, tail,
exactly as if it had been alive.

"Ha, ha!" he said, and he jerked and skipped up and down, never stopping
an instant, just as if he had St. Vitus's dance. "Ain't I a pretty
fellow now?"

And so he was; for his body was white, and his tail orange, and his eyes
all the colours of a peacock's tail. And what was the oddest of all, the
whisks at the end of his tail had grown five times as long as they were
before.

"Ah!" said he, "now I will see the gay world. My living won't cost me
much, for I have no mouth, you see, and no inside; so I can never be
hungry nor have the stomach-ache neither."

No more he had. He had grown as dry and hard and empty as a quill, as
such silly shallow-hearted fellows deserve to grow.

But, instead of being ashamed of his emptiness, he was quite proud of
it, as a good many fine gentlemen are, and began flirting and flipping
up and down, and singing--

          "_My wife shall dance, and I shall sing,
              So merrily pass the day;
            For I hold it for quite the wisest thing,
              To drive dull care away._"

And he danced up and down for three days and three nights, till he grew
so tired, that he tumbled into the water, and floated down. But what
became of him Tom never knew, and he himself never minded; for Tom heard
him singing to the last, as he floated down--

          "_To drive dull care away-ay-ay!_"

And if he did not care, why nobody else cared either.

But one day Tom had a new adventure. He was sitting on a water-lily
leaf, he and his friend the dragon-fly, watching the gnats dance. The
dragon-fly had eaten as many as he wanted, and was sitting quite still
and sleepy, for it was very hot and bright. The gnats (who did not care
the least for their poor brothers' death) danced a foot over his head
quite happily, and a large black fly settled within an inch of his nose,
and began washing his own face and combing his hair with his paws: but
the dragon-fly never stirred, and kept on chatting to Tom about the
times when he lived under the water.

Suddenly, Tom heard the strangest noise up the stream; cooing, and
grunting, and whining, and squeaking, as if you had put into a bag two
stock-doves, nine mice, three guinea-pigs, and a blind puppy, and left
them there to settle themselves and make music.

He looked up the water, and there he saw a sight as strange as the
noise; a great ball rolling over and over down the stream, seeming one
moment of soft brown fur, and the next of shining glass: and yet it was
not a ball; for sometimes it broke up and streamed away in pieces, and
then it joined again; and all the while the noise came out of it louder
and louder.

Tom asked the dragon-fly what it could be: but, of course, with his
short sight, he could not even see it, though it was not ten yards away.
So he took the neatest little header into the water, and started off to
see for himself; and, when he came near, the ball turned out to be four
or five beautiful creatures, many times larger than Tom, who were
swimming about, and rolling, and diving, and twisting, and wrestling,
and cuddling, and kissing, and biting, and scratching, in the most
charming fashion that ever was seen. And if you don't believe me, you
may go to the Zoological Gardens (for I am afraid that you won't see it
nearer, unless, perhaps, you get up at five in the morning, and go down
to Cordery's Moor, and watch by the great withy pollard which hangs over
the backwater, where the otters breed sometimes), and then say, if
otters at play in the water are not the merriest, lithest, gracefullest
creatures you ever saw.

But, when the biggest of them saw Tom, she darted out from the rest,
and cried in the water-language sharply enough, "Quick, children, here
is something to eat, indeed!" and came at poor Tom, showing such a
wicked pair of eyes, and such a set of sharp teeth in a grinning mouth,
that Tom, who had thought her very handsome, said to himself, _Handsome
is that handsome does_, and slipped in between the water-lily roots as
fast as he could, and then turned round and made faces at her.

"Come out," said the wicked old otter, "or it will be worse for you."

But Tom looked at her from between two thick roots, and shook them with
all his might, making horrible faces all the while, just as he used to
grin through the railings at the old women, when he lived before. It was
not quite well bred, no doubt; but you know, Tom had not finished his
education yet.

"Come away, children," said the otter in disgust, "it is not worth
eating, after all. It is only a nasty eft, which nothing eats, not even
those vulgar pike in the pond."

"I am not an eft!" said Tom; "efts have tails."

"You are an eft," said the otter, very positively; "I see your two hands
quite plain, and I know you have a tail."

"I tell you I have not," said Tom. "Look here!" and he turned his pretty
little self quite round; and sure enough, he had no more tail than you.

The otter might have got out of it by saying that Tom was a frog: but,
like a great many other people, when she had once said a thing, she
stood to it, right or wrong; so she answered:

"I say you are an eft, and therefore you are, and not fit food for
gentlefolk like me and my children. You may stay there till the salmon
eat you (she knew the salmon would not, but she wanted to frighten poor
Tom). Ha! ha! they will eat you, and we will eat them"; and the otter
laughed such a wicked cruel laugh--as you may hear them do sometimes;
and the first time that you hear it you will probably think it is
bogies.

"What are salmon?" asked Tom.

"Fish, you eft, great fish, nice fish to eat. They are the lords of the
fish, and we are lords of the salmon"; and she laughed again. "We hunt
them up and down the pools, and drive them up into a corner, the silly
things; they are so proud, and bully the little trout, and the minnows,
till they see us coming, and then they are so meek all at once; and we
catch them, but we disdain to eat them all; we just bite out their soft
throats and suck their sweet juice--Oh, so good!"--(and she licked her
wicked lips)--"and then throw them away, and go and catch another. They
are coming soon, children, coming soon; I can smell the rain coming up
off the sea, and then hurrah for a fresh, and salmon, and plenty of
eating all day long."

And the otter grew so proud that she turned head over heels twice, and
then stood upright half out of the water, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

"And where do they come from?" asked Tom, who kept himself very close,
for he was considerably frightened.

"Out of the sea, eft, the great wide sea, where they might stay and be
safe if they liked. But out of the sea the silly things come, into the
great river down below, and we come up to watch for them; and when they
go down again we go down and follow them. And there we fish for the bass
and the pollock, and have jolly days along the shore, and toss and roll
in the breakers, and sleep snug in the warm dry crags. Ah, that is a
merry life too, children, if it were not for those horrid men."

"What are men?" asked Tom; but somehow he seemed to know before he
asked.

"Two-legged things, eft: and, now I come to look at you, they are
actually something like you, if you had not a tail" (she was determined
that Tom should have a tail), "only a great deal bigger, worse luck for
us; and they catch the fish with hooks and lines, which get into our
feet sometimes, and set pots along the rocks to catch lobsters. They
speared my poor dear husband as he went out to find something for me to
eat. I was laid up among the crags then, and we were very low in the
world, for the sea was so rough that no fish would come in shore. But
they speared him, poor fellow, and I saw them carrying him away upon a
pole. Ah, he lost his life for your sakes, my children, poor dear
obedient creature that he was."

And the otter grew so sentimental (for otters can be very sentimental
when they choose, like a good many people who are both cruel and greedy,
and no good to anybody at all) that she sailed solemnly away down the
burn, and Tom saw her no more for that time. And lucky it was for her
that she did so; for no sooner was she gone, than down the bank came
seven little rough terrier dogs, snuffing and yapping, and grubbing and
splashing, in full cry after the otter. Tom hid among the water-lilies
till they were gone; for he could not guess that they were the
water-fairies come to help him.

But he could not help thinking of what the otter had said about the
great river and the broad sea. And, as he thought, he longed to go and
see them. He could not tell why; but the more he thought, the more he
grew discontented with the narrow little stream in which he lived, and
all his companions there; and wanted to get out into the wide wide
world, and enjoy all the wonderful sights of which he was sure it was
full.

And once he set off to go down the stream. But the stream was very low;
and when he came to the shallows he could not keep under water, for
there was no water left to keep under. So the sun burned his back and
made him sick; and he went back again and lay quiet in the pool for a
whole week more.

And then, on the evening of a very hot day, he saw a sight.

He had been very stupid all day, and so had the trout; for they would
not move an inch to take a fly, though there were thousands on the
water, but lay dozing at the bottom under the shade of the stones; and
Tom lay dozing too, and was glad to cuddle their smooth cool sides, for
the water was quite warm and unpleasant.

But toward evening it grew suddenly dark, and Tom looked up and saw a
blanket of black clouds lying right across the valley above his head,
resting on the crags right and left. He felt not quite frightened, but
very still; for everything was still. There was not a whisper of wind,
nor a chirp of a bird to be heard; and next a few great drops of rain
fell plop into the water, and one hit Tom on the nose, and made him pop
his head down quickly enough.

And then the thunder roared, and the lightning flashed, and leapt across
Vendale and back again, from cloud to cloud, and cliff to cliff, till
the very rocks in the stream seemed to shake: and Tom looked up at it
through the water, and thought it the finest thing he ever saw in his
life.

But out of the water he dared not put his head; for the rain came down
by bucketsful, and the hail hammered like shot on the stream, and
churned it into foam; and soon the stream rose, and rushed down, higher
and higher, and fouler and fouler, full of beetles, and sticks; and
straws, and worms, and addle-eggs, and wood-lice, and leeches, and odds
and ends, and omnium-gatherums, and this, that, and the other, enough to
fill nine museums.

Tom could hardly stand against the stream, and hid behind a rock. But
the trout did not; for out they rushed from among the stones, and began
gobbling the beetles and leeches in the most greedy and quarrelsome way,
and swimming about with great worms hanging out of their mouths, tugging
and kicking to get them away from each other.

And now, by the flashes of the lightning, Tom saw a new sight--all the
bottom of the stream alive with great eels, turning and twisting along,
all down stream and away. They had been hiding for weeks past in the
cracks of the rocks, and in burrows in the mud; and Tom had hardly ever
seen them, except now and then at night: but now they were all out, and
went hurrying past him so fiercely and wildly that he was quite
frightened. And as they hurried past he could hear them say to each
other, "We must run, we must run. What a jolly thunderstorm! Down to the
sea, down to the sea!"

And then the otter came by with all her brood, twining and sweeping
along as fast as the eels themselves; and she spied Tom as she came by,
and said:

"Now is your time, eft, if you want to see the world. Come along,
children, never mind those nasty eels: we shall breakfast on salmon
to-morrow. Down to the sea, down to the sea!"

Then came a flash brighter than all the rest, and by the light of it--in
the thousandth part of a second they were gone again--but he had seen
them, he was certain of it--Three beautiful little white girls, with
their arms twined round each other's necks, floating down the torrent,
as they sang, "Down to the sea, down to the sea!"

[Illustration: "From which great trout rushed out on Tom."--_P. 88._]

"Oh stay! Wait for me!" cried Tom; but they were gone: yet he could hear
their voices clear and sweet through the roar of thunder and water and
wind, singing as they died away, "Down to the sea!"

"Down to the sea?" said Tom; "everything is going to the sea, and I will
go too. Good-bye, trout." But the trout were so busy gobbling worms that
they never turned to answer him; so that Tom was spared the pain of
bidding them farewell.

And now, down the rushing stream, guided by the bright flashes of the
storm; past tall birch-fringed rocks, which shone out one moment as
clear as day, and the next were dark as night; past dark hovers under
swirling banks, from which great trout rushed out on Tom, thinking him
to be good to eat, and turned back sulkily, for the fairies sent them
home again with a tremendous scolding, for daring to meddle with a
water-baby; on through narrow strids and roaring cataracts, where Tom
was deafened and blinded for a moment by the rushing waters; along deep
reaches, where the white water-lilies tossed and flapped beneath the
wind and hail; past sleeping villages; under dark bridge-arches, and
away and away to the sea. And Tom could not stop, and did not care to
stop; he would see the great world below, and the salmon, and the
breakers, and the wide wide sea.

And when the daylight came, Tom found himself out in the salmon river.

And what sort of a river was it? Was it like an Irish stream, winding
through the brown bogs, where the wild ducks squatter up from among the
white water-lilies, and the curlews flit to and fro, crying
"Tullie-wheep, mind your sheep"; and Dennis tells you strange stories of
the Peishtamore, the great bogy-snake which lies in the black peat
pools, among the old pine-stems, and puts his head out at night to snap
at the cattle as they come down to drink?--But you must not believe all
that Dennis tells you, mind; for if you ask him:

"Is there a salmon here, do you think, Dennis?"

"Is it salmon, thin, your honour manes? Salmon? Cartloads it is of thim,
thin, an' ridgmens, shouldthering ache out of water, av' ye'd but the
luck to see thim."

Then you fish the pool all over, and never get a rise.

"But there can't be a salmon here, Dennis! and, if you'll but think, if
one had come up last tide, he'd be gone to the higher pools by now."

"Shure thin, and your honour's the thrue fisherman, and understands it
all like a book. Why, ye spake as if ye'd known the wather a thousand
years! As I said, how could there be a fish here at all, just now?"

"But you said just now they were shouldering each other out of water?"

And then Dennis will look up at you with his handsome, sly, soft,
sleepy, good-natured, untrustable, Irish grey eye, and answer with the
prettiest smile:

"Shure, and didn't I think your honour would like a pleasant answer?"

So you must not trust Dennis, because he is in the habit of giving
pleasant answers: but, instead of being angry with him, you must
remember that he is a poor Paddy, and knows no better; so you must just
burst out laughing; and then he will burst out laughing too, and slave
for you, and trot about after you, and show you good sport if he
can--for he is an affectionate fellow, and as fond of sport as you
are--and if he can't, tell you fibs instead, a hundred an hour; and
wonder all the while why poor ould Ireland does not prosper like England
and Scotland, and some other places, where folk have taken up a
ridiculous fancy that honesty is the best policy.

Or was it like a Welsh salmon river, which is remarkable chiefly (at
least, till this last year) for containing no salmon, as they have been
all poached out by the enlightened peasantry, to prevent the _Cythrawl
Sassenach_ (which means you, my little dear, your kith and kin, and
signifies much the same as the Chinese _Fan Quei_) from coming bothering
into Wales, with good tackle, and ready money, and civilisation, and
common honesty, and other like things of which the Cymry stand in no
need whatsoever?

Or was it such a salmon stream as I trust you will see among the
Hampshire water-meadows before your hairs are grey, under the wise new
fishing-laws?--when Winchester apprentices shall covenant, as they did
three hundred years ago, not to be made to eat salmon more than three
days a week; and fresh-run fish shall be as plentiful under Salisbury
spire as they are in Holly-hole at Christchurch; in the good time
coming, when folks shall see that, of all Heaven's gifts of food, the
one to be protected most carefully is that worthy gentleman salmon, who
is generous enough to go down to the sea weighing five ounces, and to
come back next year weighing five pounds, without having cost the soil
or the state one farthing?

Or was it like a Scotch stream, such as Arthur Clough drew in his
"Bothie":--

                _"Where over a ledge of granite
  Into a granite bason the amber torrent descended. . . .
  Beautiful there for the colour derived from green rocks under;
  Beautiful most of all, where beads of foam uprising
  Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the
      stillness. . . .
  Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendant birch
      boughs." . . ._

Ah, my little man, when you are a big man, and fish such a stream as
that, you will hardly care, I think, whether she be roaring down in full
spate, like coffee covered with scald cream, while the fish are swirling
at your fly as an oar-blade swirls in a boat-race, or flashing up the
cataract like silver arrows, out of the fiercest of the foam; or
whether the fall be dwindled to a single thread, and the shingle below
be as white and dusty as a turnpike road, while the salmon huddle
together in one dark cloud in the clear amber pool, sleeping away their
time till the rain creeps back again off the sea. You will not care
much, if you have eyes and brains; for you will lay down your rod
contentedly, and drink in at your eyes the beauty of that glorious
place; and listen to the water-ouzel piping on the stones, and watch the
yellow roes come down to drink and look up at you with their great soft
trustful eyes, as much as to say, "You could not have the heart to shoot
at us?" And then, if you have sense, you will turn and talk to the great
giant of a gilly who lies basking on the stone beside you. He will tell
you no fibs, my little man; for he is a Scotchman, and fears God, and
not the priest; and, as you talk with him, you will be surprised more
and more at his knowledge, his sense, his humour, his courtesy; and you
will find out--unless you have found it out before--that a man may learn
from his Bible to be a more thorough gentleman than if he had been
brought up in all the drawing-rooms in London.

No. It was none of these, the salmon stream at Harthover. It was such a
stream as you see in dear old Bewick; Bewick, who was born and bred upon
them. A full hundred yards broad it was, sliding on from broad pool to
broad shallow, and broad shallow to broad pool, over great fields of
shingle, under oak and ash coverts, past low cliffs of sandstone, past
green meadows, and fair parks, and a great house of grey stone, and
brown moors above, and here and there against the sky the smoking
chimney of a colliery. You must look at Bewick to see just what it was
like, for he has drawn it a hundred times with the care and the love of
a true north countryman; and, even if you do not care about the salmon
river, you ought, like all good boys, to know your Bewick.

At least, so old Sir John used to say, and very sensibly he put it too,
as he was wont to do:

"If they want to describe a finished young gentleman in France, I hear,
they say of him, '_Il sait son Rabelais._' But if I want to describe one
in England, I say, '_He knows his Bewick._' And I think that is the
higher compliment."

But Tom thought nothing about what the river was like. All his fancy
was, to get down to the wide wide sea.

And after a while he came to a place where the river spread out into
broad still shallow reaches, so wide that little Tom, as he put his head
out of the water, could hardly see across.

And there he stopped. He got a little frightened. "This must be the
sea," he thought. "What a wide place it is! If I go on into it I shall
surely lose my way, or some strange thing will bite me. I will stop here
and look out for the otter, or the eels, or some one to tell me where I
shall go."

So he went back a little way, and crept into a crack of the rock, just
where the river opened out into the wide shallows, and watched for some
one to tell him his way: but the otter and the eels were gone on miles
and miles down the stream.

There he waited, and slept too, for he was quite tired with his night's
journey; and, when he woke, the stream was clearing to a beautiful amber
hue, though it was still very high. And after a while he saw a sight
which made him jump up; for he knew in a moment it was one of the things
which he had come to look for.

Such a fish! ten times as big as the biggest trout, and a hundred times
as big as Tom, sculling up the stream past him, as easily as Tom had
sculled down.

Such a fish! shining silver from head to tail, and here and there a
crimson dot; with a grand hooked nose and grand curling lip, and a grand
bright eye, looking round him as proudly as a king, and surveying the
water right and left as if all belonged to him. Surely he must be the
salmon, the king of all the fish.

Tom was so frightened that he longed to creep into a hole; but he need
not have been; for salmon are all true gentlemen, and, like true
gentlemen, they look noble and proud enough, and yet, like true
gentlemen, they never harm or quarrel with any one, but go about their
own business, and leave rude fellows to themselves.

The salmon looked at him full in the face, and then went on without
minding him, with a swish or two of his tail which made the stream boil
again. And in a few minutes came another, and then four or five, and so
on; and all passed Tom, rushing and plunging up the cataract with strong
strokes of their silver tails, now and then leaping clean out of water
and up over a rock, shining gloriously for a moment in the bright sun;
while Tom was so delighted that he could have watched them all day long.

And at last one came up bigger than all the rest; but he came slowly,
and stopped, and looked back, and seemed very anxious and busy. And Tom
saw that he was helping another salmon, an especially handsome one, who
had not a single spot upon it, but was clothed in pure silver from nose
to tail.

"My dear," said the great fish to his companion, "you really look
dreadfully tired, and you must not over-exert yourself at first. Do rest
yourself behind this rock"; and he shoved her gently with his nose, to
the rock where Tom sat.

You must know that this was the salmon's wife. For salmon, like other
true gentlemen, always choose their lady, and love her, and are true to
her, and take care of her and work for her, and fight for her, as every
true gentleman ought; and are not like vulgar chub and roach and pike,
who have no high feelings, and take no care of their wives.

Then he saw Tom, and looked at him very fiercely one moment, as if he
was going to bite him.

"What do you want here?" he said, very fiercely.

"Oh, don't hurt me!" cried Tom. "I only want to look at you; you are so
handsome."

"Ah?" said the salmon, very stately but very civilly. "I really beg your
pardon; I see what you are, my little dear. I have met one or two
creatures like you before, and found them very agreeable and
well-behaved. Indeed, one of them showed me a great kindness lately,
which I hope to be able to repay. I hope we shall not be in your way
here. As soon as this lady is rested, we shall proceed on our journey."

What a well-bred old salmon he was!

"So you have seen things like me before?" asked Tom.

"Several times, my dear. Indeed, it was only last night that one at the
river's mouth came and warned me and my wife of some new stake-nets
which had got into the stream, I cannot tell how, since last winter, and
showed us the way round them, in the most charmingly obliging way."

"So there are babies in the sea?" cried Tom, and clapped his little
hands. "Then I shall have some one to play with there? How delightful!"

"Were there no babies up this stream?" asked the lady salmon.

"No! and I grew so lonely. I thought I saw three last night; but they
were gone in an instant, down to the sea. So I went too; for I had
nothing to play with but caddises and dragon-flies and trout."

"Ugh!" cried the lady, "what low company!"

"My dear, if he has been in low company, he has certainly not learnt
their low manners," said the salmon.

"No, indeed, poor little dear: but how sad for him to live among such
people as caddises, who have actually six legs, the nasty things; and
dragon-flies, too! why they are not even good to eat; for I tried them
once, and they are all hard and empty; and, as for trout, every one
knows what they are." Whereon she curled up her lip, and looked
dreadfully scornful, while her husband curled up his too, till he looked
as proud as Alcibiades.

"Why do you dislike the trout so?" asked Tom.

"My dear, we do not even mention them, if we can help it; for I am sorry
to say they are relations of ours who do us no credit. A great many
years ago they were just like us: but they were so lazy, and cowardly,
and greedy, that instead of going down to the sea every year to see the
world and grow strong and fat, they chose to stay and poke about in the
little streams and eat worms and grubs; and they are very properly
punished for it; for they have grown ugly and brown and spotted and
small; and are actually so degraded in their tastes, that they will eat
our children."

"And then they pretend to scrape acquaintance with us again," said the
lady. "Why, I have actually known one of them propose to a lady salmon,
the little impudent little creature."

"I should hope," said the gentleman, "that there are very few ladies of
our race who would degrade themselves by listening to such a creature
for an instant. If I saw such a thing happen, I should consider it my
duty to put them both to death upon the spot." So the old salmon said,
like an old blue-blooded hidalgo of Spain; and what is more, he would
have done it too. For you must know, no enemies are so bitter against
each other as those who are of the same race; and a salmon looks on a
trout, as some great folks look on some little folks, as something just
too much like himself to be tolerated.

          "Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
           Our meddling intellect
           Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things
           We murder to dissect.

          "Enough of science and of art:
           Close up these barren leaves;
           Come forth, and bring with you a heart
           That watches and receives."

                                    WORDSWORTH.





CHAPTER IV


[Illustration: "He watched the moonlight on the rippling river." _P.
101._]

SO the salmon went up, after Tom had warned them of the wicked old
otter; and Tom went down, but slowly and cautiously, coasting along the
shore. He was many days about it, for it was many miles down to the sea;
and perhaps he would never have found his way, if the fairies had not
guided him, without his seeing their fair faces, or feeling their gentle
hands.

And, as he went, he had a very strange adventure. It was a clear still
September night, and the moon shone so brightly down through the water,
that he could not sleep, though he shut his eyes as tight as possible.
So at last he came up to the top, and sat upon a little point of rock,
and looked up at the broad yellow moon, and wondered what she was, and
thought that she looked at him. And he watched the moonlight on the
rippling river, and the black heads of the firs, and the silver-frosted
lawns, and listened to the owl's hoot, and the snipe's bleat, and the
fox's bark, and the otter's laugh; and smelt the soft perfume of the
birches, and the wafts of heather honey off the grouse moor far above;
and felt very happy, though he could not well tell why. You, of course,
would have been very cold sitting there on a September night, without
the least bit of clothes on your wet back; but Tom was a water-baby, and
therefore felt cold no more than a fish.

Suddenly, he saw a beautiful sight. A bright red light moved along the
river-side, and threw down into the water a long tap-root of flame. Tom,
curious little rogue that he was, must needs go and see what it was; so
he swam to the shore, and met the light as it stopped over a shallow run
at the edge of a low rock.

And there, underneath the light, lay five or six great salmon, looking
up at the flame with their great goggle eyes, and wagging their tails,
as if they were very much pleased at it.

Tom came to the top, to look at this wonderful light nearer, and made a
splash.

And he heard a voice say:

"There was a fish rose."

He did not know what the words meant: but he seemed to know the sound of
them, and to know the voice which spoke them; and he saw on the bank
three great two-legged creatures, one of whom held the light, flaring
and sputtering, and another a long pole. And he knew that they were men,
and was frightened, and crept into a hole in the rock, from which he
could see what went on.

The man with the torch bent down over the water, and looked earnestly
in; and then he said:

"Tak' that muckle fellow, lad; he's ower fifteen punds; and haud your
hand steady."

Tom felt that there was some danger coming, and longed to warn the
foolish salmon, who kept staring up at the light as if he was bewitched.
But before he could make up his mind, down came the pole through the
water; there was a fearful splash and struggle, and Tom saw that the
poor salmon was speared right through, and was lifted out of the water.

And then, from behind, there sprang on these three men three other men;
and there were shouts, and blows, and words which Tom recollected to
have heard before; and he shuddered and turned sick at them now, for he
felt somehow that they were strange, and ugly, and wrong, and horrible.
And it all began to come back to him. They were men; and they were
fighting; savage, desperate, up-and-down fighting, such as Tom had seen
too many times before.

And he stopped his little ears, and longed to swim away; and was very
glad that he was a water-baby, and had nothing to do any more with
horrid dirty men, with foul clothes on their backs, and foul words on
their lips; but he dared not stir out of his hole: while the rock shook
over his head with the trampling and struggling of the keepers and the
poachers.

All of a sudden there was a tremendous splash, and a frightful flash,
and a hissing, and all was still.

For into the water, close to Tom, fell one of the men; he who held the
light in his hand. Into the swift river he sank, and rolled over and
over in the current. Tom heard the men above run along, seemingly
looking for him; but he drifted down into the deep hole below, and there
lay quite still, and they could not find him.

Tom waited a long time, till all was quiet; and then he peeped out, and
saw the man lying. At last he screwed up his courage and swam down to
him. "Perhaps," he thought, "the water has made him fall asleep, as it
did me."

Then he went nearer. He grew more and more curious, he could not tell
why. He must go and look at him. He would go very quietly, of course; so
he swam round and round him, closer and closer; and, as he did not stir,
at last he came quite close and looked him in the face.

The moon shone so bright that Tom could see every feature; and, as he
saw, he recollected, bit by bit, it was his old master, Grimes.

Tom turned tail, and swam away as fast as he could.

"Oh dear me!" he thought, "now he will turn into a water-baby. What a
nasty troublesome one he will be! And perhaps he will find me out, and
beat me again."

So he went up the river again a little way, and lay there the rest of
the night under an alder root; but, when morning came, he longed to go
down again to the big pool, and see whether Mr. Grimes had turned into a
water-baby yet.

So he went very carefully, peeping round all the rocks, and hiding under
all the roots. Mr. Grimes lay there still; he had not turned into a
water-baby. In the afternoon Tom went back again. He could not rest
till he had found out what had become of Mr. Grimes. But this time Mr.
Grimes was gone; and Tom made up his mind that he was turned into a
water-baby.

He might have made himself easy, poor little man; Mr. Grimes did not
turn into a water-baby, or anything like one at all. But he did not make
himself easy; and a long time he was fearful lest he should meet Grimes
suddenly in some deep pool. He could not know that the fairies had
carried him away, and put him, where they put everything which falls
into the water, exactly where it ought to be. But, do you know, what had
happened to Mr. Grimes had such an effect on him that he never poached
salmon any more. And it is quite certain that, when a man becomes a
confirmed poacher, the only way to cure him is to put him under water
for twenty-four hours, like Grimes. So when you grow to be a big man, do
you behave as all honest fellows should; and never touch a fish or a
head of game which belongs to another man without his express leave; and
then people will call you a gentleman, and treat you like one; and
perhaps give you good sport: instead of hitting you into the river, or
calling you a poaching snob.

Then Tom went on down, for he was afraid of staying near Grimes: and as
he went, all the vale looked sad. The red and yellow leaves showered
down into the river; the flies and beetles were all dead and gone; the
chill autumn fog lay low upon the hills, and sometimes spread itself so
thickly on the river that he could not see his way. But he felt his way
instead, following the flow of the stream, day after day, past great
bridges, past boats and barges, past the great town, with its wharfs,
and mills, and tall smoking chimneys, and ships which rode at anchor in
the stream; and now and then he ran against their hawsers, and wondered
what they were, and peeped out, and saw the sailors lounging on board
smoking their pipes; and ducked under again, for he was terribly afraid
of being caught by man and turned into a chimney-sweep once more. He did
not know that the fairies were close to him always, shutting the
sailors' eyes lest they should see him, and turning him aside from
millraces, and sewer-mouths, and all foul and dangerous things. Poor
little fellow, it was a dreary journey for him; and more than once he
longed to be back in Vendale, playing with the trout in the bright
summer sun. But it could not be. What has been once can never come over
again. And people can be little babies, even water-babies, only once in
their lives.

Besides, people who make up their minds to go and see the world, as Tom
did, must needs find it a weary journey. Lucky for them if they do not
lose heart and stop half-way, instead of going on bravely to the end as
Tom did. For then they will remain neither boys nor men, neither fish,
flesh, nor good red-herring: having learnt a great deal too much, and
yet not enough; and sown their wild oats, without having the advantage
of reaping them.

But Tom was always a brave, determined, little English bull-dog, who
never knew when he was beaten; and on and on he held, till he saw a
long way off the red buoy through the fog. And then he found to his
surprise, the stream turned round, and running up inland.

It was the tide, of course: but Tom knew nothing of the tide. He only
knew that in a minute more the water, which had been fresh, turned salt
all round him. And then there came a change over him. He felt as strong,
and light, and fresh, as if his veins had run champagne; and gave, he
did not know why, three skips out of the water, a yard high, and head
over heels, just as the salmon do when they first touch the noble rich
salt water, which, as some wise men tell us, is the mother of all living
things.

He did not care now for the tide being against him. The red buoy was in
sight, dancing in the open sea; and to the buoy he would go, and to it
he went. He passed great shoals of bass and mullet, leaping and rushing
in after the shrimps, but he never heeded them, or they him; and once he
passed a great black shining seal, who was coming in after the mullet.
The seal put his head and shoulders out of water, and stared at him,
looking exactly like a fat old greasy negro with a grey pate. And Tom,
instead of being frightened, said, "How d'ye do, sir; what a beautiful
place the sea is!" And the old seal, instead of trying to bite him,
looked at him with his soft sleepy winking eyes, and said, "Good tide to
you, my little man; are you looking for your brothers and sisters? I
passed them all at play outside."

"Oh, then," said Tom, "I shall have playfellows at last," and he swam on
to the buoy, and got upon it (for he was quite out of breath) and sat
there, and looked round for water-babies: but there were none to be
seen.

The sea-breeze came in freshly with the tide and blew the fog away; and
the little waves danced for joy around the buoy, and the old buoy danced
with them. The shadows of the clouds ran races over the bright blue bay,
and yet never caught each other up; and the breakers plunged merrily
upon the wide white sands, and jumped up over the rocks, to see what the
green fields inside were like, and tumbled down and broke themselves all
to pieces, and never minded it a bit, but mended themselves and jumped
up again. And the terns hovered over Tom like huge white dragon-flies
with black heads, and the gulls laughed like girls at play, and the
sea-pies, with their red bills and legs, flew to and fro from shore to
shore, and whistled sweet and wild. And Tom looked and looked, and
listened; and he would have been very happy, if he could only have seen
the water-babies. Then when the tide turned, he left the buoy, and swam
round and round in search of them: but in vain. Sometimes he thought he
heard them laughing: but it was only the laughter of the ripples. And
sometimes he thought he saw them at the bottom: but it was only white
and pink shells. And once he was sure he had found one, for he saw two
bright eyes peeping out of the sand. So he dived down, and began
scraping the sand away, and cried, "Don't hide; I do want some one to
play with so much!" And out jumped a great turbot with his ugly eyes and
mouth all awry, and flopped away along the bottom, knocking poor Tom
over. And he sat down at the bottom of the sea, and cried salt tears
from sheer disappointment.

To have come all this way, and faced so many dangers, and yet to find no
water-babies! How hard! Well, it did seem hard: but people, even little
babies, cannot have all they want without waiting for it, and working
for it too, my little man, as you will find out some day.

And Tom sat upon the buoy long days, long weeks, looking out to sea, and
wondering when the water-babies would come back; and yet they never
came.

Then he began to ask all the strange things which came in out of the sea
if they had seen any; and some said "Yes," and some said nothing at all.

He asked the bass and the pollock; but they were so greedy after the
shrimps that they did not care to answer him a word.

Then there came in a whole fleet of purple sea-snails, floating along,
each on a sponge full of foam, and Tom said, "Where do you come from,
you pretty creatures? and have you seen the water-babies?"

And the sea-snails answered, "Whence we come we know not; and whither we
are going, who can tell? We float out our life in the mid-ocean, with
the warm sunshine above our heads, and the warm gulf-stream below; and
that is enough for us. Yes; perhaps we have seen the water-babies. We
have seen many strange things as we sailed along." And they floated
away, the happy stupid things, and all went ashore upon the sands.

Then there came in a great lazy sunfish, as big as a fat pig cut in
half; and he seemed to have been cut in half too, and squeezed in a
clothes-press till he was flat; but to all his big body and big fins he
had only a little rabbit's mouth, no bigger than Tom's; and, when Tom
questioned him, he answered in a little squeaky feeble voice:

"I'm sure I don't know; I've lost my way. I meant to go to the
Chesapeake, and I'm afraid I've got wrong somehow. Dear me! it was all
by following that pleasant warm water. I'm sure I've lost my way."

And, when Tom asked him again, he could only answer, "I've lost my way.
Don't talk to me; I want to think."

But, like a good many other people, the more he tried to think the less
he could think; and Tom saw him blundering about all day, till the
coastguardsmen saw his big fin above the water, and rowed out, and
struck a boat-hook into him, and took him away. They took him up to the
town and showed him for a penny a head, and made a good day's work of
it. But of course Tom did not know that.

Then there came by a shoal of porpoises, rolling as they went--papas,
and mammas, and little children--and all quite smooth and shiny,
because the fairies French-polish them every morning; and they sighed
so softly as they came by, that Tom took courage to speak to them: but
all they answered was, "Hush, hush, hush"; for that was all they had
learnt to say.

And then there came a shoal of basking sharks, some of them as long as a
boat, and Tom was frightened at them. But they were very lazy
good-natured fellows, not greedy tyrants, like white sharks and blue
sharks and ground sharks and hammer-heads, who eat men, or saw-fish and
threshers and ice-sharks, who hunt the poor old whales. They came and
rubbed their great sides against the buoy, and lay basking in the sun
with their back-fins out of water; and winked at Tom: but he never could
get them to speak. They had eaten so many herrings that they were quite
stupid; and Tom was glad when a collier brig came by and frightened them
all away; for they did smell most horribly, certainly, and he had to
hold his nose tight as long as they were there.

And then there came by a beautiful creature, like a ribbon of pure
silver with a sharp head and very long teeth; but it seemed very sick
and sad. Sometimes it rolled helpless on its side; and then it dashed
away glittering like white fire; and then it lay sick again and
motionless.

"Where do you come from?" asked Tom. "And why are _you_ so sick and
sad?"

"I come from the warm Carolinas, and the sandbanks fringed with pines;
where the great owl-rays leap and flap, like giant bats, upon the tide.
But I wandered north and north, upon the treacherous warm gulf-stream,
till I met with the cold icebergs, afloat in the mid ocean. So I got
tangled among the icebergs, and chilled with their frozen breath. But
the water-babies helped me from among them, and set me free again. And
now I am mending every day; but I am very sick and sad; and perhaps I
shall never get home again to play with the owl-rays any more."

"Oh!" cried Tom. "And you have seen water-babies? Have you seen any near
here?"

"Yes; they helped me again last night, or I should have been eaten by a
great black porpoise."

How vexatious! The water-babies close to him, and yet he could not find
one.

And then he left the buoy, and used to go along the sands and round the
rocks, and come out in the night--like the forsaken Merman in Mr.
Arnold's beautiful, beautiful poem, which you must learn by heart some
day--and sit upon a point of rock, among the shining seaweeds, in the
low October tides, and cry and call for the water-babies; but he never
heard a voice call in return. And at last, with his fretting and crying,
he grew quite lean and thin.

But one day among the rocks he found a playfellow. It was not a
water-baby, alas! but it was a lobster; and a very distinguished lobster
he was; for he had live barnacles on his claws, which is a great mark of
distinction in lobsterdom, and no more to be bought for money than a
good conscience or the Victoria Cross.

[Illustration: "Tom had never seen a lobster before."--_P. 113._]

Tom had never seen a lobster before; and he was mightily taken with this
one; for he thought him the most curious, odd, ridiculous creature he
had ever seen; and there he was not far wrong; for all the ingenious
men, and all the scientific men, and all the fanciful men, in the world,
with all the old German bogy-painters into the bargain, could never
invent, if all their wits were boiled into one, anything so curious, and
so ridiculous, as a lobster.

He had one claw knobbed and the other jagged; and Tom delighted in
watching him hold on to the seaweed with his knobbed claw, while he cut
up salads with his jagged one, and then put them into his mouth, after
smelling at them, like a monkey. And always the little barnacles threw
out their casting-nets and swept the water, and came in for their share
of whatever there was for dinner.

But Tom was most astonished to see how he fired himself off--snap! like
the leap-frogs which you make out of a goose's breast-bone. Certainly he
took the most wonderful shots, and backwards, too. For, if he wanted to
go into a narrow crack ten yards off, what do you think he did? If he
had gone in head foremost, of course he could not have turned round. So
he used to turn his tail to it, and lay his long horns, which carry his
sixth sense in their tips (and nobody knows what that sixth sense is),
straight down his back to guide him, and twist his eyes back till they
almost came out of their sockets, and then made ready, present, fire,
snap!--and away he went, pop into the hole; and peeped out and twiddled
his whiskers, as much as to say, "You couldn't do that."

Tom asked him about water-babies. "Yes," he said. He had seen them
often. But he did not think much of them. They were meddlesome little
creatures, that went about helping fish and shells which got into
scrapes. Well, for his part, he should be ashamed to be helped by little
soft creatures that had not even a shell on their backs. He had lived
quite long enough in the world to take care of himself.

He was a conceited fellow, the old lobster, and not very civil to Tom;
and you will hear how he had to alter his mind before he was done, as
conceited people generally have. But he was so funny, and Tom so lonely,
that he could not quarrel with him; and they used to sit in holes in the
rocks, and chat for hours.

And about this time there happened to Tom a very strange and important
adventure--so important, indeed, that he was very near never finding the
water-babies at all; and I am sure you would have been sorry for that.

I hope that you have not forgotten the little white lady all this while.
At least, here she comes, looking like a clean white good little
darling, as she always was, and always will be. For it befell in the
pleasant short December days, when the wind always blows from the
south-west, till Old Father Christmas comes and spreads the great white
table-cloth, ready for little boys and girls to give the birds their
Christmas dinner of crumbs--it befell (to go on) in the pleasant
December days, that Sir John was so busy hunting that nobody at home
could get a word out of him. Four days a week he hunted, and very good
sport he had; and the other two he went to the bench and the board of
guardians, and very good justice he did; and, when he got home in time,
he dined at five; for he hated this absurd new fashion of dining at
eight in the hunting season, which forces a man to make interest with
the footman for cold beef and beer as soon as he comes in, and so spoil
his appetite, and then sleep in an arm-chair in his bedroom, all stiff
and tired, for two or three hours before he can get his dinner like a
gentleman. And do you be like Sir John, my dear little man, when you are
your own master; and, if you want either to read hard or ride hard,
stick to the good old Cambridge hours of breakfast at eight and dinner
at five; by which you may get two days' work out of one. But, of course,
if you find a fox at three in the afternoon and run him till dark, and
leave off twenty miles from home, why you must wait for your dinner till
you can get it, as better men than you have done. Only see that, if you
go hungry, your horse does not; but give him his warm gruel and beer,
and take him gently home, remembering that good horses don't grow on the
hedge like blackberries.

It befell (to go on a second time) that Sir John, hunting all day, and
dining at five, fell asleep every evening, and snored so terribly that
all the windows in Harthover shook, and the soot fell down the
chimneys. Whereon My Lady, being no more able to get conversation out of
him than a song out of a dead nightingale, determined to go off and
leave him, and the doctor, and Captain Swinger the agent, to snore in
concert every evening to their hearts' content. So she started for the
seaside with all the children, in order to put herself and them into
condition by mild applications of iodine. She might as well have stayed
at home and used Parry's liquid horse-blister, for there was plenty of
it in the stables; and then she would have saved her money, and saved
the chance, also, of making all the children ill instead of well (as
hundreds are made), by taking them to some nasty smelling undrained
lodging, and then wondering how they caught scarlatina and diphtheria:
but people won't be wise enough to understand that till they are dead of
bad smells, and then it will be too late; besides you see, Sir John did
certainly snore very loud.

But where she went to nobody must know, for fear young ladies should
begin to fancy that there are water-babies there! and so hunt and howk
after them (besides raising the price of lodgings), and keep them in
aquariums, as the ladies at Pompeii (as you may see by the paintings)
used to keep Cupids in cages. But nobody ever heard that they starved
the Cupids, or let them die of dirt and neglect, as English young ladies
do by the poor sea-beasts. So nobody must know where My Lady went.
Letting water-babies die is as bad as taking singing birds' eggs; for,
though there are thousands, ay, millions, of both of them in the world,
yet there is not one too many.

Now it befell that, on the very shore, and over the very rocks, where
Tom was sitting with his friend the lobster, there walked one day the
little white lady, Ellie herself, and with her a very wise man
indeed--Professor Ptthmllnsprts.

His mother was a Dutchwoman, and therefore he was born at Curaçao (of
course you have learnt your geography, and therefore know why); and his
father a Pole, and therefore he was brought up at Petropaulowski (of
course you have learnt your modern politics, and therefore know why):
but for all that he was as thorough an Englishman as ever coveted his
neighbour's goods. And his name, as I said, was Professor Ptthmllnsprts,
which is a very ancient and noble Polish name.

He was, as I said, a very great naturalist, and chief professor of
_Necrobioneopalæonthydrochthonanthropopithekology_ in the new university
which the king of the Cannibal Islands had founded; and, being a member
of the Acclimatisation Society, he had come here to collect all the
nasty things which he could find on the coast of England, and turn them
loose round the Cannibal Islands, because they had not nasty things
enough there to eat what they left.

But he was a very worthy kind good-natured little old gentleman; and
very fond of children (for he was not the least a cannibal himself); and
very good to all the world as long as it was good to him. Only one
fault he had, which cock-robins have likewise, as you may see if you
look out of the nursery window--that, when any one else found a curious
worm, he would hop round them, and peck them, and set up his tail, and
bristle up his feathers, just as a cock-robin would; and declare that he
found the worm first; and that it was his worm; and, if not, that then
it was not a worm at all.

He had met Sir John at Scarborough, or Fleetwood, or somewhere or other
(if you don't care where, nobody else does), and had made acquaintance
with him, and become very fond of his children. Now, Sir John knew
nothing about sea-cockyolybirds, and cared less, provided the fishmonger
sent him good fish for dinner; and My Lady knew as little: but she
thought it proper that the children should know something. For in the
stupid old times, you must understand, children were taught to know one
thing, and to know it well; but in these enlightened new times they are
taught to know a little about everything, and to know it all ill; which
is a great deal pleasanter and easier, and therefore quite right.

So Ellie and he were walking on the rocks, and he was showing her about
one in ten thousand of all the beautiful and curious things which are to
be seen there. But little Ellie was not satisfied with them at all. She
liked much better to play with live children, or even with dolls, which
she could pretend were alive; and at last she said honestly, "I don't
care about all these things, because they can't play with me, or talk
to me. If there were little children now in the water, as there used to
be, and I could see them, I should like that."

"Children in the water, you strange little duck?" said the professor.

"Yes," said Ellie. "I know there used to be children in the water, and
mermaids too, and mermen. I saw them all in a picture at home, of a
beautiful lady sailing in a car drawn by dolphins, and babies flying
round her, and one sitting in her lap; and the mermaids swimming and
playing, and the mermen trumpeting on conch-shells; and it is called
'The Triumph of Galatea'; and there is a burning mountain in the picture
behind. It hangs on the great staircase, and I have looked at it ever
since I was a baby, and dreamt about it a hundred times; and it is so
beautiful, that it must be true."

But the professor had not the least notion of allowing that things were
true, merely because people thought them beautiful. For at that rate, he
said, the Baltas would be quite right in thinking it a fine thing to eat
their grandpapas, because they thought it an ugly thing to put them
underground. The professor, indeed, went further, and held that no man
was forced to believe anything to be true, but what he could see, hear,
taste, or handle.

He held very strange theories about a good many things. He had even got
up once at the British Association, and declared that apes had
hippopotamus majors in their brains just as men have. Which was a
shocking thing to say; for, if it were so, what would become of the
faith, hope, and charity of immortal millions? You may think that there
are other more important differences between you and an ape, such as
being able to speak, and make machines, and know right from wrong, and
say your prayers, and other little matters of that kind; but that is a
child's fancy, my dear. Nothing is to be depended on but the great
hippopotamus test. If you have a hippopotamus major in your brain, you
are no ape, though you had four hands, no feet, and were more apish than
the apes of all aperies. But if a hippopotamus major is ever discovered
in one single ape's brain, nothing will save your great-great-great-great-
great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greater-greatest-grandmother
from having been an ape too. No, my dear little man; always remember
that the one true, certain, final, and all-important difference between
you and an ape is, that you have a hippopotamus major in your brain, and
it has none; and that, therefore, to discover one in its brain will be a
very wrong and dangerous thing, at which every one will be very much
shocked, as we may suppose they were at the professor.--Though really,
after all, it don't much matter; because--as Lord Dundreary and others
would put it--nobody but men have hippopotamuses in their brains; so, if
a hippopotamus was discovered in an ape's brain, why it would not be
one, you know, but something else.

But the professor had gone, I am sorry to say, even further than
that; for he had read at the British Association at Melbourne,
Australia, in the year 1999, a paper which assured every one who found
himself the better or wiser for the news, that there were not, never
had been, and could not be, any rational or half-rational beings
except men, anywhere, anywhen, or anyhow; that _nymphs_, _satyrs_,
_fauns_, _inui_, _dwarfs_, _trolls_, _elves_, _gnomes_, _fairies_,
_brownies_, _nixes_, _wilis_, _kobolds_, _leprechaunes_, _cluricaunes_,
_banshees_, _will-o'-the-wisps_, _follets_, _lutins_, _magots_, _goblins_,
_afrits_, _marids_, _jinns_, _ghouls_, _peris_, _deevs_, _angels_,
_archangels_, _imps_, _bogies_, or worse, were nothing at all, and pure
bosh and wind. And he had to get up very early in the morning to prove
that, and to eat his breakfast overnight; but he did it, at least to his
own satisfaction. Whereon a certain great divine, and a very clever
divine was he, called him a regular Sadducee; and probably he was quite
right. Whereon the professor, in return, called him a regular Pharisee;
and probably he was quite right too. But they did not quarrel in the
least; for, when men are men of the world, hard words run off them like
water off a duck's back. So the professor and the divine met at dinner
that evening, and sat together on the sofa afterwards for an hour, and
talked over the state of female labour on the antarctic continent (for
nobody talks shop after his claret), and each vowed that the other was
the best company he ever met in his life. What an advantage it is to be
men of the world!

From all which you may guess that the professor was not the least of
little Ellie's opinion. So he gave her a succinct compendium of his
famous paper at the British Association, in a form suited for the
youthful mind. But, as we have gone over his arguments against
water-babies once already, which is once too often, we will not repeat
them here.

Now little Ellie was, I suppose, a stupid little girl; for, instead of
being convinced by Professor Ptthmllnsprts' arguments, she only asked
the same question over again.

"But why are there not water-babies?"

I trust and hope that it was because the professor trod at that moment
on the edge of a very sharp mussel, and hurt one of his corns sadly,
that he answered quite sharply, forgetting that he was a scientific man,
and therefore ought to have known that he couldn't know; and that he was
a logician, and therefore ought to have known that he could not prove a
universal negative--I say, I trust and hope it was because the mussel
hurt his corn, that the professor answered quite sharply:

"Because there ain't."

Which was not even good English, my dear little boy; for, as you must
know from Aunt Agitate's Arguments, the professor ought to have said, if
he was so angry as to say anything of the kind--Because there are not:
or are none: or are none of them; or (if he had been reading Aunt
Agitate too) because they do not exist.

And he groped with his net under the weeds so violently, that, as it
befell, he caught poor little Tom.

He felt the net very heavy; and lifted it out quickly, with Tom all
entangled in the meshes.

"Dear me!" he cried. "What a large pink Holothurian; with hands, too! It
must be connected with Synapta."

And he took him out.

"It has actually eyes!" he cried. "Why, it must be a Cephalopod! This is
most extraordinary!"

"No, I ain't!" cried Tom, as loud as he could; for he did not like to be
called bad names.

"It is a water-baby!" cried Ellie; and of course it was.

"Water-fiddlesticks, my dear!" said the professor; and he turned away
sharply.

There was no denying it. It was a water-baby: and he had said a moment
ago that there were none. What was he to do?

He would have liked, of course, to have taken Tom home in a bucket. He
would not have put him in spirits. Of course not. He would have kept him
alive, and petted him (for he was a very kind old gentleman), and
written a book about him, and given him two long names, of which the
first would have said a little about Tom, and the second all about
himself; for of course he would have called him Hydrotecnon
Ptthmllnsprtsianum, or some other long name like that; for they are
forced to call everything by long names now, because they have used up
all the short ones, ever since they took to making nine species out of
one. But--what would all the learned men say to him after his speech at
the British Association? And what would Ellie say, after what he had
just told her?

There was a wise old heathen once, who said, "Maxima debetur pueris
reverentia"--The greatest reverence is due to children; that is, that
grown people should never say or do anything wrong before children, lest
they should set them a bad example.--Cousin Cramchild says it means,
"The greatest respectfulness is expected from little boys." But he was
raised in a country where little boys are not expected to be respectful,
because all of them are as good as the President:--Well, every one knows
his own concerns best; so perhaps they are. But poor Cousin Cramchild,
to do him justice, not being of that opinion, and having a moral
mission, and being no scholar to speak of, and hard up for an
authority--why, it was a very great temptation for him. But some people,
and I am afraid the professor was one of them, interpret that in a more
strange, curious, one-sided, left-handed, topsy-turvy, inside-out,
behind-before fashion than even Cousin Cramchild; for they make it mean,
that you must show your respect for children, by never confessing
yourself in the wrong to them, even if you know that you are so, lest
they should lose confidence in their elders.

Now, if the professor had said to Ellie, "Yes, my darling, it is a
water-baby, and a very wonderful thing it is; and it shows how little I
know of the wonders of nature, in spite of forty years' honest labour. I
was just telling you that there could be no such creatures; and,
behold! here is one come to confound my conceit and show me that Nature
can do, and has done, beyond all that man's poor fancy can imagine. So,
let us thank the Maker, and Inspirer, and Lord of Nature for all His
wonderful and glorious works, and try and find out something about this
one";--I think that, if the professor had said that, little Ellie would
have believed him more firmly, and respected him more deeply, and loved
him better, than ever she had done before. But he was of a different
opinion. He hesitated a moment. He longed to keep Tom, and yet he half
wished he never had caught him; and at last he quite longed to get rid
of him. So he turned away and poked Tom with his finger, for want of
anything better to do; and said carelessly, "My dear little maid, you
must have dreamt of water-babies last night, your head is so full of
them."

Now Tom had been in the most horrible and unspeakable fright all the
while; and had kept as quiet as he could, though he was called a
Holothurian and a Cephalopod; for it was fixed in his little head that
if a man with clothes on caught him, he might put clothes on him too,
and make a dirty black chimney-sweep of him again. But, when the
professor poked him, it was more than he could bear; and, between fright
and rage, he turned to bay as valiantly as a mouse in a corner, and bit
the professor's finger till it bled.

"Oh! ah! yah!" cried he; and glad of an excuse to be rid of Tom, dropped
him on to the seaweed, and thence he dived into the water and was gone
in a moment.

[Illustration: "The fairies came flying in at the window and brought her
such a pretty pair of wings."--_P. 126._]

"But it was a water-baby, and I heard it speak!" cried Ellie. "Ah, it is
gone!" And she jumped down off the rock to try and catch Tom before he
slipped into the sea.

Too late! and what was worse, as she sprang down, she slipped, and fell
some six feet, with her head on a sharp rock, and lay quite still.

The professor picked her up, and tried to waken her, and called to her,
and cried over her, for he loved her very much: but she would not waken
at all. So he took her up in his arms and carried her to her governess,
and they all went home; and little Ellie was put to bed, and lay there
quite still; only now and then she woke up and called out about the
water-baby: but no one knew what she meant, and the professor did not
tell, for he was ashamed to tell.

And, after a week, one moonlight night, the fairies came flying in at
the window and brought her such a pretty pair of wings that she could
not help putting them on; and she flew with them out of the window, and
over the land, and over the sea, and up through the clouds, and nobody
heard or saw anything of her for a very long while.

And this is why they say that no one has ever yet seen a water-baby. For
my part, I believe that the naturalists get dozens of them when they are
out dredging; but they say nothing about them, and throw them overboard
again, for fear of spoiling their theories. But, you see the
professor was found out, as every one is in due time. A very terrible
old fairy found the professor out; she felt his bumps, and cast his
nativity, and took the lunars of him carefully inside and out; and so
she knew what he would do as well as if she had seen it in a print book,
as they say in the dear old west country; and he did it; and so he was
found out beforehand, as everybody always is; and the old fairy will
find out the naturalists some day, and put them in the _Times_, and then
on whose side will the laugh be?

So the old fairy took him in hand very severely there and then. But she
says she is always most severe with the best people, because there is
most chance of curing them, and therefore they are the patients who pay
her best; for she has to work on the same salary as the Emperor of
China's physicians (it is a pity that all do not), no cure, no pay.

So she took the poor professor in hand: and because he was not content
with things as they are, she filled his head with things as they are
not, to try if he would like them better; and because he did not choose
to believe in a water-baby when he saw it, she made him believe in worse
things than water-babies--in _unicorns_, _fire-drakes_, _manticoras_,
_basilisks_, _amphisbænas_, _griffins_, _ph[oe]nixes_, _rocs_, _orcs_,
_dog-headed men_, _three-headed dogs_, _three-bodied geryons_, and other
pleasant creatures, which folks think never existed yet, and which folks
hope never will exist, though they know nothing about the matter, and
never will; and these creatures so upset, terrified, flustered,
aggravated, confused, astounded, horrified, and totally flabbergasted
the poor professor that the doctors said that he was out of his wits for
three months; and perhaps they were right, as they are now and then.

So all the doctors in the county were called in to make a report on his
case; and of course every one of them flatly contradicted the other:
else what use is there in being men of science? But at last the majority
agreed on a report in the true medical language, one half bad Latin, the
other half worse Greek, and the rest what might have been English, if
they had only learnt to write it. And this is the beginning thereof--

"_The subanhypaposupernal anastomoses of peritomic diacellurite in the
encephalo digital region of the distinguished individual of whose
symptomatic ph[oe]nomena we had the melancholy honour (subsequently to a
preliminary diagnostic inspection) of making an inspectorial diagnosis,
presenting the interexclusively quadrilateral and antinomian diathesis
known as Bumpsterhausen's blue follicles, we proceeded_"--

But what they proceeded to do My Lady never knew; for she was so
frightened at the long words that she ran for her life, and locked
herself into her bedroom, for fear of being squashed by the words and
strangled by the sentence. A boa constrictor, she said, was bad company
enough: but what was a boa constrictor made of paving stones?

"It was quite shocking! What can they think is the matter with him?"
said she to the old nurse.

"That his wit's just addled; may be wi' unbelief and heathenry," quoth
she.

"Then why can't they say so?"

And the heaven, and the sea, and the rocks, and the vales
re-echoed--"Why indeed?" But the doctors never heard them.

So she made Sir John write to the _Times_ to command the Chancellor of
the Exchequer for the time being to put a tax on long words;--

A light tax on words over three syllables, which are necessary evils,
like rats: but, like them, must be kept down judiciously.

A heavy tax on words over four syllables, as _heterodoxy_,
_spontaneity_, _spiritualism_, _spuriosity_, _etc._

And on words over five syllables (of which I hope no one will wish to
see any examples), a totally prohibitory tax.

And a similar prohibitory tax on words derived from three or more
languages at once; words derived from two languages having become so
common that there was no more hope of rooting out them than of rooting
out peth-winds.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, being a scholar and a man of sense,
jumped at the notion; for he saw in it the one and only plan for
abolishing Schedule D: but when he brought in his bill, most of the
Irish members, and (I am sorry to say) some of the Scotch likewise,
opposed it most strongly, on the ground that in a free country no man
was bound either to understand himself or to let others understand him.
So the bill fell through on the first reading; and the Chancellor,
being a philosopher, comforted himself with the thought that it was not
the first time that a woman had hit off a grand idea and the men turned
up their stupid noses thereat.

Now the doctors had it all their own way; and to work they went in
earnest, and they gave the poor professor divers and sundry medicines,
as prescribed by the ancients and moderns, from Hippocrates to
Feuchtersleben, as below, viz.--

  1. _Hellebore, to wit_--
         _Hellebore of Æta._
         _Hellebore of Galatia._
         _Hellebore of Sicily._
         _And all other Hellebores, after the method of the
            Helleborising Helleborists of the Helleboric era.
            But that would not do. Bumpsterhausen's blue follicles
            would not stir an inch out of his encephalo digital
            region._

  2. _Trying to find out what was the matter with him, after the
        method of_
       _Hippocrates_,
       _Aretæus_,
       _Celsus_,
       _C[oe]lius Aurelianus_,
       _And Galen_.

But they found that a great deal too much trouble, as most people have
since; and so had recourse to--

  3. _Borage._
     _Cauteries._

Boring a hole in his head to let out fumes, which (says Gordonius)
"will, without doubt, do much good." But it didn't.

   _Bezoar stone._
   _Diamargaritum._
   _A ram's brain boiled in spice._
   _Oil of wormwood._
   _Water of Nile._
   _Capers._
   _Good wine (but there was none to be got)._
   _The water of a smith's forge._
   _Hops._
   _Ambergris._
   _Mandrake pillows._
   _Dormouse fat._
   _Hares' ears._
   _Starvation._
   _Camphor._
   _Salts and senna._
   _Musk._
   _Opium._
   _Strait-waistcoats._
   _Bullyings._
   _Bumpings._
   _Blisterings._
   _Bleedings._
   _Bucketings with cold water._
   _Knockings down._
   _Kneeling on his chest till they broke it in,
      etc. etc.; after the mediæval or monkish
      method: but that would not do. Bumpsterhausen's
      blue follicles stuck there still._

Then--

  4. _Coaxing._
     _Kissing._
     _Champagne and turtle._
     _Red herrings and soda water._
     _Good advice._
     _Gardening._
     _Croquet._
     _Musical soirées._
     _Aunt Sally._
     _Mild tobacco._
     _The Saturday Review._
     _A carriage with outriders, etc. etc._

After the modern method. But that would not do.

And if he had but been a convict lunatic, and had shot at the Queen,
killed all his creditors to avoid paying them, or indulged in any other
little amiable eccentricity of that kind, they would have given him in
addition--

The healthiest situation in England, on Easthampstead Plain.

Free run of Windsor Forest.

The _Times_ every morning.

A double-barrelled gun and pointers, and leave to shoot three Wellington
College boys a week (not more) in case black game was scarce.

But as he was neither mad enough nor bad enough to be allowed such
luxuries, they grew desperate, and fell into bad ways, viz.--

  5. _Suffumigations of sulphur._
     _Herrwiggius his "Incomparable drink for madmen"_:

Only they could not find out what it was.

    _Suffumigation of the liver of the fish * * *_

Only they had forgotten its name, so Dr. Gray could not well procure
them a specimen.

    _Metallic tractors._
    _Holloway's Ointment._
    _Electro-biology._
    _Valentine Greatrakes his Stroking Cure._
    _Spirit-rapping._
    _Holloway's Pills._
    _Table-turning._
    _Morison's Pills._
    _Hom[oe]opathy._
    _Parr's Life Pills._
    _Mesmerism._
    _Pure Bosh._
    _Exorcisms, for which they read Maleus Maleficarum, Nideri
       Formicarium, Delrio, Wierus, etc._

But could not get one that mentioned water-babies.

    _Hydropathy._
    _Madame Rachel's Elixir of Youth._
    _The Poughkeepsie Seer his Prophecies._
    _The distilled liquor of addle eggs._
    _Pyropathy._

As successfully employed by the old inquisitors to cure the malady of
thought, and now by the Persian Mollahs to cure that of rheumatism.

    _Geopathy, or burying him._
    _Atmopathy, or steaming him._
    _Sympathy, after the method of Basil Valentine his Triumph
        of Antimony, and Kenelm Digby his Weapon-salve, which some
        call a hair of the dog that bit him._
    _Hermopathy, or pouring mercury down his throat to move the
        animal spirits._
    _Meteoropathy, or going up to the moon to look for his lost
        wits, as Ruggiero did for Orlando Furioso's: only, having
        no hippogriff, they were forced to use a balloon; and,
        falling into the North Sea, were picked up by a Yarmouth
        herring-boat, and came home much the wiser, and all over
        scales._
    _Antipathy, or using him like "a man and a brother."_
    _Apathy, or doing nothing at all._
    _With all other ipathies and opathies which Noodle has invented,
        and Foodle tried, since black-fellows chipped flints at
        Abbéville--which is a considerable time ago, to judge by
        the Great Exhibition._

But nothing would do; for he screamed and cried all day for a
water-baby, to come and drive away the monsters; and of course they did
not try to find one, because they did not believe in them, and were
thinking of nothing but Bumpsterhausen's blue follicles; having, as
usual, set the cart before the horse, and taken the effect for the
cause.

So they were forced at last to let the poor professor ease his mind by
writing a great book, exactly contrary to all his old opinions; in which
he proved that the moon was made of green cheese, and that all the mites
in it (which you may see sometimes quite plain through a telescope, if
you will only keep the lens dirty enough, as Mr. Weekes kept his voltaic
battery) are nothing in the world but little babies, who are hatching
and swarming up there in millions, ready to come down into this world
whenever children want a new little brother or sister.

Which must be a mistake, for this one reason: that, there being no
atmosphere round the moon (though some one or other says there is, at
least on the other side, and that he has been round at the back of it to
see, and found that the moon was just the shape of a Bath bun, and so
wet that the man in the moon went about on Midsummer-day in Macintoshes
and Cording's boots, spearing eels and sneezing); that, therefore, I
say, there being no atmosphere, there can be no evaporation; and
therefore, the dew-point can never fall below 71.5° below zero of
Fahrenheit: and, therefore, it cannot be cold enough there about four
o'clock in the morning to condense the babies' mesenteric apophthegms
into their left ventricles; and, therefore, they can never catch the
hooping-cough; and if they do not have hooping-cough, they cannot be
babies at all; and, therefore, there are no babies in the moon.--Q.E.D.

Which may seem a roundabout reason; and so, perhaps, it is: but you will
have heard worse ones in your time, and from better men than you are.

But one thing is certain; that, when the good old doctor got his book
written, he felt considerably relieved from Bumpsterhausen's blue
follicles, and a few things infinitely worse; to wit, from pride and
vain-glory, and from blindness and hardness of heart; which are the true
causes of Bumpsterhausen's blue follicles, and of a good many other ugly
things besides. Whereon the foul flood-water in his brains ran down, and
cleared to a fine coffee colour, such as fish like to rise in, till very
fine clean fresh-run fish did begin to rise in his brains; and he caught
two or three of them (which is exceedingly fine sport, for brain
rivers), and anatomised them carefully, and never mentioned what he
found out from them, except to little children; and became ever after a
sadder and a wiser man; which is a very good thing to become, my dear
little boy, even though one has to pay a heavy price for the blessing.

        "Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
         The Godhead's most benignant grace;
         Nor know we anything so fair
         As is the smile upon thy face:
         Flowers laugh before thee on their beds
         And fragrance in thy footing treads;
         Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
  And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong."

                                 WORDSWORTH, _Ode to Duty_.





CHAPTER V


BUT what became of little Tom?

He slipped away off the rocks into the water, as I said before. But he
could not help thinking of little Ellie. He did not remember who she
was; but he knew that she was a little girl, though she was a hundred
times as big as he. That is not surprising: size has nothing to do with
kindred. A tiny weed may be first cousin to a great tree; and a little
dog like Vick knows that Lioness is a dog too, though she is twenty
times larger than herself. So Tom knew that Ellie was a little girl, and
thought about her all that day, and longed to have had her to play with;
but he had very soon to think of something else. And here is the account
of what happened to him, as it was published next morning in the
Waterproof Gazette, on the finest watered paper, for the use of the
great fairy, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, who reads the news very carefully
every morning, and especially the police cases, as you will hear very
soon.

He was going along the rocks in three-fathom water, watching the pollock
catch prawns, and the wrasses nibble barnacles off the rocks, shells and
all, when he saw a round cage of green withes; and inside it, looking
very much ashamed of himself, sat his friend the lobster, twiddling his
horns, instead of thumbs.

"What, have you been naughty, and have they put you in the lock-up?"
asked Tom.

The lobster felt a little indignant at such a notion, but he was too
much depressed in spirits to argue; so he only said, "I can't get out."

"Why did you get in?"

"After that nasty piece of dead fish." He had thought it looked and
smelt very nice when he was outside, and so it did, for a lobster: but
now he turned round and abused it because he was angry with himself.

"Where did you get in?"

"Through that round hole at the top."

"Then why don't you get out through it?"

"Because I can't": and the lobster twiddled his horns more fiercely than
ever, but he was forced to confess.

"I have jumped upwards, downwards, backwards, and sideways, at least
four thousand times; and I can't get out: I always get up underneath
there, and can't find the hole."

Tom looked at the trap, and having more wit than the lobster, he saw
plainly enough what was the matter; as you may if you will look at a
lobster-pot.

"Stop a bit," said Tom. "Turn your tail up to me, and I'll pull you
through hindforemost, and then you won't stick in the spikes."

But the lobster was so stupid and clumsy that he couldn't hit the hole.
Like a great many fox-hunters, he was very sharp as long as he was in
his own country; but as soon as they get out of it they lose their
heads; and so the lobster, so to speak, lost his tail.

Tom reached and clawed down the hole after him, till he caught hold of
him; and then, as was to be expected, the clumsy lobster pulled him in
head foremost.

"Hullo! here is a pretty business," said Tom. "Now take your great
claws, and break the points off those spikes, and then we shall both get
out easily."

"Dear me, I never thought of that," said the lobster; "and after all the
experience of life that I have had!"

You see, experience is of very little good unless a man, or a lobster,
has wit enough to make use of it. For a good many people, like old
Polonius, have seen all the world, and yet remain little better than
children after all.

But they had not got half the spikes away when they saw a great dark
cloud over them: and lo, and behold, it was the otter.

How she did grin and grin when she saw Tom. "Yar!" said she, "you little
meddlesome wretch, I have you now! I will serve you out for telling the
salmon where I was!" And she crawled all over the pot to get in.

Tom was horribly frightened, and still more frightened when she found
the hole in the top, and squeezed herself right down through it, all
eyes and teeth. But no sooner was her head inside than valiant Mr.
Lobster caught her by the nose and held on.

And there they were all three in the pot, rolling over and over, and
very tight packing it was. And the lobster tore at the otter, and the
otter tore at the lobster, and both squeezed and thumped poor Tom till
he had no breath left in his body; and I don't know what would have
happened to him if he had not at last got on the otter's back, and safe
out of the hole.

He was right glad when he got out: but he would not desert his friend
who had saved him; and the first time he saw his tail uppermost he
caught hold of it, and pulled with all his might.

But the lobster would not let go.

"Come along," said Tom; "don't you see she is dead?" And so she was,
quite drowned and dead.

And that was the end of the wicked otter.

But the lobster would not let go.

"Come along, you stupid old stick-in-the-mud," cried Tom, "or the
fisherman will catch you!" And that was true, for Tom felt some one
above beginning to haul up the pot.

But the lobster would not let go.

Tom saw the fisherman haul him up to the boat-side, and thought it was
all up with him. But when Mr. Lobster saw the fisherman, he gave such a
furious and tremendous snap, that he snapped out of his hand, and out of
the pot, and safe into the sea. But he left his knobbed claw behind
him; for it never came into his stupid head to let go after all, so he
just shook his claw off as the easier method. It was something of a
bull, that; but you must know the lobster was an Irish lobster, and was
hatched off Island Magee at the mouth of Belfast Lough.

Tom asked the lobster why he never thought of letting go. He said very
determinedly that it was a point of honour among lobsters. And so it is,
as the Mayor of Plymouth found out once to his cost--eight or nine
hundred years ago, of course; for if it had happened lately it would be
personal to mention it.

For one day he was so tired with sitting on a hard chair, in a grand
furred gown, with a gold chain round his neck, hearing one policeman
after another come in and sing, "What shall we do with the drunken
sailor, so early in the morning?" and answering them each exactly alike:

"Put him in the round house till he gets sober, so early in the
morning"--

That, when it was over, he jumped up, and played leap-frog with the
town-clerk till he burst his buttons, and then had his luncheon, and
burst some more buttons, and then said: "It is a low spring-tide; I
shall go out this afternoon and cut my capers."

Now he did not mean to cut such capers as you eat with boiled mutton. It
was the commandant of artillery at Valetta who used to amuse himself
with cutting them, and who stuck upon one of the bastions a notice, "No
one allowed to cut capers here but me," which greatly edified the
midshipmen in port, and the Maltese on the Nix Mangiare stairs. But all
that the mayor meant was that he would go and have an afternoon's fun,
like any schoolboy, and catch lobsters with an iron hook.

So to the Mewstone he went, and for lobsters he looked. And when he came
to a certain crack in the rocks he was so excited that, instead of
putting in his hook, he put in his hand; and Mr. Lobster was at home,
and caught him by the finger, and held on.

"Yah!" said the mayor, and pulled as hard as he dared: but the more he
pulled, the more the lobster pinched, till he was forced to be quiet.

Then he tried to get his hook in with his other hand; but the hole was
too narrow.

Then he pulled again; but he could not stand the pain.

Then he shouted and bawled for help: but there was no one nearer him
than the men-of-war inside the breakwater.

Then he began to turn a little pale; for the tide flowed, and still the
lobster held on.

Then he turned quite white; for the tide was up to his knees, and still
the lobster held on.

Then he thought of cutting off his finger; but he wanted two things to
do it with--courage and a knife; and he had got neither.

Then he turned quite yellow; for the tide was up to his waist, and still
the lobster held on.

Then he thought over all the naughty things he ever had done; all the
sand which he had put in the sugar, and the sloe-leaves in the tea, and
the water in the treacle, and the salt in the tobacco (because his
brother was a brewer, and a man must help his own kin).

Then he turned quite blue; for the tide was up to his breast, and still
the lobster held on.

Then, I have no doubt, he repented fully of all the said naughty things
which he had done, and promised to mend his life, as too many do when
they think they have no life left to mend. Whereby, as they fancy, they
make a very cheap bargain. But the old fairy with the birch rod soon
undeceives them.

And then he grew all colours at once, and turned up his eyes like a duck
in thunder; for the water was up to his chin, and still the lobster held
on.

And then came a man-of-war's boat round the Mewstone, and saw his head
sticking up out of the water. One said it was a keg of brandy, and
another that it was a cocoa-nut, and another that it was a buoy loose,
and another that it was a black diver, and wanted to fire at it, which
would not have been pleasant for the mayor: but just then such a yell
came out of a great hole in the middle of it that the midshipman in
charge guessed what it was, and bade pull up to it as fast as they
could. So somehow or other the Jack-tars got the lobster out, and set
the mayor free, and put him ashore at the Barbican. He never went
lobster-catching again; and we will hope he put no more salt in the
tobacco, not even to sell his brother's beer.

[Illustration: "A real live water-baby sitting on the white sand."--_P.
146_.]

And that is the story of the Mayor of Plymouth, which has two
advantages--first, that of being quite true; and second, that of having
(as folks say all good stories ought to have) no moral whatsoever: no
more, indeed, has any part of this book, because it is a fairy tale, you
know.

And now happened to Tom a most wonderful thing; for he had not left the
lobster five minutes before he came upon a water-baby.

A real live water-baby, sitting on the white sand, very busy about a
little point of rock. And when it saw Tom it looked up for a moment, and
then cried, "Why, you are not one of us. You are a new baby! Oh, how
delightful!"

And it ran to Tom, and Tom ran to it, and the

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