Mew VI.
A Terrible Sight.
Carefully advancing one foot a time, our young hero slowly made his way across what appeared to him an interminable desert. The ground was soft and mossy, and here and there clusters of mighty pillars (which he afterwards found were called chair-legs) towered skywards. He passed a great many strange things, and heard a great many strange sounds that he could not tell the meaning of; at last he arrived at the foot of a tall iron wall (the fender?), round which he waddled for many a feline mile; but finding no gate at which to knock, he resolved to scale the barrier and solve the mystery. So he raised himself on his hind-legs, thinking at the same time how handy hind-legs were, and how happy he was to possess such appendages; then he gazed over the wall. The sight that was presented to him, would have turned a hero less brave into whinstone. But Blinks was Blinks.
It appeared to be a great blazing volcano, surrounded, or rather ribbed in, by gigantic bars of steel; in fact it looked like a small bad-place, in which he had no doubt the souls of dogs, and the gizzards of birds were getting purified of their sins. On the top thereof was a mighty cauldron, and the steam therefrom rose in dense clouds, and disappeared in the blackness of darkness; and there was much smoke and flame, and a loud spluttering noise, accompanied by hissing and crackling. And lo! even as he gazed, a mighty ball of fire was thrown out by a small and ugly fiend, that dwelt below the cauldron in the midst of the ardent element; and the ball of fire fell within a whisker-length of our gallant Blinks, who just then remembered that he was getting thirsty, and could spare time to gaze no longer. So, after casting one defiant glance at the ugly little fiend that crouched beneath the cauldron, he left the little Hades and journeyed on in quest of adventures.