We did not take any notice of what he said, but just kept on saying how sorry we were; and he did not take our apology like a man, but only said he dare said, just like a woman does. Then he went to look at his bridge, and we went in to our tea. The jackets were never quite the same again.
Really great explorers would never be discouraged by the dare saying of a farmer, still less by his calling them names he ought not to. Albert's uncle was away, so we got no double slating; and next day we started again to discover the source of the river of cataracts (or the region of mountain-like icebergs).
We set out heavily provisioned with a large cake Daisy and Dora had made themselves and six bottles of ginger-beer. I think real explorers most likely have their ginger-beer in something lighter to carry than stone bottles. Perhaps they have it by the cask, which would come cheaper; and you could make the girls carry it on their back, like in pictures of the daughters of regiments.
We passed the scene of the devouring conflagration, and the thought of the fire made us so thirsty we decided to drink the ginger-beer and leave the bottles in a place of concealment. Then we went on, determined to reach our destination, tropic or polar, that day.
Denny and H. O. wanted to stop and try to make a fashionable watering-place at that part where the stream spreads out like a small-sized sea, but Noël said, "No." We did not like fashionableness.
"You ought to, at any rate," Denny said. "A Mr. Collins wrote an 'Ode to the Fashions,' and he was a great poet."
"The poet Milton wrote a long book about Satan," Noël said, "but I'm not bound to like him." I think it was smart of Noël.
"People aren't obliged to like everything they write about even, let alone read," Alice said. "Look at 'Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!' and all the pieces of poetry about war and tyrants and slaughtered saints—and the one you made yourself about the black beetle, Noël."
By this time we had got by the pondy place and the danger of delay was past; but the others went on talking about poetry for quite a field and a half, as we walked along by the banks of the stream. The stream was broad and shallow at this part, and you could see the stones and gravel at the bottom, and millions of baby fishes, and a sort of skating-spiders walking about on the top of the water. Denny said the water must be ice for them to be able to walk on it, and this showed we were getting near the north pole. But Oswald had seen a kingfisher by the wood, and he said it was an ibis, so this was even.
When Oswald had had as much poetry as he could bear, he said, "Let's be beavers and make a dam."