In sadness waned the moon, for caught between the horns of a dilemma she had no wealth left to endow the infant with. Intemperate habits had the goddess always, was often full and now reduced to her last quarter, but that was waning fast and her man's shadow also growing less. Her semi-transparent stone, alas! had given she long since to California, but this proudest of all daughters of the seas did not appreciate the kindly gift. She cast it on the white sands of her beaches where it is gathered by the thankful tourist who shouts exultantly, delighted with his find:
The moonstone, climate, atmosphere,
The only things free-gratis here—
Eureka!
I have found!
A ROYAL FIASCO.
(HISTORICAL ANECDOTES.)
A village on the coast of northern Germany, where the Elbe flows into the North Sea, was my birthplace, its parsonage, my childhood's home.
Two great earth-dikes which sheltered our village from fierce southwesterly gales were the only barrier standing between untold thousands of lives and watery graves, for the coasts of Holland and northern Germany are below the level of high tides.
It is known that through inundations caused by breaks in these levees, occurring as late as the tenth and eleventh centuries of our era more than three hundred thousand persons with all their domestic cattle were drowned over night.
These dikes which extend for many miles along the banks of the river were erected by the systematic herculean toil of generations of our ancestors.
According to a popular tradition it was Rolof, the dwarf, a thrall of Vulcan, who taught my forefathers the art of forging tools from iron ore, enabling them to battle successfully against the might of Neptune.