Antonio is not without superstition. Can these be sea-serpents? For a moment he believes they are. He turns the glass on the largest. It cannot be much under one hundred feet in length.
He can see its very eyes, for the head is raised well above the water, and the neck and back are covered with a black and horrible mane.
But reason comes at last to his aid, and he makes them out to be only floating trees.
Relieved now, and not a little hungry as well as tired—for high up here the air is both cool and bracing—he makes the signal for descent, and soon after is safe once more on his own quarter-deck. Every one is anxious to hear his strange story, especially our impatient little Teenie.
But he keeps it till after dinner, for the few hours ’twixt that meal and bedtime are the happiest of all the day.
Antonio, much to Teenie’s delight—the child sat on his knee drinking eagerly in every word that fell from his lips—made quite a story of his aerial expedition. He called his yarn
“MY JOURNEY SKYWARDS,”
and certainly, as he related it, it lacked not interest. He interlarded it too with impromptus on the guitar, some of which were weird and wild in the extreme, but all intended to depict the state of his feelings at various stages of his adventure; as, for example, when his eyes fell upon the far-off blue and sunny sea, or when he first found out the derelict, and anon the awful sea-serpents, that finally, to Teenie’s disappointment, turned out to be floating trees, their eyes but notches, their awful manes only the trailing seaweed.
However, this determined little fisher-lassie made a resolution, which as she slid off the captain’s knee she embodied in the following sentence—
“Mind you this, Captain ’Tonio, you is not going up again next time without me.”