"Mine neither," whistled Whistlebinkie. "It looks rather stale."
"Yes," said the Unwiseman. "And that's the only roil thing about it. Passing along rapidly we come soon to a bottleful of the British Channel," he resumed. "In order to get the full effect of that very conceited body of water you want to shake it violently. That gives you some idea of how the water works. It's tame enough now that I've got it bottled but in its native lair it is fierce. You will see the instructions on the bottle."
Sure enough the bottle was labeled as the Unwiseman said with full instructions as to how it must be used.
"Shake for fifteen minutes until it is all roiled up and swells around inside the bottle like a tidal wave," the instructions read. "You will then get a small idea of how this disagreeable body of water behaves itself in the presence of trusting strangers."
"Here is my bottle of French soil," said the Unwiseman, passing on to the next object. "It doesn't look very different from English soil but it's French all right, as you would see for yourself if it tried to talk. I scooped it up myself in Paris. There's the book—French in Five Lessons—too. That I call 'The French Language,' which shows people who visit this museum what a funny tongue it is. That pill box full of sand is a part of the Swiss frontier and the small piece of gravel next to it is a piece of an Alp chipped off Mount Blanc by myself, so that I know it is genuine. It will give the man who has never visited Swaz—well—that country, a small idea of what an Alp looks like and will correct the notion in some people's minds that an Alp is a wild animal with a long hairy tail and the manners of a lion. The next two bottles contain all that is left of a snow-ball I gathered in at Chamouny, and a chip of the Mer de Glace glazier. They've both melted since I bottled them, but I'll have them frozen up again all right when winter comes, so there's no harm done."
"What's this piece of broken china on the table?" asked Mollie.
"That is a fragment of a Parisian butter saucer," said the Unwiseman. "One of the waiters fell down stairs with somebody's breakfast at our hotel in Paris one morning while we were there," he explained, "and I rescued that from the debris. It is a perfect specimen of a broken French butter dish."
"I don't think it's very interesting," said Mollie.
"Well to tell you the truth, I don't either, but you've got to remember, my dear, that this is a British Museum and the one over in London is chuck full of broken china, old butter plates and coffee cups from all over everywhere, and I don't want people who care for that sort of thing to be disappointed with my museum when they come here. Take that plaster statue of Cupid that I bought in Venice—I only got that to please people who care for statuary."