The reader will observe that we did not say the language had, at that time, been much improved! only to some small extent.
“I’ve seen pictur’s of ’em, Bob,” said Tim, leaning his arms on the vessel’s bulwarks as he gazed on the sleeping sea, “w’en a gen’l’man came to George Yard with a magic lantern, but I never thought they was so big, or that the holes in ’em was so blue.”
“Nor I neither,” said Bob.
They referred, of course, to the iceberg, the seams and especially the caverns in which graduated from the lightest azure to the deepest indigo.
“Why, I do believe,” continued Bobby, as the haze grew a little thinner, “that there’s rivers of water runnin’ down its sides, just like as if it was a mountain o’ loaf-sugar wi’ the fire-brigade a-pumpin’ on it. An’ see, there’s waterfalls too, bigger I do b’lieve than the one I once saw at a pantomime.”
“Ay, an’ far prettier too,” said Tim.
Bobby Frog did not quite see his way to assent to that. The waterfalls on the iceberg were bigger, he admitted, than those in the pantomime, but then, there was not so much glare and glitter around them.
“An’ I’m fond of glare an’ glitter,” he remarked, with a glance at his friend.
“So am I, Bob, but—”
At that instant the dinner-bell rang, and the eyes of both glittered—they almost glared—as they turned and made for the companion-hatch, Bob exclaiming, “Ah, that’s the thing that I’m fond of; glare an’ glitter’s all wery well in its way, but it can’t ’old a candle to grub!”