“No! did you?” exclaimed the group, drawing their heads closer together with looks of expectancy.
“Ay, that did I, mates; but you mustn’t expect wild descriptions about monsters with bulls’ horns and asses’ tails from me. I like truth, and the truth is, that the brute was so far away at the time we saw it, that not a man of us could tell exactly what it was like, and when we tried the description, we were all so different, that we gave it up; but we were all agreed on this point, that it certainly was the serpent.”
The listeners seemed rather disappointed at this meagre account and sudden conclusion of what had bidden fair to become a stirring tale of the sea; but Maikar re-aroused their expectations by stating his firm belief that it was all nonsense about there being only one sea-serpent.
“Why, how could there be only one?” he demanded, ceasing to twirl, in order that he might clench his fist and smite his knee with emphasis. “Haven’t you got a grandfather?” he asked, turning suddenly to the grave man.
“Certainly, I’ve got two of them if you come to that,” he answered, taken rather aback by the brusque and apparently irrelevant nature of the question.
“Just so—two of them,” repeated the little man, “and don’t you think it likely that the sea serpent must have had two grandfathers also?”
“Undoubtedly—and two grandmothers as well. Perhaps he’s got them yet,” replied the grave man with a contemplative look over the side, where the rippling sea gleamed with phosphoric brilliancy.
“Exactly so,” continued Maikar in an eager tone, “and of course these also must have had two grandfathers besides a mother each, and it is more than likely that the great sea-serpent himself is the father of a large family.”
“Which implies a wife,” suggested one of the seamen.
“Not necessarily,” objected an elderly seaman, who had once been to the lands lying far to the north of Albion, and had acquired something of that tendency to object to everything at all times which is said to characterise the people of the far North. “Not necessarily,” he repeated, “for the serpent may be a bachelor with no family at all.”