Carl was silent.
"When you consider this you will understand how it was that the eager readers of the past devoured with wide-open eyes the tale-telling of Sir John Mandeville; and should you ever read that ancient story, as I hope you will sometime, you will be less surprised to hear that even he declared that he had seen cotton growing and that when the pod of the plant was cut open inside it was a little creature like a lamb. The natives of the East ate both the fruit of the plant and the wee beast, he explained. In fact he said he had eaten the thing himself."
"Why, the very idea!" gasped Mary.
"What a lie!" Carl burst out.
"I'm afraid Sir John was either not very truthful or he had a great imagination," smiled Mrs. McGregor. "Still, you see, he was not alone in his belief about the Tartary lamb. So many other people believed the yarn that he probably thought he was telling the truth. And as for eating it—well, he just had a strain of Jack Murphy in him. Besides, there were no schools in 1322 to teach Sir John Mandeville better. And anyway, who was to contradict the fable? Sir John had been to the East and the other people hadn't. Why shouldn't they believe what he and other travelers told them?"
"He did sort of have them, didn't he?" grinned Carl.
"How long was it before the public stopped believing such a ridiculous story?" demanded Mary.
"About three hundred years," answered her mother. "In the meantime much traveling had been done by the peoples of all nations and learning had made great strides. Scientific men began to whisper there could be no such thing as the lamb of the Tartars; it was not possible. Cotton was merely a plant. You can imagine what discussions such an assertion as that raised. The public had come to like the notion of the Tartary lamb and did not wish to give it up; besides, if the story were all a myth, it put the travelers who had told it in a very bad light, and shook the confidence of readers in some of the other tales they had published. Science always upsets us. None of us like to be jolted out of the beliefs we have been brought up with and exchange them for others, no matter how good the new ones are. So it was in sixteen hundred. The populace resented having the Tartary lamb taken away from them."
Mrs. McGregor laughed.
"It was a pity Sir John Mandeville and the rest did not live long enough to learn how mistaken they had been," mused Mary.