The Polos, seizing this opportunity of escape, promised to convey the bridal party safely by sea; and the Khan agreed to let them go, on condition of their returning to him again after a short visit home. Among the monarch's parting gifts were caskets of magnificent rubies and other precious gems.
It was eighteen months before they reached Ormuz, and during that time two or three of the envoys and six hundred of the Princess's attendants had died. The Persian bridegroom was dead also, and so was the monarch of Cathay, Khubla Khan.
The Polos now were freed from their promise to return; and after staying nine months in Persia—for they liked to explore every place at which they stopped—they started on their long journey to Venice. They arrived there in safety, after an absence of twenty-four years; and at first no one would believe that these outlandish-looking travellers were the real Polos. But they soon proved their identity, and became known far and wide as the most wonderful travellers of the time.
Marco was a prisoner in Genoa for four years, after a battle with the Genoese, and he amused himself during this dreary period by writing an account of his travels and his life at the court of the Khan.
[FROG-CATCHING.]
BY A. W. ROBERTS.
When a man dwelling in the Drowned Lands of Canonoque, Canada, is capable of accumulating a small fortune by catching frogs for the New York market, surely some of our young people who are now spending their vacations near the shores of our lakes, rivers, and ponds ought also to make considerable pocket-money, if not as large a fortune as that of Pat Bowman, of the Drowned Lands, who follows up the frogs from early spring until late in the fall.
It is not only the pocket-money that is to be picked up, but while on the frog-hunts many lessons are to be learned in aquatic natural history. Then there is the fun of the thing. It's fun to get sunburned, and have a brand-new skin at the end of a week to attend church in. It's fun to step into a bumble-bees' nest, and have the bees chase you until you are only too glad to take refuge in the water, where they can't find you out. And it's fun to break through a musk-rat or turtle run, and to have your companions pull you out covered with black peat; then come the washing out of your clothes, and hanging them in the sun to dry; and while they are drying, then the sand-flies and mosquitoes come swarming about you in clouds, until in sheer desperation you conclude to do as the cows do—stand in the water and splash. And after you have stood in the water a few minutes, you find the horse-leeches and boat-flies have discovered you have legs, and are having a feast on them. By this time your clothing is dry. All this sort of experience was fun to me when I was a boy, and I often sigh for those happy days to return.
At the age of thirteen I became a frog-catcher. I discovered there was a demand in Fulton and Washington markets for frogs' legs, and that the price paid for them, as they ran, large and small (not very, very small), was one dollar and a half per hundred. But here was the trouble: how could I manage to keep the frogs alive and healthy until I had one hundred of them ready for market? At last I hit upon a plan, which was no less than to construct a pond in our then very large garden, and plant it with pond-lilies, sweet-flag, and cat-tails; in fact, to make it as picturesque as possible. To have the pond hold water, the bottom and sides were lined with clay to the depth of half a foot. To fill the pond we made a series of wooden gutters that connected with the garden pump. Every night we pumped and pumped, until we thought the old pump would surely go dry.