"Merciful Heaven! I forgot to tell you that the other was in the back room."
"Well,–yes; you might have mentioned that before. You see the timbers are falling, and–I've got three children myself. However"—
Up he went again, four steps at a time. Pretty soon he came back, a blackamoor with smoke; but he had the baby safe and sound, and gave it to its mother. Next day when he came to sing at the Muller Gardens, the audience glorified him.
NOT A SEA-SERPENT.
That there really is a sea-serpent, scientific men now have little doubt; but many people have not seen it who thought they did. One curious deception of this sort is thus related by an English writer:
One morning in October, 1869, I was standing with a group of passengers on the deck of time ill-fated P. and G. steamship Rangoon, then steaming up the Straits of Malacca to Singapore.
One of the party suddenly pointed out an object on the port-bow, perhaps half a mile off, and drew from us the simultaneous exclamation of "The sea-serpent!"
And there it was, to the naked eye a genuine serpent, speeding through the sea, with its head raised on a slender curved neck, now almost buried in the water, and anon reared just above its surface. There was the mane, and there were the well-known undulating coils stretching yards behind.
But for an opera-glass, probably all our party on board the Rangoon would have been personal witnesses to the existence of a great sea-serpent. But, alas for romance! One glance through the lenses, and the reptile was resolved into a bamboo, root upwards, anchored in some manner to the bottom,–a "snag," in fact.