collection of eggs. "Never," shrieked my wrathful aunt, "shall you have these again until you bring back to me my beautiful crane."
'After a while I recovered, but no one dared to speak to me, and I moped about the house in solitary wretchedness without a single egg to contemplate.
'At last I could bear it no longer, and one night I left the house determined never to return again without the crane. I took with me an old perambulator, in which I had been wheeled about as a child, and
in this I placed six of the delicious kernels of the Peruvian yap bean, besides a hatchet and other things which I thought might be useful on my journey. I slept in the forest and, on the following morning I cut down the straightest tree I could find for my purpose, trimmed it to a fine long pole, and on the very top of this I fastened a pin, bent to the form of a fish-hook, which I now baited with one of the yap kernels.
'"If anything will attract the bird, this will," thought I, having fastened the foot of the pole to my perambulator. I now proceeded to angle the air for the
lost crane. Carefully following the direction I had observed the bird to take when it broke away from its chain, I travelled for weeks and weeks, without seeing any sign of it. In time, without even a nibble, the first kernel was dissolved and worn away by the wind and rain, and, in like manner the same fate overcame the second, with which I baited my hook; then the third, then the fourth, and then the fifth.
'Still keeping the same direction, by this time I had arrived at the very edge of the world, beyond which there is nothing but sea and sky. Believing that the poor creature had flown out over this lonely sea, and hoping that it might return when it realised that there was no land beyond, I determined to wait on the desolate shore.