The Hot Swamp | Page 7

sea with just sufficient force to intensify its heavenly blue, and fill out the great square-sail so that there was no occasion to ply the oars. One dark, starlight but moonless night, a time of quiet talk prevailed from stem to stern of the vessel as the grizzled mariners spun long yarns of their prowess and experiences on the deep, for the benefit of awe-stricken and youthful shipmates whose careers were only commencing.
"You've heard, no doubt, of the great sea-serpent?" observed little Maikar, who had speedily recovered from the flattening to which Bladud had subjected him, and was busy enlivening a knot of young fellows in the bow of the ship.
"Of course we have!" cried one; "father used to tell me about it when I was but a small boy. He never saw it himself, though he had been to the Tin Isles and Albion more than once; but he said he had met with men who had spoken with shipmates who had heard of it from men who had seen it only a few days before, and who described it exactly."
"Ah!" remarked another, "but I have met a man who had seen it himself on his first voyage, when he was quite a youth; and he said it had a bull's head and horns, with a dreadful long body all over scales, and something like an ass's tail at the end."
"Pooh!--nonsense!" exclaimed little Maikar, twirling his thumbs, for smoking had not been introduced into the world at that period--and thumb-twirling would seem to have served the ancient world for leisurely pastime quite as well, if not better--at least we are led to infer so from the fact that Herodotus makes no mention of anything like a vague, mysterious sensation of unsatisfied desire to fill the mouth with smoke in those early ages, which he would certainly have done had the taste for smoke been a natural craving, and thumb-twirling an unsatisfactory occupation. This absolute silence of the "Father of History," we think, almost proves our point. "Nonsense!" repeated little Maikar. "The youth of the man who told you about the serpent accounts for his wild description, for youth is prone to strange imaginings and--"
"It seems to me," interrupted a grave man, who twirled his thumbs in that slow, deliberate way in which a contemplative man smokes--"it seems to me that there's no more truth about the great sea-serpent than there is about the golden fleece. I don't believe in either of them."
"Don't you? Well, all I can say is," returned the little man, gazing fixedly in the grave comrade's face, "that I saw the great sea-serpent with my own eyes!"
"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