Mr. MUNCHAUSEN

I
I ENCOUNTER THE OLD GENTLEMAN

There are moments of supreme embarrassment
in the lives of persons given to veracity,—indeed
it has been my own unusual experience
in life that the truth well stuck to is twice as
hard a proposition as a lie so obvious that no one is
deceived by it at the outset. I cannot quite agree
with my friend, Caddy Barlow, who says that in a
tight place it is better to lie at once and be done
with it than to tell the truth which will need forty
more truths to explain it, but I must confess that in
my forty years of absolute and conscientious devotion
to truth I have found myself in holes far
deeper than any my most mendacious of friends
ever got into. I do not propose, however, to desert
at this late hour the Goddess I have always worshipped
because she leads me over a rough and
rocky road, and whatever may be the hardships
involved in my wooing I intend to the very end to
 remain the ever faithful slave of Mademoiselle
Veracité. All of which I state here in prefatory
mood, and in order, in so far as it is possible for me
to do so, to disarm the incredulous and sniffy reader
who may be inclined to doubt the truth of my story
of how the manuscript of the following pages came
into my possession. I am quite aware that to some
the tale will appear absolutely and intolerably impossible.
I know that if any other than I told it
to me I should not believe it. Yet despite these
drawbacks the story is in all particulars, essential
and otherwise, absolutely truthful.

The facts are briefly these:

It was not, to begin with, a dark and dismal
evening. The snow was not falling silently, clothing
a sad and gloomy world in a mantle of white,
and over the darkling moor a heavy mist was not
rising, as is so frequently the case. There was no
soul-stirring moaning of bitter winds through the
leafless boughs; so far as I was aware nothing
soughed within twenty miles of my bailiwick; and
my dog, lying before a blazing log fire in my library,
did not give forth an occasional growl of apprehension,
 denoting the presence or approach of
an uncanny visitor from other and mysterious
realms: and for two good reasons. The first reason
is that it was midsummer when the thing happened,
so that a blazing log fire in my library
would have been an extravagance as well as an
anachronism. The second is that I have no dog.
In fact there was nothing unusual, or uncanny in
the whole experience. It happened to be a bright
and somewhat too sunny July day, which is not an
unusual happening along the banks of the Hudson.
You could see the heat, and if anything had
soughed it could only have been the mercury in my
thermometer. This I must say clicked nervously
against the top of the glass tube and manifested an
extraordinary desire to climb higher than the
length of the tube permitted. Incidentally I may
add, even if it be not believed, that the heat was so
intense that the mercury actually did raise the
whole thermometer a foot and a half above the
mantel-shelf, and for two mortal hours, from midday
until two by the Monastery Clock, held it suspended
there in mid-air with no visible means of
 support. Not a breath of air was stirring, and
the only sounds heard were the expanding creaks of
the beams of my house, which upon that particular
day increased eight feet in width and assumed a
height which made it appear to be a three instead
of a two story dwelling. There was little work
doing in the house. The children played about in
their bathing suits, and the only other active
factor in my life of the moment was our hired man
who was kept busy in the cellar pouring water on
the furnace coal to keep it from spontaneously
combusting.

We had just had luncheon, burning our throats
with the iced tea and with considerable discomfort
swallowing the simmering cold roast filet, which
we had to eat hastily before the heat of the day
transformed it into smoked beef. My youngest boy
Willie perspired so copiously that we seriously
thought of sending for a plumber to solder up his
pores, and as for myself who have spent three summers
of my life in the desert of Sahara in order to
rid myself of nervous chills to which I was once
unhappily subject, for the first time in my life I was
 impelled to admit that it was intolerably warm.
And then the telephone bell rang.

“Great Scott!” I cried, “Who in thunder do
you suppose wants to play golf on a day like this?”—for
nowadays our telephone is used for no other
purpose than the making or the breaking of golf
engagements.

“Me,” cried my eldest son, whose grammar is
not as yet on a par with his activity. “I’ll go.”

The boy shot out of the dining room and ran to
the telephone, returning in a few moments with the
statement that a gentleman with a husky voice
whose name was none of his business wished to
speak with me on a matter of some importance to
myself.

I was loath to go. My friends the book agents
had recently acquired the habit of approaching
me over the telephone, and I feared that here was
another nefarious attempt to foist a thirty-eight
volume tabloid edition of The World’s Worst Literature
upon me. Nevertheless I wisely determined
to respond.

“Hello,” I said, placing my lips against the rubber
 cup. “Hello there, who wants 91162 Nepperhan?”

“Is that you?” came the answering question,
and, as my boy had indicated, in a voice whose chief
quality was huskiness.

“I guess so,” I replied facetiously;—“It was this
morning, but the heat has affected me somewhat,
and I don’t feel as much like myself as I might.
What can I do for you?”

“Nothing, but you can do a lot for yourself,” was
the astonishing answer. “Pretty hot for literary
work, isn’t it?” the voice added sympathetically.

“Very,” said I. “Fact is I can’t seem to do
anything these days but perspire.”

“That’s what I thought; and when you can’t
work ruin stares you in the face, eh? Now I have
a manuscript—”

“Oh Lord!” I cried. “Don’t. There are millions
in the same fix. Even my cook writes.”

“Don’t know about that,” he returned instantly.
“But I do know that there’s millions in my manuscript.
And you can have it for the asking. How’s
that for an offer?”

 “Very kind, thank you,” said I. “What’s the
nature of your story?”

“It’s extremely good-natured,” he answered
promptly.

I laughed. The twist amused me.

“That isn’t what I meant exactly,” said I,
“though it has some bearing on the situation. Is
it a Henry James dandy, or does it bear the mark
of Caine? Is it realism or fiction?”

“Realism,” said he. “Fiction isn’t in my line.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” I replied; “you send it to
me by post and I’ll look it over. If I can use it I
will.”

“Can’t do it,” said he. “There isn’t any post-office
where I am.”

“What?” I cried. “No post-office? Where in
Hades are you?”

“Gehenna,” he answered briefly. “The transportation
between your country and mine is all one
way,” he added. “If it wasn’t the population
here would diminish.”

“Then how the deuce am I to get hold of your
stuff?” I demanded.

 “That’s easy. Send your stenographer to the
’phone and I’ll dictate it,” he answered.

The novelty of the situation appealed to me.
Even if my new found acquaintance were some
funny person nearer at hand than Gehenna trying
to play a practical joke upon me, still it might be
worth while to get hold of the story he had to tell.
Hence I agreed to his proposal.

“All right, sir,” said I. “I’ll do it. I’ll have him
here to-morrow morning at nine o’clock sharp.
What’s your number? I’ll ring you up.”

“Never mind that,” he replied. “I’m merely a
tapster on your wires. I’ll ring you up as soon as
I’ve had breakfast and then we can get to work.”

“Very good,” said I. “And may I ask your
name?”

“Certainly,” he answered. “I’m Munchausen.”

“What? The Baron?” I roared, delighted.

“Well—I used to be Baron,” he returned with a
tinge of sadness in his voice, “but here in Gehenna
we are all on an equal footing. I’m plain Mr. Munchausen
of Hades now. But that’s a detail. Don’t
forget. Nine o’clock. Good-bye.”

 “Wait a moment, Baron,” I cried. “How about
the royalties on this book?”

“Keep ’em for yourself,” he replied. “We have
money to burn over here. You are welcome to all
the earthly rights of the book. I’m satisfied with
the returns on the Asbestos Edition, already in its
468th thousand. Good-bye.”

There was a rattle as of the hanging up of the
receiver, a short sharp click and a ring, and I
realised that he had gone.

The next morning in response to a telegraphic
summons my stenographer arrived and when I explained
the situation to him he was incredulous,
but orders were orders and he remained. I could
see, however, that as nine o’clock approached he
grew visibly nervous, which indicated that he half
believed me anyhow, and when at nine to the second
the sharp ring of the ’phone fell upon our ears he
jumped as if he had been shot.

“Hello,” said I again. “That you, Baron?”

“The same,” the voice replied. “Stenographer
ready?”

“Yes,” said I.

 The stenographer walked to the desk, placed the
receiver at his ear, and with trembling voice announced
his presence. There was a response of some
kind, and then more calmly he remarked,
“Fire ahead, Mr. Munchausen,” and began to
write rapidly in short-hand.

Two days later he handed me a type-written copy
of the following stories. The reader will observe
that they are in the form of interviews, and it
should be stated here that they appeared originally
in the columns of the Sunday edition of the Gehenna
Gazette, a publication of Hades which circulates
wholly among the best people of that country, and
which, if report saith truly, would not print a line
which could not be placed in the hands of children,
and to whose columns such writers as Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Jonah and Ananias are
frequent contributors.

Indeed, on the statement of Mr. Munchausen, all
the interviews herein set forth were between himself
as the principal and the Hon. Henry B.
Ananias as reporter, or were scrupulously edited
by the latter before being published.

II
THE SPORTING TOUR OF MR. MUNCHAUSEN

“Good morning, Mr. Munchausen,” said the
interviewer of the Gehenna Gazette entering
the apartment of the famous traveller at the
Hotel Deville, where the late Baron had just arrived
from his sporting tour in the Blue Hills of
Cimmeria and elsewhere.

“The interests of truth, my dear Ananias,”
replied the Baron, grasping me cordially by the
hand, “require that I should state it as my opinion
that it is not a good morning. In fact, my good
friend, it is a very bad morning. Can you not see
that it is raining cats and dogs without?”

“Sir,” said I with a bow, “I accept the spirit of
your correction but not the letter. It is raining
indeed, sir, as you suggest, but having passed
through it myself on my way hither I can personally
testify that it is raining rain, and not a single
cat or canine has, to my knowledge, as yet fallen
from the clouds to the parched earth, although I am
 informed that down upon the coast an elephant
and three cows have fallen upon one of the summer
hotels and irreparably damaged the roof.”

Mr. Munchausen laughed.

“It is curious, Ananias,” said he, “what sticklers
for the truth you and I have become.”

“It is indeed, Munchausen,” I returned. “The
effects of this climate are working wonders upon
us. And it is just as well. You and I are outclassed
by these twentieth century prevaricators
concerning whom late arrivals from the upper
world tell such strange things. They tell me that
lying has become a business and is no longer ranked
among the Arts or Professions.”

“Ah me!” sighed the Baron with a retrospective
look in his eye, “lying isn’t what it used to be,
Ananias, in your days and mine. I fear it has become
one of the lost arts.”

“I have noticed it myself, my friend, and only last
night I observed the same thing to my well beloved
Sapphira, who was lamenting the transparency
of the modern lie, and said that lying to-day is no
better than the truth. In our day a prevarication
 had all of the opaque beauty of an opalescent bit of
glass, whereas to-day in the majority of cases it is
like a great vulgar plate-glass window, through
which we can plainly see the ugly truths that lie behind.
But, sir, I am here to secure from you not
a treatise upon the lost art of lying, but some idea
of the results of your sporting tour. You fished,
and hunted, and golfed, and doubtless did other
things. You, of course, had luck and made the
greatest catch of the season; shot all the game in
sight, and won every silver, gold and pewter golf
mug in all creation?”

“You speak truly, Ananias,” returned Mr. Munchausen.
“My luck was wonderful—even for one
who has been so singularly fortunate as I. I took
three tons of speckled beauties with one cast of an
ordinary horse whip in the Blue Hills, and with
nothing but a silken line and a minnow hook landed
upon the deck of my steam yacht a whale of most
tremendous proportions; I shot game of every kind
in great abundance and in my golf there was none
to whom I could not give with ease seven holes in
every nine and beat him out.”

 “Seven?” said I, failing to see how the ex-Baron
could be right.

“Seven,” said he complacently. “Seven on the
first, and seven on the second nine; fourteen in all
of the eighteen holes.”

“But,” I cried, “I do not see how that could be.
With fourteen holes out of the eighteen given to
your opponent even if you won all the rest you still
would be ten down.”

“True, by ordinary methods of calculation,” returned
the Baron, “but I got them back on a technicality,
which I claim is a new and valuable discovery
in the game. You see it is impossible to
play more than one hole at a time, and I invariably
proved to the Greens Committee that in taking
fourteen holes at once my opponent violated the
physical possibilities of the situation. In every case
the point was accepted as well taken, for if we
allow golfers to rise above physical possibilities the
game is gone. The integrity of the Card is the
soul of Golf,” he added sententiously.

“Tell me of the whale,” said I, simply. “You
landed a whale of large proportions on the deck
 of your yacht with a simple silken line and a
minnow hook.”

“Well it’s a tough story,” the Baron replied,
handing me a cigar. “But it is true, Ananias, true
to the last word. I was fishing for eels. Sitting on
the deck of The Lyre one very warm afternoon in
the early stages of my trip, I baited a minnow hook
and dropped it overboard. It was the roughest
day at sea I had ever encountered. The waves were
mountain high, and it is the sad fact that one of our
crew seated in the main-top was drowned with the
spray of the dashing billows. Fortunately for myself,
directly behind my deck chair, to which I was
securely lashed, was a powerful electric fan which
blew the spray away from me, else I too might have
suffered the same horrid fate. Suddenly there
came a tug on my line. I was half asleep at the
time and let the line pay out involuntarily, but I
was wide-awake enough to know that something
larger than an eel had taken hold of the hook. I
had hooked either a Leviathan or a derelict. Caution
and patience, the chief attributes of a good
angler were required. I hauled the line in until it
 was taut. There were a thousand yards of it out,
and when it reached the point of tensity, I gave
orders to the engineers to steam closer to the object
at the other end. We steamed in five hundred
yards, I meanwhile hauling in my line. Then came
another tug and I let out ten yards. ‘Steam
closer,’ said I. ‘Three hundred yards sou-sou-west
by nor’-east.’ The yacht obeyed on the instant.
I called the Captain and let him feel the
line. ‘What do you think it is?’ said I. He pulled
a half dozen times. ‘Feels like a snag,’ he said,
‘but seein’ as there ain’t no snags out here, I think
it must be a fish.’ ‘What kind?’ I asked. I could
not but agree that he was better acquainted with
the sea and its denizens than I. ‘Well,’ he replied,
‘it is either a sea serpent or a whale.’ At the mere
mention of the word whale I was alert. I have always
wanted to kill a whale. ‘Captain,’ said I,
‘can’t you tie an anchor onto a hawser, and bait
the flukes with a boa constrictor and make sure of
him?’ He looked at me contemptuously. ‘Whales
eats fish,’ said he, ‘and they don’t bite at no
anchors. Whales has brains, whales has.’ ‘What
 shall we do?’ I asked. ‘Steam closer,’ said the
Captain, and we did so.”

Munchausen took a long breath and for the moment
was silent.

“Well?” said I.

“Well, Ananias,” said he. “We resolved to
wait. As the Captain said to me, ‘Fishin’ is
waitin’.’ So we waited. ‘Coax him along,’ said
the Captain. ‘How can we do it?’ I asked. ‘By
kindness,’ said he. ‘Treat him gently, persuasive-like
and he’ll come.’ We waited four days and
nobody moved and I grew weary of coaxing. ‘We’ve
got to do something,’ said I to the Captain. ‘Yes,’
said he, ‘Let’s make him move. He doesn’t seem to
respond to kindness.’ ‘But how?’ I cried. ‘Give
him an electric shock,’ said the Captain. ‘Telegraph
him his mother’s sick and may be it’ll move him.’
‘Can’t you get closer to him?’ I demanded, resenting
his facetious manner. ‘I can, but it will
scare him off,’ replied the Captain. So we turned
all our batteries on the sea. The dynamo shot
forth its bolts and along about four o’clock in the
afternoon there was the whale drawn by magnetic
 influence to the side of The Lyre. He was a beauty,
Ananias,” Munchausen added with enthusiasm.
“You never saw such a whale. His back was
as broad as the deck of an ocean steamer and in his
length he exceeded the dimensions of The Lyre by
sixty feet.”

“There was the whale drawn by magnetic
influence to the side of The Lyre.” Chapter II.

“And still you got him on deck?” I asked,—I,
Ananias, who can stand something in the way of an
exaggeration.

“Yes,” said Munchausen, lighting his cigar,
which had gone out. “Another storm came up and
we rolled and rolled and rolled, until I thought The
Lyre was going to capsize.”

“But weren’t you sea-sick?” I asked.

“Didn’t have a chance to be,” said Munchausen.
“I was thinking of the whale all the time. Finally
there came a roll in which we went completely under,
and with a slight pulling on the line the
whale was landed by the force of the wave and laid
squarely upon the deck.”

“Great Sapphira!” said I. “But you just said
he was wider and longer than the yacht!”

“He was,” sighed Munchausen. “He landed on
 the deck and by sheer force of his weight the yacht
went down under him. I swam ashore and the
whole crew with me. The next day Mr. Whale
floated in strangled. He’d swallowed the thousand
yards of line and it got so tangled in his tonsils
that it choked him to death. Come around next
week and I’ll give you a couple of pounds of whalebone
for Mrs. Ananias, and all the oil you can
carry.”

I thanked the old gentleman for his kind offer
and promised to avail myself of it, although as a
newspaper man it is against my principles to accept
gifts from public men.

“It was great luck, Baron,” said I. “Or at least
it would have been if you hadn’t lost your yacht.”

“That was great luck too,” he observed nonchalantly.
“It cost me ten thousand dollars a month
keeping that yacht in commission. Now she’s gone
I save all that. Why it’s like finding money in the
street, Ananias. She wasn’t worth more than fifty
thousand dollars, and in six months I’ll be ten
thousand ahead.”

I could not but admire the cheerful philosophy
 of the man, but then I was not surprised. Munchausen
was never the sort of man to let little
things worry him.

“But that whale business wasn’t a circumstance
to my catch of three tons of trout with a single cast
of a horse-whip in the Blue Hills,” said the Baron
after a few moments of meditation, during which I
could see that he was carefully marshalling his
facts.

“I never heard of its equal,” said I. “You must
have used a derrick.”

“No,” he replied suavely. “Nothing of the sort.
It was the simplest thing in the world. It was
along about five o’clock in the afternoon when with
my three guides and my valet I drove up the winding
roadway of Great Sulphur Mountain on my
way to the Blue Mountain House where I purposed
to put up for a few days. I had one of those big
mountain wagons with a covered top to it such as
the pioneers used on the American plains, with six
fine horses to the fore. I held the reins myself,
since we were in the midst of a terrific thunderstorm
and I felt safer when I did my own driving.
 All the flaps of the leathern cover were let down
at the sides and at the back, and were securely
fastened. The roads were unusually heavy, and
when we came to the last great hill before the lake
all but I were walking, as a measure of relief to the
horses. Suddenly one of the horses balked right in
the middle of the ascent, and in a moment of impatience
I gave him a stinging flick with my whip,
when like a whirlwind the whole six swerved to
one side and started on a dead run upward. The
jolt and the unexpected swerving of the wagon
threw me from my seat and I landed clear of the
wheels in the soft mud of the roadway, fortunately
without injury. When I arose the team was out of
sight and we had to walk the remainder of the distance
to the hotel. Imagine our surprise upon arriving
there to find the six panting steeds and the
wagon standing before the main entrance to the
hotel dripping as though they had been through
the Falls of Niagara, and, would you believe it,
Ananias, inside that leather cover of the wagon,
packed as tightly as sardines, were no less than
three thousand trout, not one of them weighing
 less than a pound and some of them getting as high
as four. The whole catch weighed a trifle over six
thousand pounds.”

“Great Heavens, Baron,” I cried. “Where the
dickens did they come from?”

“That’s what I asked myself,” said the Baron
easily. “It seemed astounding at first glance, but
investigation showed it after all to be a very simple
proposition. The runaways after reaching the top
of the hill turned to the left, and clattered on down
toward the bridge over the inlet to the lake. The
bridge broke beneath their weight and the horses
soon found themselves struggling in the water. The
harness was strong and the wagon never left them.
They had to swim for it, and I am told by a small
boy who was fishing on the lake at the time that
they swam directly across it, pulling the wagon
after them. Naturally with its open front and
confined back and sides the wagon acted as a sort
of drag-net and when the opposite shore was
gained, and the wagon was pulled ashore, it was
found to have gathered in all the fish that could
not get out of the way.”

 The Baron resumed his cigar, and I sat still eyeing
the ample pattern of the drawing-room carpet.

“Pretty good catch for an afternoon, eh?” he
said in a minute.

“Yes,” said I. “Almost too good, Baron. Those
horses must have swam like the dickens to get over
so quickly. You would think the trout would have
had time to escape.”

“Oh I presume one or two of them did,” said
Munchausen. “But the majority of them couldn’t.
The horses were all fast, record-breakers anyhow.
I never hire a horse that isn’t.”

And with that I left the old gentleman and
walked blushing back to the office. I don’t doubt
for an instant the truth of the Baron’s story, but
somehow or other I feel that in writing it my reputation
is in some measure at stake.

III
THREE MONTHS IN A BALLOON

Mr. Munchausen was not handsome, but
the Imps liked him very much, he was so
full of wonderful reminiscences, and was always
willing to tell anybody that would listen, all about
himself. To the Heavenly Twins he was the greatest
hero that had ever lived. Napoleon Bonaparte,
on Mr. Munchausen’s own authority, was not half
the warrior that he, the late Baron had been, nor
was Cæsar in his palmiest days, one-quarter so wise
or so brave. How old the Baron was no one ever
knew, but he had certainly lived long enough to
travel the world over, and stare every kind of death
squarely in the face without flinching. He had
fought Zulus, Indians, tigers, elephants—in fact,
everything that fights, the Baron had encountered,
and in every contest he had come out victorious.
He was the only man the children had ever seen that
had lost three legs in battle and then had recovered
 them after the fight was over; he was the only
visitor to their house that had been lost in the African
jungle and wandered about for three months
without food or shelter, and best of all he was, on
his own confession, the most truthful narrator of
extraordinary tales living. The youngsters had to
ask the Baron a question only, any one, it mattered
not what it was—to start him off on a story of
adventure, and as he called upon the Twins’ father
once a month regularly, the children were not long
in getting together a collection of tales beside
which the most exciting episodes in history paled
into insignificant commonplaces.

“Uncle Munch,” said the Twins one day, as they
climbed up into the visitor’s lap and disarranged
his necktie, “was you ever up in a balloon?”

“Only once,” said the Baron calmly. “But I
had enough of it that time to last me for a lifetime.”

“Was you in it for long?” queried the Twins,
taking the Baron’s watch out of his pocket and
flinging it at Cerberus, who was barking outside of
the window.

 “Well, it seemed long enough,” the Baron answered,
putting his pocket-book in the inside pocket
of his vest where the Twins could not reach it.
“Three months off in the country sleeping all
day long and playing tricks all night seems a very
short time, but three months in a balloon and the
constant centre of attack from every source is too
long for comfort.”

“Were you up in the air for three whole
months?” asked the Twins, their eyes wide open
with astonishment.

“All but two days,” said the Baron. “For two
of those days we rested in the top of a tree in
India. The way of it was this: I was always, as
you know, a great favourite with the Emperor
Napoleon, of France, and when he found himself
involved in a war with all Europe, he replied to
one of his courtiers who warned him that his army
was not in condition: ‘Any army is prepared for
war whose commander-in-chief numbers Baron
Munchausen among his advisers. Let me have
Munchausen at my right hand and I will fight the
world.’ So they sent for me and as I was not very
 busy I concluded to go and assist the French, although
the allies and I were also very good friends.
I reasoned it out this way: In this fight the allies
are the stronger. They do not need me. Napoleon
does. Fight for the weak, Munchausen, I said to
myself, and so I went. Of course, when I reached
Paris I went at once to the Emperor’s palace and
remained at his side until he took the field, after
which I remained behind for a few days to put
things to rights for the Imperial family. Unfortunately
for the French, the King of Prussia heard of
my delay in going to the front, and he sent word to
his forces to intercept me on my way to join Napoleon
at all hazards, and this they tried to do. When
I was within ten miles of the Emperor’s headquarters,
I was stopped by the Prussians, and had
it not been that I had provided myself with a balloon
for just such an emergency, I should have been
captured and confined in the King’s palace at Berlin,
until the war was over.

“Foreseeing all this, I had brought with me a
large balloon packed away in a secret section of my
trunk, and while my body-guard was fighting with
 the Prussian troops sent to capture me, I and my
valet inflated the balloon, jumped into the car and
were soon high up out of the enemy’s reach. They
fired several shots at us, and one of them would
have pierced the balloon had I not, by a rare good
shot, fired my own rifle at the bullet, and hitting it
squarely in the middle, as is my custom, diverted it
from its course, and so saved our lives.

“It had been my intention to sail directly over
the heads of the attacking party and drop down into
Napoleon’s camp the next morning, but unfortunately
for my calculations, a heavy wind came up in
the night and the balloon was caught by a northerly
blast, and blown into Africa, where, poised in the
air directly over the desert of Sahara, we encountered
a dead calm, which kept us stalled up for two
miserable weeks.”

“Why didn’t you come down?” asked the Twins,
“wasn’t the elevator running?”

“We didn’t dare,” explained the Baron, ignoring
the latter part of the question. “If we had we’d
have wasted a great deal of our gas, and our condition
would have been worse than ever. As I told
 you we were directly over the centre of the desert.
There was no way of getting out of it except by long
and wearisome marches over the hot, burning sands
with the chances largely in favour of our never getting
out alive. The only thing to do was to stay
just where we were and wait for a favouring
breeze. This we did, having to wait four mortal
weeks before the air was stirred.”

“You said two weeks a minute ago, Uncle
Munch,” said the Twins critically.

“Two? Hem! Well, yes it was two, now that I
think of it. It’s a natural mistake,” said the Baron
stroking his mustache a little nervously. “You
see two weeks in a balloon over a vast desert of
sand, with nothing to do but whistle for a breeze, is
equal to four weeks anywhere else. That is, it seems
so. Anyhow, two weeks or four, whichever it was,
the breeze came finally, and along about midnight
left us stranded again directly over an Arab encampment
near Wady Halfa. It was a more perilous
position really, than the first, because the moment
the Arabs caught sight of us they began to
make frantic efforts to get us down. At first we
 simply laughed them to scorn and made faces at
them, because as far as we could see, we were safely
out of reach. This enraged them and they apparently
made up their minds to kill us if they could.
At first their idea was to get us down alive and sell
us as slaves, but our jeers changed all that, and
what should they do but whip out a lot of guns and
begin to pepper us.

“‘I’ll settle them in a minute,’ I said to myself,
and set about loading my own gun. Would you
believe it, I found that my last bullet was the one
with which I had saved the balloon from the Prussian
shot?”

“Mercy, how careless of you, Uncle Munch!”
said one of the Twins. “What did you do?”

“I threw out a bag of sand ballast so that the
balloon would rise just out of range of their guns,
and then, as their bullets got to their highest point
and began to drop back, I reached out and caught
them in a dipper. Rather neat idea, eh? With
these I loaded my own rifle and shot every one
of the hostile party with their own ammunition,
and when the last of the attacking Arabs dropped
 I found there were enough bullets left to fill the
empty sand bag again, so that the lost ballast
was not missed. In fact, there were enough of
them in weight to bring the balloon down so
near to the earth that our anchor rope dangled
directly over the encampment, so that my valet and
I, without wasting any of our gas, could climb
down and secure all the magnificent treasures in
rugs and silks and rare jewels these robbers of the
desert had managed to get together in the course of
their depredations. When these were placed in the
car another breeze came up, and for the rest of the
time we drifted idly about in the heavens waiting
for a convenient place to land. In this manner we
were blown hither and yon for three months over
land and sea, and finally we were wrecked upon a
tall tree in India, whence we escaped by means of a
convenient elephant that happened to come our
way, upon which we rode triumphantly into Calcutta.
The treasures we had secured from the
Arabs, unfortunately, we had to leave behind us in
the tree, where I suppose they still are. I hope
some day to go back and find them.”

“As their bullets got to their highest point
and began to drop back, I reached out and
caught them.” Chapter III.

 Here Mr. Munchausen paused for a moment to
catch his breath. Then he added with a sigh. “Of
course, I went back to France immediately, but by
the time I reached Paris the war was over, and the
Emperor was in exile. I was too late to save him—though
I think if he had lived some sixty or seventy
years longer I should have managed to restore his
throne, and Imperial splendour to him.”

The Twins gazed into the fire in silence for a
minute or two. Then one of them asked:

“But what did you live on all that time, Uncle
Munch?”

“Eggs,” said the Baron. “Eggs and occasionally
fish. My servant had had the foresight when
getting the balloon ready to include, among the
things put into the car, a small coop in which were
six pet chickens I owned, and without which I
never went anywhere. These laid enough eggs
every day to keep us alive. The fish we caught
when our balloon stood over the sea, baiting our
anchor with pieces of rubber gas pipe used to inflate
the balloon, and which looked very much like
worms.”

 “But the chickens?” said the Twins. “What
did they live on?”

The Baron blushed.

“I am sorry you asked that question,” he said,
his voice trembling somewhat. “But I’ll answer it
if you promise never to tell anyone. It was the
only time in my life that I ever practised an intentional
deception upon any living thing, and I
have always regretted it, although our very lives
depended upon it.”

“What was it, Uncle Munch?” asked the Twins,
awed to think that the old warrior had ever deceived
anyone.

“I took the egg shells and ground them into
powder, and fed them to the chickens. The poor
creatures supposed it was corn-meal they were getting,”
confessed the Baron. “I know it was mean,
but what could I do?”

“Nothing,” said the Twins softly. “And we
don’t think it was so bad of you after all. Many
another person would have kept them laying eggs
until they starved, and then he’d have killed them
and eaten them up. You let them live.”

 “That may be so,” said the Baron, with a smile
that showed how relieved his conscience was by the
Twins’ suggestion. “But I couldn’t do that you
know, because they were pets. I had been brought
up from childhood with those chickens.”

Then the Twins, jamming the Baron’s hat down
over his eyes, climbed down from his lap and went
to their play, strongly of the opinion that, though a
bold warrior, the Baron was a singularly kind,
soft-hearted man after all.

IV
SOME HUNTING STORIES FOR CHILDREN

The Heavenly Twins had been off in the mountains
during their summer holiday, and in consequence
had seen very little of their good old
friend, Mr. Munchausen. He had written them
once or twice, and they had found his letters most
interesting, especially that one in which he told
how he had killed a moose up in Maine with his
Waterbury watch spring, and I do not wonder that
they marvelled at that, for it was one of the most extraordinary
happenings in the annals of the chase.
It seems, if his story is to be believed, and I am sure
that none of us who know him has ever had any
reason to think that he would deceive intentionally;
it seems, I say, that he had gone to Maine for a
week’s sport with an old army acquaintance of his,
who had now become a guide in that region. Unfortunately
his rifle, of which he was very fond, and
with which his aim was unerring, was in some manner
mislaid on the way, and when they arrived in the
woods they were utterly without weapons; but Mr.
 Munchausen was not the man to be daunted by any
such trifle as that, particularly while his friend had
an old army musket, a relic of the war, stored away
in the attic of his woodland domicile.

“Th’ only trouble with that ar musket,” said the
old guide, “ain’t so much that she won’t shoot
straight, nor that she’s got a kick onto her like an
unbroke mule. What I’m most afeard ’on about
your shootin’ with her ain’t that I think she’ll bust
neither, for the fact is we ain’t got nothin’ for to
bust her with, seein’ as how ammynition is skeerce.
I got powder, an’ I got waddin’, but I ain’t got no
shot.”

“That doesn’t make any difference,” the Baron
replied. “We can make the shot. Have you got
any plumbing in the camp? If you have, rip it out,
and I’ll melt up a water-pipe into bullets.”

“No, sir,” retorted the old man. “Plumbin’ is
one of the things I came here to escape from.”

“Then,” said the Baron, “I’ll use my watch for
ammunition. It is only a three-dollar watch and I
can spare it.”

With this determination, Mr. Munchausen took
 his watch to pieces, an ordinary time-piece of the
old-fashioned kind, and, to make a long story short,
shot for several days with the component parts of
that useful affair rammed down into the barrel of
the old musket. With the stem-winding ball he
killed an eagle; with pieces of the back cover
chopped up to a fineness of medium-sized shot he
brought down several other birds, but the great feat
of all was when he started for moose with nothing
but the watch-spring in the barrel of the gun. Having
rolled it up as tight as he could, fastened it with
a piece of twine, and rammed it well into the gun, he
set out to find the noble animal upon whose life he
had designs. After stalking the woods for several
hours, he came upon the tracks which told him that
his prey was not far off, and in a short while he
caught sight of a magnificent creature, his huge
antlers held proudly up and his great eyes full of
defiance.

For a moment the Baron hesitated. The idea of
destroying so beautiful an animal seemed to be abhorrent
to his nature, which, warrior-like as he is,
has something of the tenderness of a woman about
 it. A second glance at the superb creature, however,
changed all that, for the Baron then saw that
to shoot to kill was necessary, for the beast was
about to force a fight in which the hunter himself
would be put upon the defensive.

“I won’t shoot you through the head, my
beauty,” he said, softly, “nor will I puncture your
beautiful coat with this load of mine, but I’ll kill
you in a new way.”

With this he pulled the trigger. The powder exploded,
the string binding the long black spring
into a coil broke, and immediately the strip of steel
shot forth into the air, made directly toward the
neck of the rushing moose, and coiling its whole
sinuous length tightly about the doomed creature’s
throat strangled him to death.

As the Twins’ father said, a feat of that kind entitled
the Baron to a high place in fiction at least,
if not in history itself. The Twins were very much
wrought up over the incident, particularly, when
one too-smart small imp who was spending the
summer at the same hotel where they were said
that he didn’t believe it,—but he was an imp who
 had never seen a cheap watch, so how should he
know anything about what could be done with a
spring that cannot be wound up by a great strong
man in less than ten minutes?

As for the Baron he was very modest about the
achievement, for when he first appeared at the
Twins’ home after their return he had actually forgotten
all about it, and, in fact, could not recall
the incident at all, until Diavolo brought him his
own letter, when, of course, the whole matter came
back to him.

“It wasn’t so very wonderful, anyhow,” said the
Baron. “I should not think, for instance, of bragging
about any such thing as that. It was a simple
affair all through.”

“And what did you do with the moose’s antlers?”
asked Angelica. “I hope you brought ’em
home with you, because I’d like to see ’em.”

“I wanted to,” said the Baron, stroking the
Twins’ soft brown locks affectionately. “I wanted
to bring them home for your father to use as a
hat rack, dear, but they were too large. When I
had removed them from the dead animal, I found
 them so large that I could not get them out of the
forest, they got so tangled up in the trees. I should
have had to clear a path twenty feet wide and seven
miles long to get them even as far as my friend’s
hut, and after that they would have had to be
carried thirty miles through the woods to the express
office.”

“I guess it’s just as well after all,” said Diavolo.
“If they were as big as all that, Papa would have
had to build a new house to get ’em into.”

“Exactly,” said the Baron. “Exactly. That
same idea occurred to me, and for that reason I concluded
not to go to the trouble of cutting away
those miles of trees. The antlers would have made
a very expensive present for your father to receive
in these hard times.”

“It was a good thing you had that watch,” the
Twins observed, after thinking over the Baron’s
adventure. “If you hadn’t had that you couldn’t
have killed the moose.”

“Very likely not,” said the Baron, “unless I
had been able to do as I did in India thirty years
ago at a man hunt.”

 “What?” cried the Twins. “Do they hunt men
in India?”?

“That all depends, my dears,” replied the Baron.
“It all depends upon what you mean by the word
they. Men don’t hunt men, but animals, great wild
beasts sometimes hunt them, and it doesn’t often
happen that the men escape. In the particular
man hunt I refer to I was the creature that was being
hunted, and I’ve had a good deal of sympathy
for foxes ever since. This was a regular fox hunt
in a way, although I was the fox, and a herd of elephants
were the huntsmen.”

“How queer,” said Diavolo, unscrewing one of
the Baron’s shirt studs to see if he would fall apart.

“Not half so queer as my feelings when I realised
my position,” said the Baron with a shake of his
head. “I was frightened half to death. It seemed
to me that I’d reached the end of my tether at last.
I was studying the fauna and flora of India, in a
small Indian village, known as ah—what was the
name of that town! Ah—something like Rathabad—no,
that isn’t quite it—however, one name does
as well as another in India. It was a good many
 miles from Calcutta, and I’d been living there
about three months. The village lay in a small
valley between two ranges of hills, none of them
very high. On the other side of the westerly hills
was a great level stretch of country upon which
herds of elephants used to graze. Out of this rose
these hills, very precipitously, which was a very
good thing for the people in the valley, else those
elephants would have come over and played havoc
with their homes and crops. To me the plains had
a great fascination, and I used to wander over them
day after day in search of new specimens for my
collection of plants and flowers, never thinking of
the danger I ran from an encounter with these elephants,
who were very ferocious and extremely
jealous of the territory they had come through
years of occupation to regard as their own. So it
happened, that one day, late in the afternoon, I was
returning from an expedition over the plains, and,
as I had found a large number of new specimens,
I was feeling pretty happy. I whistled loudly as I
walked, when suddenly coming to a slight undulation
 in the plain what should I see before me but
a herd of sixty-three elephants, some eating, some
thinking, some romping, and some lying asleep on
the soft turf. Now, if I had come quietly, of course,
I could have passed them unobserved, but as I told
you I was whistling. I forget what the tune was,
The Marsellaise or Die Wacht Am Rhein, or maybe
Tommie Atkins, which enrages the elephants very
much, being the national anthem of the British invader.
At any rate, whatever the tune was it attracted
the attention of the elephants, and then
their sport began. The leader lifted his trunk high
in the air, and let out a trumpet blast that echoed
back from the cliff three miles distant. Instantly
every elephant was on the alert. Those that had
been sleeping awoke, and sprang to their feet.
Those that had been at play stopped in their romp,
and under the leadership of the biggest brute of
the lot they made a rush for me. I had no gun;
nothing except my wits and my legs with which to
defend myself, so I naturally began to use the latter
until I could get the former to work. It was nip
 and tuck. They could run faster than I could, and
I saw in an instant that without stratagem I could
not hope to reach a place of safety. As I have said,
the cliff, which rose straight up from the plain like
a stone-wall, was three miles away, nor was there
any other spot in which I could find a refuge. It
occurred to me as I ran that if I ran in circles I
could edge up nearer to the cliff all the time, and
still keep my pursuers at a distance for the simple
reason that an elephant being more or less unwieldy
cannot turn as rapidly as a man can, so I
kept running in circles. I could run around my
short circle in less time than the enemy could run
around his larger one, and in this manner I got
nearer and nearer my haven of safety, the bellowing
beasts snorting with rage as they followed. Finally,
when I began to see that I was tolerably safe, another
idea occurred to me, which was that if I
could manage to kill those huge creatures the ivory
I could get would make my fortune. But how!
That was the question. Well, my dearly beloved
Imps, I admit that I am a fast runner, but I am
 also a fast thinker, and in less than two minutes I
had my plan arranged. I stopped short when about
two hundred feet from the cliff, and waited until
the herd was fifty feet away. Then I turned about
and ran with all my might up to within two feet
of the cliff, and then turning sharply to the left
ran off in that direction. The elephants, thinking
they had me, redoubled their speed, but failed to
notice that I had turned, so quickly was that movement
executed. They failed likewise to notice the
cliff, as I had intended. The consequence was the
whole sixty-three of them rushed head first, bang!
with all their force, into the rock. The hill shook
with the force of the blow and the sixty-three elephants
fell dead. They had simply butted their
brains out.”

“I got nearer and nearer my haven of safety,
the bellowing beasts snorting with rage as
they followed.” Chapter IV.

Here the Baron paused and pulled vigourously on
his cigar, which had almost gone out.

“That was fine,” said the Twins.

“What a narrow escape it was for you, Uncle
Munch,” said Diavolo.

“Very true,” said the great soldier rising, as a
 signal that his story was done. “In fact you might
say that I had sixty-three narrow escapes, one for
each elephant.”

“But what became of the ivory?” asked Angelica.

“Oh, as for that!” said the Baron, with a sigh,
“I was disappointed in that. They turned out to
be all young elephants, and they had lost their
first teeth. Their second teeth hadn’t grown yet.
I got only enough ivory to make one paper cutter,
which is the one I gave your father for Christmas
last year.”

Which may account for the extraordinary interest
the Twins have taken in their father’s paper
cutter ever since.

V
THE STORY OF JANG

“Did you ever own a dog, Baron Munchausen?”
asked the reporter of the Gehenna
Gazette, calling to interview the eminent nobleman
during Dog Show Week in Cimmeria.

“Yes, indeed I have,” said the Baron, “I fancy I
must have owned as many as a hundred dogs in my
life. To be sure some of the dogs were iron and
brass, but I was just as fond of them as if they had
been made of plush or lamb’s wool. They were so
quiet, those iron dogs were; and the brass dogs
never barked or snapped at any one.”

“I never saw a brass dog,” said the reporter.
“What good are they?”

“Oh they are likely to be very useful in winter,”
the Baron replied. “My brass dogs used to guard
my fire-place and keep the blazing logs from rolling
out into my room and setting fire to the rug the
Khan of Tartary gave me for saving his life from a
herd of Antipodes he and I were hunting in the
Himalaya Mountains.”

 “I don’t see what you needed dogs to do that
for,” said the reporter. “A fender would have
done just as well, or a pair of andirons,” he added.

“That’s what these dogs were,” said the Baron.
“They were fire dogs and fire dogs are andirons.”

Ananias pressed his lips tightly together, and
into his eyes came a troubled look. It was evident
that, revolting as the idea was to him, he thought
the Baron was trying to deceive him. Noting his
displeasure, the Baron inwardly resolving to be
careful how he handled the truth, hastened on
with his story.

“But dogs were never my favourite animals,” he
said. “With my pets I am quite as I am with other
things. I like to have pets that are entirely different
from the pets of other people, and that is why
in my day I have made companions of such animals
as the sangaree, and the camomile, and the—ah—the
two-horned piccolo. I’ve had tame bees even—in
fact my bees used to be the wonder of Siam, in
which country I was stationed for three years, having
been commissioned by a British company to
make a study of its climate with a view to finding
 out if it would pay the company to go into the ice
business there. Siam is, as you have probably
heard, a very warm country, and as ice is a very
rare thing in warm countries these English people
thought they might make a vast fortune by sending
tug-boats up to the Arctic Ocean, and with them
capture and tow icebergs to Siam, where they
might be cut up and sold to the people at tremendous
profit. The scheme was certainly a good one,
and I found many of the wealthy Siamese quite
willing to subscribe for a hundred pounds of ice a
week at ten dollars a pound, but it never came to
anything because we had no means of preserving
the icebergs after we got them into the Gulf of
Siam. The water was so hot that they melted before
we could cut them up, and we nearly got ourselves
into very serious trouble with the coast
people for that same reason. An iceberg, as you
know, is a huge affair, and when a dozen or two of
them had melted in the Gulf they added so to the
quantity of water there that fifty miles of the
coast line were completely flooded, and thousands
of valuable fish, able to live in warm water only,
 were so chilled that they got pneumonia, and died.
You can readily imagine how indignant the Siamese
fishermen were with my company over the losses
they had to bear, but their affection for me personally
was so great that they promised not to sue the
company if I would promise not to let the thing
occur again. This I promised, and all went well.
But about the bees, it was while I was living in
Bangkok that I had them, and they were truly wonderful.
There was hardly anything those bees
couldn’t do after I got them tamed.”

“How did you tame them, Baron,” asked
Ananias.

“Power of the eye, my boy,” returned the Baron.
“I attracted their attention first and then held it.
Of course, I tried my plan on one bee first. He
tamed the rest. Bees are very like children. They
like to play stunts—I think it is called stunts,
isn’t it, when one boy does something, and all his
companions try to do the same thing?”

“Yes,” said Ananias, “I believe there is such a
game, but I shouldn’t like to play it with you.”

“Well, that was the way I did with the bees,”
 said Mr. Munchausen. “I tamed the king bee,
and when he had learned all sorts of funny little
tricks, such as standing on his head and humming
tunes, I let him go back to the swarm. He
was gone a week, and then he came back, he had
grown so fond of me—as well he might, because I
fed him well, giving him a large basket of flowers
three times a day. Back with him came two or
three thousand other bees, and whatever Jang did
they did.”

“Who was Jang?” asked Ananias.

“That was the first bee’s name. King Jang.
Jang is Siamese for Billie, and as I was always
fond of the name, Billie, I called him Jang. By and
by every bee in the lot could hum the Star Spangled
Banner and Yankee Doodle as well as you or I
could, and it was grand on those soft moonlight
nights we had there, to sit on the back porch of my
pagoda and listen to my bee orchestra discoursing
sweet music. Of course, as soon as Jang had
learned to hum one tune it was easy enough for
him to learn another, and before long the bee orchestra
could give us any bit of music we wished
 to have. Then I used to give musicales at my house
and all the Siamese people, from the King down
asked to be invited, so that through my pets my
home became one of the most attractive in all Asia.

“And the honey those bees made! It was the
sweetest honey you ever tasted, and every morning
when I got down to breakfast there was a fresh
bottleful ready for me, the bees having made it in
the bottle itself over night. They were the most
grateful pets I ever had, and once they saved my
life. They used to live in a hive I had built for them
in one corner of my room and I could go to bed and
sleep with every door in my house open, and not be
afraid of robbers, because those bees were there to
protect me. One night a lion broke loose from the
Royal Zoo, and while trotting along the road looking
for something to eat he saw my front door wide
open. In he walked, and began to sniff. He sniffed
here and he sniffed there, but found nothing but a
pot of anchovy paste, which made him thirstier and
hungrier than ever. So he prowled into the parlour,
and had his appetite further aggravated by a bronze
statue of the Emperor of China I had there. He
 thought in the dim light it was a small-sized human
being, and he pounced on it in a minute. Well, of
course, he couldn’t make any headway trying to
eat a bronze statue, and the more he tried the more
hungry and angry he got. He roared until he shook
the house and would undoubtedly have awakened
me had it not been that I am always a sound sleeper
and never wake until I have slept enough. Why, on
one occasion, on the Northern Pacific Railway, a
train I was on ran into and completely telescoped
another while I was asleep in the smoking car, and
although I was severely burned and hurled out of
the car window to land sixty feet away on the prairie,
I didn’t wake up for two hours. I was nearly
buried alive because they thought I’d been killed,
I lay so still.

“But to return to the bees. The roaring of the
lion disturbed them, and Jang buzzed out of his
hive to see what was the matter just as the lion appeared
at my bed-room door. The intelligent insect
saw in a moment what the trouble was, and he
sounded the alarm for the rest of the bees, who came
swarming out of the hive in response to the summons.
 Jang kept his eye on the lion meanwhile,
and just as the prowler caught sight of your uncle
peacefully snoring away on the bed, dreaming of
his boyhood, and prepared to spring upon me, Jang
buzzed over and sat down upon his back, putting
his sting where it would do the most good. The
angry lion, who in a moment would have fastened
his teeth upon me, turned with a yelp of pain, and
the bite which was to have been mine wrought
havoc with his own back. Following Jang’s example,
the other bees ranged themselves in line
over the lion’s broad shoulders, and stung him until
he roared with pain. Each time he was stung he
would whisk his head around like a dog after a
flea, and bite himself, until finally he had literally
chewed himself up, when he fainted from sheer exhaustion,
and I was saved. You can imagine my
surprise when next morning I awakened to find a
dying lion in my room.”

“Jang buzzed over and sat down upon his
back, putting his sting where it would do the
most good.” Chapter V.

“But, Baron,” said Ananias. “I don’t understand
one thing about it. If you were fast asleep
while all this was happening how did you know
that Jang did those things?”

 “Why, Jang told me himself,” replied the Baron
calmly.

“Could he talk?” cried Ananias in amazement.

“Not as you and I do,” said the Baron. “Of
course not, but Jang could spell. I taught him how.
You see I reasoned it out this way. If a bee can be
taught to sing a song which is only a story in music,
why can’t he be taught to tell a story in real words.
It was worth trying anyhow, and I tried. Jang
was an apt pupil. He was the most intelligent bee
I ever met, and it didn’t take me more than a month
to teach him his letters, and when he once knew
his letters it was easy enough to teach him how to
spell. I got a great big sheet and covered it with
twenty-six squares, and in each of these squares I
painted a letter of the alphabet, so that finally when
Jang came to know them, and wanted to tell me
anything he would fly from one square to another
until he had spelled out whatever he wished to say.
I would follow his movements closely, and we got
so after awhile that we could converse for hours
without any trouble whatsoever. I really believe
that if Jang had been a little heavier so that he
 could push the keys down far enough he could have
managed a typewriter as well as anybody, and
when I think about his wonderful mind and delicious
fancy I deeply regret that there never was a
typewriting machine so delicately made that a bee
of his weight could make it go. The world would
have been very much enriched by the stories Jang
had in his mind to tell, but it is too late now. He
is gone forever.”

“How did you lose Jang, Baron?” asked
Ananias, with tears in his eyes.

“He thought I had deceived him,” said the
Baron, with a sigh. “He was as much of a stickler
for truth as I am. An American friend of mine
sent me a magnificent parterre of wax flowers
which were so perfectly made that I couldn’t tell
them from the real. I was very proud of them,
and kept them in my room near the hive. When
Jang and his tribe first caught sight of them they
were delighted and they sang as they had never
sung before just to show how pleased they were.
Then they set to work to make honey out of them.
 They must have laboured over those flowers for two
months before I thought to tell them that they were
only wax and not at all real. As I told Jang this,
I unfortunately laughed, thinking that he could
understand the joke of the thing as well as I, but I
was mistaken. All that he could see was that he
had been deceived, and it made him very angry.
Bees don’t seem to have a well-developed sense of
humour. He cast a reproachful glance at me and
returned to his hive and on the morning of the third
day when I waked up they were moving out. They
flew to my lattice and ranged themselves along the
slats and waited for Jang. In a moment he appeared
and at a given signal they buzzed out of my
sight, humming a farewell dirge as they went. I
never saw them again.”

Here the Baron wiped his eyes.

“I felt very bad about it,” he went on, “and resolved
then never again to do anything which even
suggested deception, and when several years later
I had my crest designed I had a bee drawn on it,
for in my eyes my good friend the bee, represents
 three great factors of the good and successful life—Industry,
Fidelity, and Truth.”

Whereupon the Baron went his way, leaving
Ananias to think it over.

VI
HE TELLS THE TWINS OF FIRE-WORKS

There was a great noise going on in the public
square of Cimmeria when Mr. Munchausen
sauntered into the library at the home of the Heavenly
Twins.

“These Americans are having a great time of it
celebrating their Fourth of July,” said he, as the
house shook with the explosion of a bomb.
“They’ve burnt powder enough already to set ten
revolutions revolving, and they’re going to outdo
themselves to-night in the park. They’ve made a
bicycle out of the two huge pin-wheels, and they’re
going to make Benedict Arnold ride a mile on it
after it’s lit.”

The Twins appeared much interested. They too
had heard much of the celebration and some of its
joys and when the Baron arrived they were primed
with questions.

“Uncle Munch,” they said, helping the Baron to
remove his hat and coat, which they threw into
a corner so anxious were they to get to work, “do
 you think there’s much danger in little boys having
fire-crackers and rockets and pin-wheels, or in
little girls having torpeters?”

“Well, I don’t know,” the Baron answered, warily.
“What does your venerable Dad say about
it?”

“He thinks we ought to wait until we are older,
but we don’t,” said the Twins.

“Torpeters never sets nothing afire,” said Angelica.

“That’s true,” said the Baron, kindly; “but
after all your father is right. Why do you know
what happened to me when I was a boy?”

“You burnt your thumb,” said the Twins, ready
to make a guess at it.

“Well, you get me a cigar, and I’ll tell you what
happened to me when I was a boy just because my
father let me have all the fire-works I wanted, and
then perhaps you will see how wise your father is
in not doing as you wish him to,” said Mr. Munchausen.

The Twins readily found the desired cigar, after
which Mr. Munchausen settled down comfortably
 in the hammock, and swinging softly to and fro,
told his story.

“My dear old father,” said he, “was the most
indulgent man that ever lived. He’d give me anything
in the world that I wanted whether he could
afford it or not, only he had an original system of
giving which kept him from being ruined by indulgence
of his children. He gave me a Rhine steamboat
once without its costing him a cent. I saw it,
wanted it, was beginning to cry for it, when he
patted me on the head and told me I could have
it, adding, however, that I must never take it away
from the river or try to run it myself. That satisfied
me. All I wanted really was the happiness
of feeling it was mine, and my dear old daddy gave
me permission to feel that way. The same thing
happened with reference to the moon. He gave
it to me freely and ungrudgingly. He had received
it from his father, he said, and he thought he had
owned it long enough. Only, he added, as he
had about the steamboat, I must leave it where it
was and let other people look at it whenever they
wanted to, and not interfere if I found any other
 little boys or girls playing with its beams, which
I promised and have faithfully observed to this day.

“Of course from such a parent as this you may
very easily see everything was to be expected on
such a day as the Tenth of August which the people
in our region celebrated because it was my birthday.
He used to let me have my own way at all
times, and it’s a wonder I wasn’t spoiled. I really
can’t understand how it is that I have become the
man I am, considering how I was indulged when I
was small.

“However, like all boys, I was very fond of celebrating
the Tenth, and being a more or less ingenious
lad, I usually prepared my own fire-works
and many things happened which might not otherwise
have come to pass if I had been properly
looked after as you are. The first thing that happened
to me on the Tenth of August that would
have a great deal better not have happened, was
when I was—er—how old are you Imps?”

“Sixteen,” said they. “Going on eighteen.”

“Nonsense,” said the Baron. “Why you’re not
more than eight.”

 “Nope—we’re sixteen,” said Diavolo. “I’m
eight and Angelica’s eight and twice eight is sixteen.”

“Oh,” said the Baron. “I see. Well, that was
exactly the age I was at the time. Just eight to a
day.”

“Sixteen we said,” said the Twins.

“Yes,” nodded the Baron. “Just eight, but going
on towards sixteen. My father had given me
ten thalers to spend on noises, but unlike most boys
I did not care so much for noises as I did for novelties.
It didn’t give me any particular pleasure
to hear a giant cracker go off with a bang. What I
wanted to do most of all was to get up some kind
of an exhibition that would please the people and
that could be seen in the day-time instead of at
night when everybody is tired and sleepy. So instead
of spending my money on fire-crackers and
torpedoes and rockets, I spent nine thalers of it
on powder and one thaler on putty blowers. My
particular object was to make one grand effort and
provide passers-by with a free exhibition of what
I was going to call ‘Munchausen’s Grand Geyser
 Cascade.’ To do this properly I had set my eye upon
a fish pond not far from the town hall. It was a
very deep pond and about a mile in circumference,
I should say. Putty blowers were then selling at
five for a pfennig and powder was cheap as sand
owing to the fact that the powder makers, expecting
a war, had made a hundred times as much as
was needed, and as the war didn’t come off, they
were willing to take almost anything they could
get for it. The consequence was that the powder
I got was sufficient in quantity to fill a rubber bag
as large as five sofa cushions. This I sank in the
middle of the pond, without telling anybody what I
intended to do, and through the putty blowers, sealed
tightly together end to end, I conducted a fuse, which
I made myself, from the powder bag to the shore.
My idea was that I could touch the thing off, you
know, and that about sixty square feet of the pond
would fly up into the air and then fall gracefully
back again like a huge fountain. If it had worked
as I expected everything would have been all right,
but it didn’t. I had too much powder, for a second
 after I had lit the fuse there came a muffled
roar and the whole pond in a solid mass, fish and
all, went flying up into the air and disappeared.
Everybody was astonished, not a few were very
much frightened. I was scared to death but I
never let on to any one that I was the person that
had blown the pond off. How high the pond went
I don’t know, but I do know that for a week there
wasn’t any sign of it, and then most unexpectedly
out of what appeared to be a clear sky there came
the most extraordinary rain-storm you ever saw.
It literally poured down for two days, and, what
I alone could understand, with it came trout and
sunfish and minnows, and most singular to all but
myself an old scow that was recognised as the property
of the owner of the pond suddenly appeared
in the sky falling toward the earth at a fearful
rate of speed. When I saw the scow coming I was
more frightened than ever because I was afraid it
might fall upon and kill some of our neighbours.
Fortunately, however, this possible disaster was
averted, for it came down directly over the sharp-pointed
 lightning-rod on the tower of our public
library and stuck there like a piece of paper on a
file.

“Out of what appeared to be a clear sky
came the most extraordinary rain storm you
ever saw.” Chapter VI.

“The rain washed away several acres of finely
cultivated farms, but the losses on crops and fences
and so forth were largely reduced by the fish that
came with the storm. One farmer took a rake and
caught three hundred pounds of trout, forty pounds
of sun-fish, eight turtles, and a minnow in his potato
patch in five minutes. Others were almost as
fortunate, but the damage was sufficiently large to
teach me that parents cannot be too careful about
what they let their children do on the day they
celebrate.”

“And weren’t you ever punished?” asked the
Twins.

“No, indeed,” said the Baron. “Nobody ever
knew that I did it because I never told them. In
fact you are the only two persons who ever heard
about it, and you mustn’t tell, because there are
still a number of farmers around that region who
would sue me for damages in case they knew that I
was responsible for the accident.”

 “That was pretty awful,” said the Twins. “But
we don’t want to blow up ponds so as to get cascadeses,
but we do want torpeters. Torpeters aren’t
any harm, are they, Uncle Munch?”

“Well, you can never tell. It all depends on the
torpedo. Torpedoes are sometimes made carelessly,”
said the Baron. “They ought to be made
as carefully as a druggist makes pills. So many
pebbles, so much paper, and so much saltpeter and
sulphur, or whatever else is used to make them go
off. I had a very unhappy time once with a carelessly
made torpedo. I had two boxes full. They
were those tin-foil torpedoes that little girls are so
fond of, and I expected they would make quite a
lot of noise, but the first ten I threw down didn’t go
off at all. The eleventh for some reason or other,
I never knew exactly what, I hurled with all my
force against the side of my father’s barn, and my,
what a surprise it was! It smashed in the whole
side of the barn and sent seven bales of hay, and
our big farm plough bounding down the hillside
into the town. The hay-bales smashed down
fences; one of them hit a cow-shed on its way down,
 knocked the back of it to smithereens and then proceeded
to demolish the rear end of a small crockery
shop that fronted on the main street. It struck the
crockery shop square in the middle of its back and
threw down fifteen dozen cups and saucers, thirty-two
water pitchers, and five china busts of Shakespeare.
The din was frightful—but I couldn’t help
that. Nobody could blame me, because I had no
means of knowing that the man who made the torpedoes
was careless and had put a solid ball of
dynamite into one of them. So you see, my dear
Imps, that even torpedoes are not always safe.”

“Yes,” said Angelica. “I guess I’ll play with
my dolls on my birthday. They never goes off and
blows things up.”

“That’s very wise of you,” said the Baron.

“But what became of the plough, Uncle
Munch?” said Diavolo.

“Oh, the plough didn’t do much damage,” replied
Mr. Munchausen. “It simply furrowed its way
down the hill, across the main street, to the bowling
green. It ploughed up about one hundred feet of
 this before it stopped, but nobody minded that much
because it was to have been ploughed and seeded
again anyhow within a few days. Of course the
furrow it made in crossing the road was bad, and
to make it worse the share caught one of the water
pipes that ran under the street, and ripped it in
two so that the water burst out and flooded the
street for a while, but one hundred and sixty thousand
dollars would have covered the damage.”

The Twins were silent for a few moments and
then they asked:

“Well, Uncle Munch, what kind of fire-works are
safe anyhow?”

“My experience has taught me that there are
only two kinds that are safe,” replied their old
friend. “One is a Jack-o-lantern and the other is
a cigar, and as you are not old enough to have
cigars, if you will put on your hats and coats and
go down into the garden and get me two pumpkins,
I’ll make each of you a Jack-o’-lantern. What do
you say?”

“We say yes,” said the Twins, and off they went,
 while the Baron turning over in the hammock, and
arranging a pillow comfortably under his head,
went to sleep to dream of more birthday recollections
in case there should be a demand for them
later on.

VII
SAVED BY A MAGIC LANTERN

When the Sunday dinner was over, the
Twins, on Mr. Munchausen’s invitation,
climbed into the old warrior’s lap, Angelica kissing
him on the ear, and Diavolo giving his nose an affectionate
tweak.

“Ah!” said the Baron. “That’s it!”

“What’s what, Uncle Munch?” demanded Diavolo.

“Why that,” returned the Baron. “I was wondering
what it was I needed to make my dinner an
unqualified success. There was something lacking,
but what it was, we have had so much, I could
not guess until you two Imps kissed me and
tweaked my nasal feature. Now I know, for
really a feeling of the most blessed contentment
has settled upon my soul.”

“Don’t you wish you had two youngsters like
us, Uncle Munch?” asked the Twins.

“Do I wish I had? Why I have got two youngsters
 like you,” the Baron replied. “I’ve got ’em
right here too.”

“Where?” asked the Twins, looking curiously
about them for the other two.

“On my knees, of course,” said he. “You are
mine. Your papa gave you to me—and you are as
like yourselves as two peas in a pod.”

“I—I hope you aren’t going to take us away from
here,” said the Twins, a little ruefully. They were
very fond of the Baron, but they didn’t exactly like
the idea of being given away.

“Oh no—not at all,” said the Baron. “Your
father has consented to keep you here for me and
your mother has kindly volunteered to look after
you. There is to be no change, except that you belong
to me, and, vice versa, I belong to you.”

“And I suppose, then,” said Diavolo, “if you
belong to us you’ve got to do pretty much what we
tell you to?”

“Exactly,” responded Mr. Munchausen. “If
you should ask me to tell you a story I’d have to
do it, even if you were to demand the full particulars
of how I spent Christmas with Mtulu, King
 of the Taafe Eatars, on the upper Congo away
down in Africa—which is a tale I have never told
any one in all my life.”

“It sounds as if it might be interesting,” said
the Twins. “Those are real candy names, aren’t
they?”

“Yes,” said the Baron. “Taafe sounds like
taffy and Mtulu is very suggestive of chewing gum.
That’s the curious thing about the savage tribes
of Africa. Their names often sound as if they
might be things to eat instead of people. Perhaps
that is why they sometimes eat each other—though,
of course, I won’t say for sure that that is the real
explanation of cannibalism.”

“What’s cannon-ballism?” asked Angelica.

“He didn’t say cannon-ballism,” said Diavolo,
scornfully. “It was candy-ballism.”

“Well—you’ve both come pretty near it,” said
the Baron, “and we’ll let the matter rest there, or
I won’t have time to tell you how Christmas got
me into trouble with King Mtulu.”

The Baron called for a cigar, which the Twins
lighted for him and then he began.

 “You may not have heard,” he said, “that some
twenty or thirty years ago I was in command of an
expedition in Africa. Our object was to find Lake
Majolica, which we hoped would turn up half way
between Lollokolela and the Clebungo Mountains.
Lollokolela was the furthermost point to which civilisation
had reached at that time, and was directly
in the pathway to the Clebungo Mountains, which
the natives said were full of gold and silver mines
and scattered all over which were reputed to be
caves in which diamonds and rubies and other gems
of the rarest sort were to be found in great profusion.
No white man had ever succeeded in
reaching this marvellously rich range of hills for
the reason that after leaving Lollokolela there was,
as far as was known, no means of obtaining water,
and countless adventurous spirits had had to give
up because of the overpowering thirst which the
climate brought upon them.

“Under such circumstances it was considered by
a company of gentlemen in London to be well worth
their while to set about the discovery of a lake,
which they decided in advance to call Majolica, for
 reasons best known to themselves; they probably
wanted to jar somebody with it. And to me was
intrusted the mission of leading the expedition. I
will confess that I did not want to go for the
very good reason that I did not wish to be eaten
alive by the savage tribes that infested that region,
but the company provided me with a close fitting
suit of mail, which I wore from the time I started
until I returned. It was very fortunate for me
that I was so provided, for on three distinct occasions
I was served up for state dinners and each
time successfully resisted the carving knife and as
a result, was thereafter well received, all the chiefs
looking upon me as one who bore a charmed existence.”

Here the Baron paused long enough for the
Twins to reflect upon and realise the terrors which
had beset him on his way to Lake Majolica, and
be it said that if they had thought him brave before
they now deemed him a very hero of heroes.

“When I set out,” said the Baron, “I was accompanied
by ten Zanzibaris and a thousand tins
of condensed dinners.”

 “A thousand what, Uncle Munch?” asked Jack,
his mouth watering.

“Condensed dinners,” said the Baron, “I had a
lot of my favourite dinners condensed and put up
in tins. I didn’t expect to be gone more than a
year and a thousand dinners condensed and tinned,
together with the food I expected to find on the
way, elephant meat, rhinoceros steaks, and tiger
chops, I thought would suffice for the trip. I could
eat the condensed dinners and my followers could
have the elephant’s meat, rhinoceros steaks, and
tiger chops—not to mention the bananas and other
fruits which grow wild in the African jungle. It
was not long, however, before I made the discovery
that the Zanzibaris, in order to eat tigers, need
to learn first how to keep tigers from eating them.
We went to bed late one night on the fourth day
out from Lollokolela, and when we waked up the
next morning every mother’s son of us, save myself,
had been eaten by tigers, and again it was nothing
but my coat of mail that saved me. There were
eighteen tigers’ teeth sticking into the sleeve of
the coat, as it was. You can imagine my distress
 at having to continue the search for Lake Majolica
alone. It was then that I acquired the habit of
talking to myself, which has kept me young ever
since, for I enjoy my own conversation hugely,
and find myself always a sympathetic listener. I
walked on for days and days, until finally, on
Christmas Eve, I reached King Mtulu’s palace. Of
course your idea of a palace is a magnificent five-story
building with beautiful carvings all over the
front of it, marble stair-cases and handsomely
painted and gilded ceilings. King Mtulu’s palace
was nothing of the sort, although for that region
it was quite magnificent, the walls being decorated
with elephants’ tusks, crocodile teeth and many
other treasures such as delight the soul of the Central
African.

“Now as I may not have told you, King Mtulu
was the fiercest of the African chiefs, and it is said
that up to the time when I outwitted him no white
man had ever encountered him and lived to tell the
tale. Consequently, when without knowing it on
this sultry Christmas Eve, laden with the luggage
and the tinned dinners and other things I had
 brought with me I stumbled upon the blood-thirsty
monarch I gave myself up for lost.

“‘Who comes here to disturb the royal peace?’
cried Mtulu, savagely, as I crossed the threshold.

“‘It is I, your highness,’ I returned, my face
blanching, for I recognized him at once by the ivory
ring he wore in the end of his nose.

“‘Who is I?’ retorted Mtulu, picking up his battle
axe and striding forward.

“A happy thought struck me then. These folks
are superstitious. Perhaps the missionaries may
have told these uncivilised creatures the story of
Santa Claus. I will pretend that I am Santa
Claus. So I answered, ‘Who is I, O Mtulu, Bravest
of the Taafe Chiefs? I am Santa Claus, the Children’s
Friend, and bearer of gifts to and for all.’

“Mtulu gazed at me narrowly for a moment and
then he beat lightly upon a tom-tom at his side.
Immediately thirty of the most villainous-looking
natives, each armed with a club, appeared.

“‘Arrest that man,’ said Mtulu, ‘before he goes
any farther. He is an impostor.’

“‘If your majesty pleases,’ I began.

 “‘Silence!’ he cried, ‘I am fierce and I eat men,
but I love truth. The truthful man has nothing to
fear from me, for I have been converted from my
evil ways and since last New Year’s day I have
eaten only those who have attempted to deceive me.
You will be served raw at dinner to-morrow night.
My respect for your record as a man of courage
leads me to spare you the torture of the frying-pan.
You are Baron Munchausen. I recognized
you the moment you turned pale. Another man
would have blushed.’

“So I was carried off and shut up in a mud
hovel, the interior walls of which were of white,
a fact which strangely enough, preserved my life
when later I came to the crucial moment. I had
brought with me, among other things, for my
amusement solely, a magic lantern. As a child,
I had always been particularly fond of pictures,
and when I thought of the lonely nights in Africa,
with no books at hand, no theatres, no cotillions to
enliven the monotony of my life, I resolved to take
with me my little magic-lantern as much for company
as for anything else. It was very compact in
 form. It folded up to be hardly larger than a wallet
containing a thousand one dollar bills, and the
glass lenses of course could be carried easily in my
trousers pockets. The views, instead of being
mounted on glass, were put on a substance not unlike
glass, but thinner, called gelatine. All of these
things I carried in my vest pockets, and when
Mtulu confiscated my luggage the magic lantern
and views of course escaped his notice.

“Christmas morning came and passed and I was
about to give myself up for lost, for Mtulu was not
a king to be kept from eating a man by anything
so small as a suit of mail, when I received word
that before dinner my captor and his suite were
going to pay me a formal parting call. Night was
coming on and as I sat despondently awaiting the
king’s arrival, I suddenly bethought me of a lantern
slide of the British army, standing and awaiting
the command to fire, I happened to have with
me. It was a superb view—lifelike as you please.
Why not throw that on the wall and when Mtulu
enters he will find me apparently with a strong
force at my command, thought I. It was no sooner
 thought than it was done and my life was saved.
Hardly was that noble picture reflected upon the
rear wall of my prison when the door opened and
Mtulu, followed by his suite, appeared. I rose to
greet him, but apparently he saw me not. Mute
with terror he stood upon the threshold gazing at
that terrible line of soldiers ready as he thought to
sweep him and his men from the face of the earth
with their death-dealing bullets.

“‘I am your slave,’ he replied to my greeting,
kneeling before me, ‘I yield all to you.’” Chapter VII.

“‘I am your slave,’ he replied to my greeting,
kneeling before me, ‘I yield all to you.’

“‘I thought you would,’ said I. ‘But I ask
nothing save the discovery of Lake Majolica. If
within twenty-four hours Lake Majolica is not discovered
I give the command to fire!’ Then I
turned and gave the order to carry arms, and lo!
by a quick change of slides, the army appeared at
a carry. Mtulu gasped with terror, but accepted
my ultimatum. I was freed, Lake Majolica was
discovered before ten o’clock the next morning, and
at five o’clock I was on my way home, the British
army reposing quietly in my breast pocket. It was a
mighty narrow escape!”

 “I should say so,” said the Twins. “But Mtulu
must have been awful stupid not to see what it
was.”

“Didn’t he see through it when he saw you put
the army in your pocket?” asked Diavolo.

“No,” said the Baron, “that frightened him
worse than ever, for you see he reasoned this way.
If I could carry an army in my pocket-book, what
was to prevent my carrying Mtulu himself and all
his tribe off in the same way! He thought I was
a marvellous man to be able to do that.”

“Well, we guess he was right,” said the Twins,
as they climbed down from the Baron’s lap to find
an atlas and search the map of Africa for Lake
Majolica. This they failed to find and the Baron’s
explanation is unknown to me, for when the Imps
returned, the warrior had departed.

VIII
AN ADVENTURE IN THE DESERT

“The editor has a sort of notion, Mr. Munchausen,”
said Ananias, as he settled down
in the big arm-chair before the fire in the Baron’s
library, “that he’d like to have a story about a
giraffe. Public taste has a necky quality about it
of late.”

“What do you say to that, Sapphira?” asked the
Baron, politely turning to Mrs. Ananias, who had
called with her husband. “Are you interested in
giraffes?”

“I like lions better,” said Sapphira. “They
roar louder and bite more fiercely.”

“Well, suppose we compromise,” said the Baron,
“and have a story about a poodle dog. Poodle
dogs sometimes look like lions, and as a rule they
are as gentle as giraffes.”

“I know a better scheme than that,” put in
Ananias. “Tell us a story about a lion and a
giraffe, and if you feel disposed throw in a few
 poodles for good measure. I’m writing on space
this year.”

“That’s so,” said Sapphira, wearily. “I could
say it was a story about a lion and Ananias could
call it a giraffe story, and we’d each be right.”

“Very well,” said the Baron, “it shall be a story
of each, only I must have a cigar before I begin.
Cigars help me to think, and the adventure I had
in the Desert of Sahara with a lion, a giraffe, and
a slippery elm tree was so long ago that I shall have
to do a great deal of thinking in order to recall it.”

So the Baron went for a cigar, while Ananias
and Sapphira winked enviously at each other and
lamented their lost glory. In a minute the Baron
returned with the weed, and after lighting it, began
his story.

“I was about twenty years old when this thing
happened to me,” said he. “I had gone to Africa
to investigate the sand in the Desert of Sahara for
a Sand Company in America. As you may already
have heard, sand is a very useful thing in a
great many ways, more particularly however in
the building trades. The Sand Company was
 formed for the purpose of supplying sand to everybody
that wanted it, but land in America at that
time was so very expensive that there was very little
profit in the business. People who owned sand
banks and sand lots asked outrageous prices for
their property; and the sea-shore people were not
willing to part with any of theirs because they
needed it in their hotel business. The great attraction
of a seaside hotel is the sand on the beach,
and of course the proprietors weren’t going to sell
that. They might better even sell their brass
bands. So the Sand Company thought it might be
well to build some steam-ships, load them with oysters,
or mowing machines, or historical novels, or
anything else that is produced in the United States,
and in demand elsewhere; send them to Egypt, sell
the oysters, or mowing machines, or historical novels,
and then have the ships fill up with sand from
the Sahara, which they could get for nothing, and
bring it back in ballast to the United States.”

“It must have cost a lot!” said Ananias.

“Not at all,” returned the Baron. “The profits
on the oysters and mowing machines and historical
 novels were so large that all expenses both
ways were more than paid, so that when it was
delivered in America the sand had really cost
less than nothing. We could have thrown it all
overboard and still have a profit left. It was I
who suggested the idea to the President of the
Sand Company—his name was Bartlett, or—ah—Mulligan—or
some similar well-known American
name, I can’t exactly recall it now. However,
Mr. Bartlett, or Mr. Mulligan, or whoever it was,
was very much pleased with the idea and asked
me if I wouldn’t go to the Sahara, investigate the
quality of the sand, and report; and as I was temporarily
out of employment I accepted the commission.
Six weeks later I arrived in Cairo and set
out immediately on a tour of the desert. I went
alone because I preferred not to take any one into
my confidence, and besides one can always be more
independent when he has only his own wishes to
consult. I also went on foot, for the reason that
camels need a great deal of care—at least mine
would have, if I’d had one, because I always like to
have my steeds well groomed whether there is any
 one to see them or not. So to save myself trouble I
started off alone on foot. In twenty-four hours I
travelled over a hundred miles of the desert, and
the night of the second day found me resting in the
shade of a slippery elm tree in the middle of an
oasis, which after much suffering and anxiety I had
discovered. It was a beautiful moonlight night and
I was enjoying it hugely. There were no mosquitoes
or insects of any kind to interfere with my
comfort. No insects could have flown so far across
the sands. I have no doubt that many of them have
tried to get there, but up to the time of my arrival
none had succeeded, and I felt as happy as though
I were in Paradise.

“After eating my supper and taking a draught
of the delicious spring water that purled up in the
middle of the oasis, I threw myself down under the
elm tree, and began to play my violin, without
which in those days I never went anywhere.”

“I didn’t know you played the violin,” said Sapphira.
“I thought your instrument was the trombone—plenty
of blow and a mighty stretch.”

“I don’t—now,” said the Baron, ignoring the
 sarcasm. “I gave it up ten years ago—but that’s
a different story. How long I played that night
I don’t know, but I do know that lulled by the delicious
strains of the music and soothed by the
soft sweetness of the atmosphere I soon dropped
off to sleep. Suddenly I was awakened by what
I thought to be the distant roar of thunder.
‘Humph!’ I said to myself. ‘This is something
new. A thunder storm in the Desert of Sahara is
a thing I never expected to see, particularly on a
beautifully clear moonlight night’—for the moon
was still shining like a great silver ball in the heavens,
and not a cloud was anywhere to be seen.
Then it occurred to me that perhaps I had been
dreaming, so I turned over to go to sleep again.
Hardly had I closed my eyes when a second ear-splitting
roar came bounding over the sands, and
I knew that it was no dream, but an actual sound
that I heard. I sprang to my feet and looked about
the horizon and there, a mere speck in the distance,
was something—for the moment I thought
a cloud, but in another instant I changed my mind,
for glancing through my telescope I perceived it
 was not a cloud but a huge lion with the glitter of
hunger in his eye. What I had mistaken for the
thunder was the roar of this savage beast. I seized
my gun and felt for my cartridge box only to discover
that I had lost my ammunition and was there
alone, unarmed, in the great desert, at the mercy
of that savage creature, who was drawing nearer
and nearer every minute and giving forth the most
fearful roars you ever heard. It was a terrible
moment and I was in despair.

“‘It’s all up with you, Baron,’ I said to myself,
and then I caught sight of the tree. It seemed my
only chance. I must climb that. I tried, but alas!
As I have told you it was a slippery elm tree, and
I might as well have tried to climb a greased pole.
Despite my frantic efforts to get a grip upon the
trunk I could not climb more than two feet without
slipping back. It was impossible. Nothing
was left for me to do but to take to my legs, and
I took to them as well as I knew how. My, what
a run it was, and how hopeless. The beast was
gaining on me every second, and before me lay mile
after mile of desert. ‘Better give up and treat the
 beast to a breakfast, Baron,’ I moaned to myself.
‘When there’s only one thing to do, you might as
well do it and be done with it. Your misery will be
over the more quickly if you stop right here.’ As I
spoke these words, I slowed up a little, but the
frightful roaring of the lion unnerved me for an
instant, or rather nerved me on to a spurt, which
left the lion slightly more to the rear—and which
resulted in the saving of my life; for as I ran on,
what should I see about a mile ahead but another
slippery elm tree, and under it stood a giraffe who
had apparently fallen asleep while browsing among
its upper branches, and filling its stomach with its
cooling cocoanuts. The giraffe had its back to me,
and as I sped on I formed my plan. I would grab
hold of the giraffe’s tail; haul myself up onto his
back; climb up his neck into the tree, and then give
my benefactor a blow between the eyes which would
send him flying across the desert before the lion
could come along and get up into the tree the same
way I did. The agony of fear I went through as I
approached the long-necked creature was something
 dreadful. Suppose the giraffe should be awakened
by the roaring of the lion before I got there
and should rush off himself to escape the fate that
awaited me? I nearly dropped, I was so nervous,
and the lion was now not more than a hundred
yards away. I could hear his breath as he came
panting on. I redoubled my speed; his pants came
closer, closer, until at length after what seemed a
year, I reached the giraffe, caught his tail, raised
myself up to his back, crawled along his neck and
dropped fainting into the tree just as the lion
sprang upon the giraffe’s back and came on toward
me. What happened then I don’t know, for as I
have told you I swooned away; but I do know that
when I came to, the giraffe had disappeared and
the lion lay at the foot of the tree dead from a
broken neck.”

“I reached the giraffe, raised myself to his
back, crawled along his neck and dropped
fainting into the tree.” Chapter VIII.

“A broken neck?” demanded Sapphira.

“Yes,” returned the Baron. “A broken neck!
From which I concluded that as the lion reached
the nape of the giraffe’s neck, the giraffe had
waked up and bent his head toward the earth,
 thus causing the lion to fall head first to the ground
instead of landing as he had expected in the tree
with me.”

“It was wonderful,” said Sapphira, scornfully.

“Yes,” said Ananias, “but I shouldn’t think a
lion could break his neck falling off a giraffe. Perhaps
it was one of the slippery elm cocoanuts that
fell on him.”

“Well, of course,” said the Baron, rising, “that
would all depend upon the height of the giraffe.
Mine was the tallest one I ever saw.”

“About how tall?” asked Ananias.

“Well,” returned the Baron, thoughtfully, as if
calculating, “did you ever see the Eiffel Tower?”

“Yes,” said Ananias.

“Well,” observed the Baron, “I don’t think my
giraffe was more than half as tall as that.”

With which estimate the Baron bowed his guests
out of the room, and with a placid smile on his
face, shook hands with himself.

“Mr. and Mrs. Ananias are charming people,”
he chuckled, “but amateurs both—deadly amateurs.”

IX
DECORATION DAY IN THE CANNIBAL ISLANDS

“Uncle Munch,” said Diavolo as he clambered
up into the old warrior’s lap, “I
don’t suppose you could tell us a story about Decoration
Day could you?”

“I think I might try,” said Mr. Munchausen,
puffing thoughtfully upon his cigar and making a
ring with the smoke for Angelica to catch upon her
little thumb. “I might try—but it will all depend
upon whether you want me to tell you about Decoration
Day as it is celebrated in the United States,
or the way a band of missionaries I once knew in
the Cannibal Islands observed it for twenty years
or more.”

“Why can’t we have both stories?” said Angelica.
“I think that would be the nicest way.
Two stories is twice as good as one.”

“Well, I don’t know,” returned Mr. Munchausen.
“You see the trouble is that in the first instance
I could tell you only what a beautiful thing
it is that every year the people have a day set apart
 upon which they especially honour the memory of
the noble fellows who lost their lives in defence of
their country. I’m not much of a poet and it takes
a poet to be able to express how beautiful and
grand it all is, and so I should be afraid to try
it. Besides it might sadden your little hearts to
have me dwell upon the almost countless number
of heroes who let themselves be killed so that their
fellow-citizens might live in peace and happiness.
I’d have to tell you about hundreds and hundreds
of graves scattered over the battle fields that no
one knows about, and which, because no one knows
of them, are not decorated at all, unless Nature
herself is kind enough to let a little dandelion or
a daisy patch into the secret, so that they may grow
on the green grass above these forgotten, unknown
heroes who left their homes, were shot down and
never heard of afterwards.”

“Does all heroes get killed?” asked Angelica.

“No,” said Mr. Munchausen. “I and a great
many others lived through the wars and are living
yet.”

“Well, how about the missionaries?” said Diavolo.
 “I didn’t know they had Decoration Day in
the Cannibal Islands.”

“I didn’t either until I got there,” returned the
Baron. “But they have and they have it in July
instead of May. It was one of the most curious
things I ever saw and the natives, the men who
used to be cannibals, like it so much that if the
missionaries were to forget it they’d either remind
them of it or have a celebration of their own. I
don’t know whether I ever told you about my first
experience with the cannibals—did I?”

“I don’t remember it, but if you had I would
have,” said Diavolo.

“So would I,” said Angelica. “I remember
most everything you say, except when I want you
to say it over again, and even then I haven’t forgotten
it.”

“Well, it happened this way,” said the Baron.
“It was when I was nineteen years old. I sort of
thought at that time I’d like to be a sailor, and as
my father believed in letting me try whatever I
wanted to do I took a position as first mate of a
steam brig that plied between San Francisco and
 Nepaul, taking San Francisco canned tomatoes to
Nepaul and bringing Nepaul pepper back to San
Francisco, making several dollars both ways. Perhaps
I ought to explain to you that Nepaul pepper
is red, and hot; not as hot as a furnace fire, but
hot enough for your papa and myself when we
order oysters at a club and have them served so cold
that we think they need a little more warmth to
make them palatable and digestible. You are not
yet old enough to know the meaning of such words
as palatable and digestible, but some day you will
be and then you’ll know what your Uncle means.
At any rate it was on the return voyage from
Nepaul that the water tank on the Betsy S. went
stale and we had to stop at the first place we
could to fill it up with fresh water. So we sailed
along until we came in sight of an Island and the
Captain appointed me and two sailors a committee
of three to go ashore and see if there was a spring
anywhere about. We went, and the first thing we
knew we were in the midst of a lot of howling,
hungry savages, who were crazy to eat us. My
companions were eaten, but when it came to my
 turn I tried to reason with the chief. ‘Now
see here, my friend,’ said I, ‘I’m perfectly willing
to be served up at your breakfast, if I
can only be convinced that you will enjoy eating
me. What I don’t want is to have my life
wasted!’ ‘That’s reasonable enough,’ said he.
‘Have you got a sample of yourself along for me
to taste?’ ‘I have,’ I replied, taking out a bottle
of Nepaul pepper, that by rare good luck I happened
to have in my pocket. ‘That is a portion of
my left foot powdered. It will give you some idea
of what I taste like,’ I added. ‘If you like that,
you’ll like me. If you don’t, you won’t.’”

“That was fine,” said Diavolo. “You told pretty
near the truth, too, Uncle Munch, because you are
hot stuff yourself, ain’t you?”

“I am so considered, my boy,” said Mr. Munchausen.
“The chief took a teaspoonful of the pepper
down at a gulp, and let me go when he recovered.
He said he guessed I wasn’t quite his style,
and he thought I’d better depart before I set fire to
the town. So I filled up the water bag, got into the
row-boat, and started back to the ship, but the
 Betsy S. had gone and I was forced to row all the
way to San Francisco, one thousand, five hundred
and sixty-two miles distant. The captain and crew
had given us all up for lost. I covered the distance
in six weeks, living on water and Nepaul
pepper, and when I finally reached home, I told my
father that, after all, I was not so sure that I liked
a sailor’s life. But I never forgot those cannibals
or their island, as you may well imagine. They
and their home always interested me hugely and I
resolved if the fates ever drove me that way again,
I would go ashore and see how the people were getting
on. The fates, however, were a long time in
drawing me that way again, for it was not until
July, ten years ago that I reached there the second
time. I was off on a yachting trip, with an English
friend, when one afternoon we dropped anchor off
that Cannibal Island.

“‘Let’s go ashore,’ said I. ‘What for?’ said
my host; and then I told him the story and we went,
and it was well we did so, for it was then and there
that I discovered the new way the missionaries had
of celebrating Decoration Day.

 “No sooner had we landed than we noticed that
the Island had become civilised. There were
churches, and instead of tents and mud-hovels,
beautiful residences appeared here and there,
through the trees. ‘I fancy this isn’t the island,’
said my host. ‘There aren’t any cannibals about
here.’ I was about to reply indignantly, for I was
afraid he was doubting the truth of my story, when
from the top of a hill, not far distant, we heard
strains of music. We went to see whence it came,
and what do you suppose we saw? Five hundred
villainous looking cannibals marching ten abreast
along a fine street, and, cheering them from the
balconies of the houses that fronted on the highway,
were the missionaries and their friends and their
children and their wives.

“‘This can’t be the place, after all,’ said my
host again.

“‘Yes it is,’ said I, ‘only it has been converted.
They must be celebrating some native festival.’
Then as I spoke the procession stopped and the
head missionary followed by a band of beautiful
girls, came down from a platform and placed garlands
 of flowers and beautiful wreaths on the shoulders
and heads of those reformed cannibals. In
less than an hour every one of the huge black fellows
was covered with roses and pinks and fragrant
flowers of all kinds, and then they started on parade
again. It was a fine sight, but I couldn’t understand
what it was all done for until that night,
when I dined with the head missionary—and what
do you suppose it was?”

“I give it up,” said Diavolo, “maybe the missionaries
thought the cannibals didn’t have enough
clothes on.”

“I guess I can’t guess,” said Angelica.

“They were celebrating Decoration Day,” said
Mr. Munchausen. “They were strewing flowers on
the graves of departed missionaries.”

“They were celebrating Decoration Day …
strewing flowers on the graves of departed
missionaries.” Chapter IX.

“You didn’t tell us about any graves,” said
Diavolo.

“Why certainly I did,” said the Baron. “The
cannibals themselves were the only graves those
poor departed missionaries ever had. Every one of
those five hundred savages was the grave of a missionary,
my dears, and having been converted, and
 taught that it was not good to eat their fellow-men,
they did all in their power afterwards to show their
repentance, keeping alive the memory of the men
they had treated so badly by decorating themselves
on memorial day—and one old fellow, the savagest
looking, but now the kindest-hearted being in the
world, used always to wear about his neck a huge
sign, upon which he had painted in great black
letters:

HERE LIES

JOHN THOMAS WILKINS,

SAILOR.

DEPARTED THIS LIFE, MAY 24TH, 1861.

HE WAS A MAN OF SPLENDID TASTE.

“The old cannibal had eaten Wilkins and later
when he had been converted and realised that he
himself was the grave of a worthy man, as an expiation
he devoted his life to the memory of John
 Thomas Wilkins, and as a matter of fact, on the
Cannibal Island Decoration Day he would lie flat
on the floor all the day, groaning under the weight
of a hundred potted plants, which he placed upon
himself in memory of Wilkins.”

Here Mr. Munchausen paused for breath, and
the twins went out into the garden to try to imagine
with the aid of a few practical experiments how a
cannibal would look with a hundred potted plants
adorning his person.

X
MR. MUNCHAUSEN’S ADVENTURE WITH A SHARK

Mr. and Mrs. Henry B. Ananias.

THURSDAYS. CIMMERIA.

This was the card sent by the reporter of the
Gehenna Gazette, and Mrs. Ananias to Mr.
Munchausen upon his return from a trip to mortal
realms concerning which many curious reports
have crept into circulation. Owing to a rumour
persistently circulated at one time, Mr. Munchausen
had been eaten by a shark, and it was with
the intention of learning, if possible, the basis for
the rumour that Ananias and Sapphira called upon
the redoubtable Baron of other days.

Mr. Munchausen graciously received the callers
and asked what he could do for them.

“Our readers, Mr. Munchausen,” explained Ananias,
 “have been much concerned over rumours of
your death at the hands of a shark.”

“Sharks have no hands,” said the Baron quietly.

“Well—that aside,” observed Ananias. “Were
you killed by a shark?”

“Not that I recall,” said the Baron. “I may
have been, but I don’t remember it. Indeed I recall
only one adventure with a shark. That grew out
of my mission on behalf of France to the Czar of
Russia. I carried letters once from the King of
France to his Imperial Coolness the Czar.”

“What was the nature of the letters?” asked
Ananias.

“I never knew,” replied the Baron. “As I have
said, it was a secret mission, and the French Government
never took me into its confidence. The
only thing I know about it is that I was sent to St.
Petersburg, and I went, and in the course of time
I made myself much beloved of both the people and
his Majesty the Czar. I am the only person that
ever lived that was liked equally by both, and if I
had attached myself permanently to the Czar, Russia
would have been a different country to-day.”

 “What country would it have been, Mr. Munchausen,”
asked Sapphira innocently, “Germany
or Siam?”

“I can’t specify, my dear madame,” the Baron
replied. “It wouldn’t be fair. But, at any rate, I
went to Russia, and was treated warmly by everybody,
except the climate, which was, as it is at all
times, very freezing. That’s the reason the Russian
people like the climate. It is the only thing the
Czar can’t change by Imperial decree, and the
people admire its independence and endure it for
that reason. But as I have said, everybody was
pleased with me, and the Czar showed me unusual
attention. He gave fêtes in my honour. He gave
the most princely dinners, and I met the very best
people in St. Petersburg, and at one of these dinners
I was invited to join a yachting party on a
cruise around the world.

“Well, of course, though a landsman in every
sense of the word, I am fond of yachting, and I
immediately accepted the invitation. The yacht
we went on was the Boomski Zboomah, belonging
to Prince—er—now what was that Prince’s name!
 Something like—er—Sheeroff or Jibski—or—er—well,
never mind that. I meet so many princes it is
difficult to remember their names. We’ll say his
name was Jibski.”

“Suppose we do,” said Ananias, with a jealous
grin. “Jibski is such a remarkable name. It will
look well in print.”

“All right,” said the Baron, “Jibski be it. The
yacht belonged to Prince Jibski, and she was a
beauty. There was a stateroom and a steward for
everybody on board, and nothing that could contribute
to a man’s comfort was left unattended to. We
set sail on the 23rd of August, and after cruising
about the North coast of Europe for a week or two,
we steered the craft south, and along about the
middle of September we reached the Amphibian
Islands, and anchored. It was here that I had my
first and last experience with sharks. If they had
been plain, ordinary sharks I’d have had an easy
time of it, but when you get hold of these Amphibian
sharks you are likely to get yourself into
twenty-three different kinds of trouble.”

 “My!” said Sapphira. “All those? Does the
number include being struck by lightning?”

“Yes,” the Baron answered, “And when you
remember that there are only twenty-four different
kinds altogether you can see what a peck of trouble
an Amphibian shark can get you into. I thought
my last hour had come when I met with him. You
see when we reached the Amphibian Islands, we
naturally thought we’d like to go ashore and pick
the cocoanuts and raisins and other things that
grow there, and when I got upon dry land again
I felt strongly tempted to go down upon the beautiful
little beach in the harbour and take a swim.
Prince Jibski advised me against it, but I was set
upon going. He told me the place was full of
sharks, but I wasn’t afraid because I was always
a remarkably rapid swimmer, and I felt confident
of my ability, in case I saw a shark coming after
me, to swim ashore before he could possibly catch
me, provided I had ten yards start. So in I went
leaving my gun and clothing on the beach. Oh, it
was fun! The water was quite warm, and the
 sandy bottom of the bay was deliciously soft and
pleasant to the feet. I suppose I must have
sported in the waves for ten or fifteen minutes
before the trouble came. I had just turned a somersault
in the water, when, as my head came to
the surface, I saw directly in front of me, the
unmistakable fin of a shark, and to my unspeakable
dismay not more than five feet away. As I told
you, if it had been ten yards away I should have
had no fear, but five feet meant another story altogether.
My heart fairly jumped into my mouth. It
would have sunk into my boots if I had had them on,
but I hadn’t, so it leaped upward into my mouth as
I turned to swim ashore, by which time the shark
had reduced the distance between us by one foot.
I feared that all was up with me, and was trying
to think of an appropriate set of last words, when
Prince Jibski, noting my peril, fired one of the
yacht’s cannon in our direction. Ordinarily this
would have been useless, for the yacht’s cannon
was never loaded with anything but a blank charge,
but in this instance it was better than if it had been
loaded with ball and shot, for not only did the
 sound of the explosion attract the attention of the
shark and cause him to pause for a moment, but
also the wadding from the gun dropped directly
upon my back, so showing that Prince Jibski’s aim
was not as good as it might have been. Had the
cannon been loaded with a ball or a shell, you can
very well understand how it would have happened
that yours truly would have been killed then and
there.”

“We should have missed you,” said Ananias
sweetly.

“Thanks,” said the Baron. “But to resume.
The shark’s pause gave me the start I needed, and
the heat from the burning wadding right between
my shoulders caused me to redouble my efforts to
get away from the shark and it, so that I never
swam faster in my life, and was soon standing upon
the shore, jeering at my fearful pursuer, who,
strange to say, showed no inclination to stop the
chase now that I was, as I thought, safely out of
his reach. I didn’t jeer very long I can tell you, for
in another minute I saw why the shark didn’t stop
chasing me, and why Amphibian sharks are worse
 than any other kind. That shark had not only fins
like all other sharks to swim with, but he had likewise
three pairs of legs that he could use on land
quite as well as he could use the fins in the water.
And then began the prettiest chase you ever saw in
your life. As he emerged from the water I grabbed
up my gun and ran. Round and round the island
we tore, I ahead, he thirty or forty yards behind,
until I got to a place where I could stop running
and take a hasty shot at him. Then I aimed, and
fired. My aim was good, but struck one of the
huge creature’s teeth, broke it off short, and
bounded off to one side. This made him more angry
than ever, and he redoubled his efforts to catch me.
I redoubled mine, until I could get another shot at
him. The second shot, like the first, struck the
creature in the teeth, only this time it was more
effective. The bullet hit his jaw lengthwise, and
knocked every tooth on that side of his head down
his throat. So it went. I ran. He pursued. I
fired; he lost his teeth, until finally I had knocked
out every tooth he had, and then, of course, I
wasn’t afraid of him, and let him come up with
 me. With his teeth he could have ground me to
atoms at one bite. Without them he was as
powerless as a bowl of currant jelly, and when he
opened his huge jaws, as he supposed to bite me
in two, he was the most surprised looking fish you
ever saw on land or sea to discover that the effect
his jaws had upon my safety was about as great as
had they been nothing but two feather bed mattresses.”

“You must have been badly frightened, though,”
said Ananias.

“No,” said the Baron. “I laughed in the poor
disappointed thing’s face, and with a howl of despair,
he rushed back into the sea again. I made
the best time I could back to the yacht for fear he
might return with assistance.”

“I laughed in the poor disappointed thing’s
face, and with a howl of despair he rushed
back into the sea.” Chapter X.

“And didn’t you ever see him again, Baron?”
asked Sapphira.

“Yes, but only from the deck of the yacht as
we were weighing anchor,” said Mr. Munchausen.
“I saw him and a dozen others like him doing precisely
what I thought they would do, going ashore
to search me out so as to have a little cold Munch
 for dinner. I’m glad they were disappointed, aren’t
you?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Ananias and Sapphira, but
not warmly.

Ananias was silent for a moment, and then walking
over to one of the bookcases, he returned in a
moment, bringing with him a huge atlas.

“Where are the Amphibian Islands, Mr. Munchausen?”
he said, opening the book. “Show them
to me on the map. I’d like to print the map with
my story.”

“Oh, I can’t do that,” said the Baron, “because
they aren’t on the map any more. When I got back
to Europe and told the map-makers about the dangers
to man on those islands, they said that the
interests of humanity demanded that they be lost.
So they took them out of all the geographies, and
all the cyclopædias, and all the other books, so that
nobody ever again should be tempted to go there;
and there isn’t a school-teacher or a sailor in the
world to-day who could tell you where they are.”

“But, you know, don’t you?” persisted Ananias.

“Well, I did,” said the Baron; “but, really I
 have had to remember so many other things that I
have forgotten that. All that I know is that they
were named from the fact that they were infested
by Amphibious animals, which are animals that
can live on land as well as on water.”

“How strange!” said Sapphira.

“It’s just too queer for anything,” said Ananias,
“but on the whole I’m not surprised.”

And the Baron said he was glad to hear it.

XI
THE BARON AS A RUNNER

The Twins had been on the lookout for the
Baron for at least an hour, and still he did
not come, and the little Imps were beginning to feel
blue over the prospect of getting the usual Sunday
afternoon story. It was past four o’clock, and
for as long a time as they could remember the
Baron had never failed to arrive by three o’clock.
All sorts of dreadful possibilities came up before
their mind’s eye. They pictured the Baron in accidents
of many sorts. They conjured up visions of
him lying wounded beneath the ruins of an apartment
house, or something else equally heavy that
might have fallen upon him on his way from his
rooms to the station, but that he was more than
wounded they did not believe, for they knew that
the Baron was not the sort of man to be killed by
anything killing under the sun.

“I wonder where he can be?” said Angelica,
uneasily to her brother, who was waiting with
equal anxiety for their common friend.

 “Oh, he’s all right!” said Diavolo, with a confidence
he did not really feel. “He’ll turn up all
right, and even if he’s two hours late he’ll be here
on time according to his own watch. Just you
wait and see.”

And they did wait and they did see. They waited
for ten minutes, when the Baron drove up, smiling
as ever, but apparently a little out of breath. I
should not dare to say that he was really out of
breath, but he certainly did seem to be so, for he
panted visibly, and for two or three minutes after
his arrival was quite unable to ask the Imps the
usual question as to their very good health.
Finally, however, the customary courtesies of the
greeting were exchanged, and the decks were
cleared for action.

“What kept you, Uncle Munch?” asked the
Twins, as they took up their usual position on the
Baron’s knees.

“What what?” replied the warrior. “Kept me?
Why, am I late?”

“Two hours,” said the Twins. “Dad gave you
up and went out for a walk.”

 “Nonsense,” said the Baron. “I’m never that
late.”

Here he looked at his watch.

“Why I do seem to be behind time. There must
be something wrong with our time-pieces. I can’t
be two hours late, you know.”

“Well, let’s say you are on time, then,” said the
Twins. “What kept you?”

“A very funny accident on the railroad,” said the
Baron lighting a cigar. “Queerest accident that
ever happened to me on the railroad, too. Our
engine ran away.”

The Twins laughed as if they thought the Baron
was trying to fool them.

“Really,” said the Baron. “I left town as usual
on the two o’clock train, which, as you know, comes
through in half an hour, without a stop. Everything
went along smoothly until we reached the
Vitriol Reservoir, when much to the surprise of
everybody the train came to a stand-still. I supposed
there was a cow on the track, and so kept
in my seat for three or four minutes as did every
one else. Finally the conductor came through and
 called to the brakeman at the end of our car to see
if his brakes were all right.

“‘It’s the most unaccountable thing,’ he said to
me. ‘Here’s this train come to a dead stop and I
can’t see why. There isn’t a brake out of order on
any one of the cars, and there isn’t any earthly reason
why we shouldn’t go ahead.’

“‘Maybe somebody’s upset a bottle of glue on
the track,’ said I. I always like to chaff the conductor,
you know, though as far as that is concerned,
I remember once when I was travelling on a South
American Railway our train was stopped by highwaymen,
who smeared the tracks with a peculiar
sort of gum. They’d spread it over three miles of
track, and after the train had gone lightly over two
miles of it the wheels stuck so fast ten engines
couldn’t have moved it. That was a terrible affair.”

“I don’t think we ever heard of that, did we?”
asked Angelica.

“I don’t remember it,” said Diavolo.

“Well, you would have remembered it, if you had
ever heard of it,” said the Baron. “It was too
dreadful to be forgotten—not for us, you know,
 but for the robbers. It was one of the Imperial
trains in Brazil, and if it hadn’t been for me the
Emperor would have been carried off and held for
ransom. The train was brought to a stand-still by
this gluey stuff, as I have told you, and the desperadoes
boarded the cars and proceeded to rifle us of
our possessions. The Emperor was in the car back
of mine, and the robbers made directly for him,
but fathoming their intention I followed close upon
their heels.

“‘You are our game,’ said the chief robber, tapping
the Emperor on the shoulder, as he entered
the Imperial car.

“‘Hands off,’ I cried throwing the ruffian to one
side.

“He scowled dreadfully at me, the Emperor
looked surprised, and another one of the robbers
requested to know who was I that I should speak
with so much authority. ‘Who am I?’ said I, with
a wink at the Emperor. ‘Who am I? Who else
but Baron Munchausen of the Bodenwerder
National Guard, ex-friend of Napoleon of France,
intimate of the Mikado of Japan, and famed the
 world over as the deadliest shot in two hemispheres.’

“The desperadoes paled visibly as I spoke, and
after making due apologies for interfering with the
train, fled shrieking from the car. They had heard
of me before.

“‘I thank you, sir,’ began the Emperor, as the
would-be assassins fled, but I cut him short. ‘They
must not be allowed to escape,’ I said, and with that
I started in pursuit of the desperate fellows, overtook
them, and glued them with the gum they had
prepared for our detention to the face of a precipice
that rose abruptly from the side of the railway,
one hundred and ten feet above the level. There I
left them. We melted the glue from the tracks
by means of our steam heating apparatus, and were
soon booming merrily on our way to Rio Janeiro
when I was fêted and dined continuously for weeks
by the people, though strange to say the Emperor’s
behaviour toward me was very cool.”

“And did the robbers ever get down?” asked the
Twins.

“Yes, but not in a way they liked,” Mr. Munchausen
 replied. “The sun came out, and after a
week or two melted the glue that held them to the
precipice, whereupon they fell to its base and were
shattered into pieces so small there wasn’t an atom
of them to be found when a month later I passed
that way again on my return trip.”

“And didn’t the Emperor treat you well, Uncle
Munch?” asked the Imps.

“No—as I told you he was very cool towards
me, and I couldn’t understand it, then, but I do
now,” said the Baron. “You see he was very much
in need of ready cash, the Emperor was, and as the
taxpayers were already growling about the expenses
of the Government he didn’t dare raise the
money by means of a tax. So he arranged with the
desperadoes to stop the train, capture him, and
hold him for ransom. Then when the ransom came
along he was going to divide up with them. My
sudden appearance, coupled with my determination
to rescue him, spoiled his plan, you see, and so he
naturally wasn’t very grateful. Poor fellow, I was
very sorry for it afterward, because he really was
an excellent ruler, and his plan of raising the
 money he needed wasn’t a bit less honest than most
other ways rulers employ to obtain revenue for
State purposes.”

“Well, now, let’s get back to the runaway engine,”
said the Twins. “You can tell us more
about South America after you get through with
that. How did the engine come to run away?”

“It was simple enough,” said the Baron. “The
engineer, after starting the train came back into the
smoking car to get a light for his pipe, and while he
was there the coupling-pin between the engine and
the train broke, and off skipped the engine twice as
fast as it had been going before. The relief from the
weight of the train set its pace to a mile a minute
instead of a mile in two minutes, and there we were
at a dead stop in front of the Vitriol Station with
nothing to move us along. When the engineer saw
what had happened he fainted dead away, because
you know if a collision had occurred between the
runaway engine and the train ahead he would have
been held responsible.”

“Couldn’t the fireman stop the engine?” asked
the Twins.

 “No. That is, it wouldn’t be his place to do it,
and these railway fellows are queer about that
sort of thing,” said the Baron. “The engineers
would go out upon a strike if the railroad were to
permit a stoker to manage the engine, and besides
that the stoker wouldn’t undertake to do it at a
stoker’s wages, so there wasn’t any help to be
looked for there. The conductor happened to be
nearsighted, and so he didn’t find out that the engine
was missing until he had wasted ten or twenty
minutes examining the brakes, by which time, of
course, the runaway was miles and miles up the
track. Then the engineer came to, and began to
wring his hands and moan in a way that was heart-rending.
The conductor, too, began to cry, and all
the brakemen left the train and took to the woods.
They weren’t going to have any of the responsibility
for the accident placed on their shoulders. Whether
they will ever turn up again I don’t know. But I
realised as soon as anybody else that something
had to be done, so I rushed into the telegraph office
and telegraphed to all the station masters between
the Vitriol Reservoir and Cimmeria to clear the
 track of all trains, freight, local, or express, or
somebody would be hurt, and that I myself would
undertake to capture the runaway engine. This
they all promised to do, whereupon I bade good-bye
to my fellow-travellers, and set off up the track
myself at full speed. In a minute I strode past
Sulphur Springs, covering at least eight ties at a
stretch. In two minutes I thundered past Lava
Hurst, where I learned that the engine had twenty
miles start of me. I made a rapid calculation mentally—I
always was strong in mental arithmetic,
which showed that unless I was tripped up or got
side-tracked somewhere I might overtake the runaway
before it reached Noxmere. Redoubling my
efforts, my stride increased to twenty ties at a
jump, and I made the next five miles in two minutes.
It sounds impossible, but really it isn’t so.
It is hard to run as fast as that at the start, but
when you have got your start the impetus gathered
in the first mile’s run sends you along faster in the
second, and so your speed increases by its own force
until finally you go like the wind. At Gasdale I
had gained two miles on the engine, at Sneakskill
 I was only fifteen miles behind, and upon my arrival
at Noxmere there was scarcely a mile between
me and the fugitive. Unfortunately a large crowd
had gathered at Noxmere to see me pass through,
and some small boy had brought a dog along with
him and the dog stood directly in my path. If I
ran over the dog it would kill him and might trip
me up. If I jumped with the impetus I had there
was no telling where I would land. It was a hard
point to decide either way, but I decided in favour
of the jump, simply to save the dog’s life, for I love
animals. I landed three miles up the road and
ahead of the engine, though I didn’t know that
until I had run ten miles farther on, leaving the
engine a hundred yards behind me at every stride.
It was at Miasmatica that I discovered my error
and then I tried to stop. It was almost in vain;
I dragged my feet over the ties, but could only slow
down to a three-minute gait. Then I tried to turn
around and slow up running backward; this
brought my speed down ten minutes to the mile,
which made it safe for me to run into a hay-stack
at the side of the railroad just this side of Cimmeria.
 Then, of course, I was all right. I could sit down
and wait for the engine, which came booming along
forty minutes later. As it approached I prepared
to board it, and in five minutes was in full control.
That made it easy enough for me to get back here
without further trouble. I simply reversed the
lever, and back we came faster than I can describe,
and just one hour and a half from the time of the
mishap the runaway engine was restored to its
deserted train and I reached your station here in
good order. I should have walked up, but for my
weariness after that exciting run, which as you see
left me very much out of breath, and which made it
necessary for me to hire that worn-out old hack
instead of walking up as is my wont.”

“This brought my speed down ten minutes
to the mile, which made it safe for me to run
into a haystack.” Chapter XI.

“Yes, we see you are out of breath,” said the
Twins, as the Baron paused. “Would you like to
lie down and take a rest?”

“Above all things,” said the Baron. “I’ll take
a nap here until your father returns,” which he proceeded
at once to do.

While he slept the two Imps gazed at him curiously,
Angelica, a little suspiciously.

 “Bub,” said she, in a whisper, “do you think
that was a true story?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Diavolo. “If anybody
else than Uncle Munch had told it, I wouldn’t
have believed it. But he hates untruth. I know
because he told me so.”

“That’s the way I feel about it,” said Angelica.
“Of course, he can run as fast as that, because he
is very strong, but what I can’t see is how an engine
ever could run away from its train.”

“That’s what stumps me,” said Diavolo.

XII

MR. MUNCHAUSEN MEETS HIS MATCH

(Reported by Henry W. Ananias for the Gehenna Gazette.)

When Mr. Munchausen, accompanied by Ananias
and Sapphira, after a long and
tedious journey from Cimmeria to the cool and
wooded heights of the Blue Sulphur Mountains,
entered the portals of the hotel where the greater
part of his summers are spent, the first person to
greet him was Beelzebub Sandboy,—the curly-headed
Imp who acted as “Head Front” of the
Blue Sulphur Mountain House, his eyes a-twinkle
and his swift running feet as ever ready for a trip
to any part of the hostelry and back. Beelzy, as
the Imp was familiarly known, as the party entered,
was in the act of carrying a half-dozen pitchers
of iced-water upstairs to supply thirsty guests
with the one thing needful and best to quench that
thirst, and in his excitement at catching sight once
again of his ancient friend the Baron, managed to
drop two of the pitchers with a loud crash upon
the office floor. This, however, was not noticed by
 the powers that ruled. Beelzy was not perfect,
and as long as he smashed less than six pitchers a
day on an average the management was disposed
not to complain.

“There goes my friend Beelzy,” said the Baron,
as the pitchers fell. “I am delighted to see him. I
was afraid he would not be here this year since I
understand he has taken up the study of theology.”

“Theology?” cried Ananias. “In Hades?”

“How foolish,” said Sapphira. “We don’t need
preachers here.”

“He’d make an excellent one,” said Mr. Munchausen.
“He is a lad of wide experience and his
fish and bear stories are wonderful. If he can make
them gee, as he would put it, with his doctrines he
would prove a tremendous success. Thousands
would flock to hear him for his bear stories alone.
As for the foolishness of his choice, I think it is a
very wise one. Everybody can’t be a stoker, you
know.”

At any rate, whatever the reasons for Beelzebub’s
presence, whether he had given up the study of
theology or not, there he was plying his old vocation
 with the same perfection of carelessness as of
yore, and apparently no farther along in the study
of theology than he was the year before when he
bade Mr. Munchausen “good-bye forever” with
the statement that now that he was going to lead
a pious life the chances were he’d never meet his
friend again.

“I don’t see why they keep such a careless boy as
that,” said Sapphira, as Beelzy at the first landing
turned to grin at Mr. Munchausen, emptying the
contents of one of his pitchers into the lap of a
nervous old gentleman in the office below.

“He adds an element of excitement to a not
over-exciting place,” explained Mr. Munchausen.
“On stormy days here the men make bets on what
fool thing Beelzy will do next. He blacked all the
russet shoes with stove polish one year, and last season
in the rush of his daily labours he filled up the
water-cooler with soft coal instead of ice. He’s a
great bell-boy, is my friend Beelzy.”

A little while later when Mr. Munchausen and
his party had been shown to their suite, Beelzy
appeared in their drawing-room and was warmly
 greeted by Mr. Munchausen, who introduced him to
Mr. and Mrs. Ananias.

“Well,” said Mr. Munchausen, “you’re here
again, are you?”

“No, indeed,” said Beelzy. “I ain’t here this
year. I’m over at the Coal-Yards shovellin’ snow.
I’m my twin brother that died three years before I
was born.”

“How interesting,” said Sapphira, looking at
the boy through her lorgnette.

Beelzy bowed in response to the compliment and
observed to the Baron:

“You ain’t here yourself this season, be ye?”

“No,” said Mr. Munchausen, drily. “I’ve gone
abroad. You’ve given up theology I presume?”

“Sorter,” said Beelzy. “It was lonesome business
and I hadn’t been at it more’n twenty minutes
when I realised that bein’ a missionary ain’t all
jam and buckwheats. It’s kind o’ dangerous too,
and as I didn’t exactly relish the idea o’ bein’ et up
by Samoans an’ Feejees I made up my mind to give
it up an’ stick to bell-boyin’ for another season any
how; but I’ll see you later, Mr. Munchausen. I’ve
 got to hurry along with this iced-water. It’s overdue
now, and we’ve got the kickinest lot o’ folks
here this year you ever see. One man here the other
night got as mad as hookey because it took forty
minutes to soft bile an egg. Said two minutes was
all that was necessary to bile an egg softer’n mush,
not understanding anything about the science of
eggs in a country where hens feeds on pebbles.”

“Pebbles?” cried Mr. Munchausen. “What, do
they lay Roc’s eggs?”

Beelzy grinned.

“No, sir—they lay hen’s eggs all right, but
they’re as hard as Adam’s aunt.”

“I never heard of chickens eating pebbles,”
observed Sapphira with a frown. “Do they really
relish them?”

“I don’t know, Ma’am,” said Beelzy. “I ain’t
never been on speakin’ terms with the hens, Ma’am,
and they never volunteered no information. They
eat ’em just the same. They’ve got to eat something
and up here on these mountains there ain’t
anything but gravel for ’em to eat. That’s why
they do it. Then when it comes to the eggs, on a
 diet like that, cobblestones ain’t in it with ’em for
hardness, and when you come to bite ’em it takes
a week to get ’em soft, an’ a steam drill to get ’em
open—an’ this feller kicked at forty minutes! Most
likely he’s swearin’ around upstairs now because
this iced-water ain’t came; and it ain’t more than
two hours since he ordered it neither.”

“What an unreasonable gentleman,” said Sapphira.

“Ain’t he though!” said Beelzy. “And he ain’t
over liberal neither. He’s been here two weeks now
and all the money I’ve got out of him was a five-dollar
bill I found on his bureau yesterday morning.
There’s more money in theology than there is
in him.”

With this Beelzebub grabbed up the pitcher of
water, and bounded out of the room like a frightened
fawn. He disappeared into the dark of the
corridor, and a few moments later was evidently
tumbling head over heels up stairs, if the sounds
that greeted the ears of the party in the drawing-room
meant anything.

The next morning when there was more leisure
 for Beelzy the Baron inquired as to the state of his
health.

“Oh it’s been pretty good,” said he. “Pretty
good. I’m all right now, barrin’ a little gout in my
right foot, and ice-water on my knee, an’ a crick in
my back, an’ a tired feelin’ all over me generally.
Ain’t had much to complain about. Had the measles
in December, and the mumps in February; an’
along about the middle o’ May the whoopin’ cough
got a holt of me; but as it saved my life I oughtn’t
to kick about that.”

Here Beelzy looked gratefully at an invisible
something—doubtless the recollection in the thin
air of his departed case of whooping cough, for having
rescued him from an untimely grave.

“That is rather curious, isn’t it?” queried Sapphira,
gazing intently into the boy’s eyes. “I don’t
exactly understand how the whooping cough could
save anybody’s life, do you, Mr. Munchausen?”

“Beelzy, this lady would have you explain the
situation, and I must confess that I am myself
somewhat curious to learn the details of this wonderful
rescue,” said Mr. Munchausen.

 “Well, I must say,” said Beelzy, with a pleased
smile at the very great consequence of his exploit in
the lady’s eyes, “if I was a-goin’ to start out to save
people’s lives generally I wouldn’t have thought
a case o’ whoopin’ cough would be of much use
savin’ a man from drownin’, and I’m sure if a feller
fell out of a balloon it wouldn’t help him much if
he had ninety dozen cases o’ whoopin’ cough concealed
on his person; but for just so long as I’m
the feller that has to come up here every June, an’
shoo the bears out o’ the hotel, I ain’t never goin’
to be without a spell of whoopin’ cough along about
that time if I can help it. I wouldn’t have been
here now if it hadn’t been for it.”

“You referred just now,” said Sapphira, “to
shooing bears out of the hotel. May I inquire what
useful function in the ménage of a hotel a bear-shooer
performs?”

“What useful what?” asked Beelzy.

“Function—duty—what does the duty of a bear-shooer
consist in?” explained Mr. Munchausen.
“Is he a blacksmith who shoes bears instead of
horses?”

 “He’s a bear-chaser,” explained Beelzy, “and
I’m it,” he added. “That, Ma’am, is the function
of a bear-shooer in the menagerie of a hotel.”

Sapphira having expressed herself as satisfied,
Beelzebub continued.

“You see this here house is shut up all winter,
and when everybody’s gone and left it empty the
bears come down out of the mountains and use it
instead of a cave. It’s more cosier and less
windier than their dens. So when the last guest
has gone, and all the doors are locked, and the band
gone into winter quarters, down come the bears
and take possession. They generally climb through
some open window somewhere. They divide up all
the best rooms accordin’ to their position in bear
society and settle down to a regular hotel life
among themselves.”

“But what do they feed upon?” asked Sapphira.

“Oh they’ll eat anything when they’re hungry,”
said Beelzy. “Sofa cushions, parlor rugs, hotel
registers—anything they can fasten their teeth to.
Last year they came in through the cupola, burrowin’
 down through the snow to get at it, and there
they stayed enjoyin’ life out o’ reach o’ the wind
and storm, snug’s bugs in rugs. Year before last
there must ha’ been a hundred of ’em in the hotel
when I got here, but one by one I got rid of ’em.
Some I smoked out with some cigars Mr. Munchausen
gave me the summer before; some I
deceived out, gettin’ ’em to chase me through the
winders, an’ then doublin’ back on my tracks an’
lockin’ ’em out. It was mighty wearin’ work.

“Last June there was twice as many. By actual
tab I shooed two hundred and eight bears and a
panther off into the mountains. When the last one
as I thought disappeared into the woods I searched
the house from top to bottom to see if there was
any more to be got rid of. Every blessed one of
the five hundred rooms I went through, and not a
bear was left that I could see. I can tell you, I
was glad, because there was a partickerly ugly run
of ’em this year, an’ they gave me a pile o’ trouble.
They hadn’t found much to eat in the hotel, an’
they was disappointed and cross. As a matter of
 fact, the only things they found in the place they
could eat was a piano stool and an old hair trunk
full o’ paper-covered novels, which don’t make a
very hearty meal for two hundred and eight bears
and a panther.”

“I should say not,” said Sapphira, “particularly
if the novels were as light as most of them are
nowadays.”

“I can’t say as to that,” said Beelzy. “I ain’t
got time to read ’em and so I ain’t any judge. But
all this time I was sufferin’ like hookey with awful
spasms of whoopin’ cough. I whooped so hard
once it smashed one o’ the best echoes in the place
all to flinders, an’ of course that made the work
twice as harder. So, naturally, when I found there
warn’t another bear left in the hotel, I just threw
myself down anywhere, and slept. My! how I
slept. I don’t suppose anything ever slept sounder’n
I did. And then it happened.”

Beelzy gave his trousers a hitch and let his voice
drop to a stage whisper that lent a wondrous
impressiveness to his narration.

 “As I was a-layin’ there unconscious, dreamin’
of home and father, a great big black hungry bruin
weighin’ six hundred and forty-three pounds, that
had been hidin’ in the bread oven in the bakery,
where I hadn’t thought of lookin’ for him, came
saunterin’ along, hummin’ a little tune all by himself,
and lickin’ his chops with delight at the idee
of havin’ me raw for his dinner. I lay on unconscious
of my danger, until he got right up close, an’
then I waked up, an’ openin’ my eyes saw this great
black savage thing gloatin’ over me an’ tears of
joy runnin’ out of his mouth as he thought of the
choice meal he was about to have. He was sniffin’
my bang when I first caught sight of him.”

“Mercy!” cried Sapphira, “I should think
you’d have died of fright.”

“At the first whoop Mr. Bear jumped ten
feet and fell over backwards on the floor.” Chapter XII.

“I did,” said Beelzy, politely, “but I came to life
again in a minute. ‘Oh Lor!’ says I, as I see how
hungry he was. ‘This here’s the end o’ me;’ at
which the bear looked me straight in the eye, licked
his chops again, and was about to take a nibble off
my right ear when ‘Whoop!’ I had a spasm of
 whoopin’. Well, Ma’am, I guess you know what
that means. There ain’t nothin’ more uncanny,
more terrifyin’ in the whole run o’ human noises,
barrin’ a German Opery, than the whoop o’ the
whoopin’ cough. At the first whoop Mr. Bear
jumped ten feet and fell over backwards onto the
floor; at the second he scrambled to his feet and
put for the door, but stopped and looked around
hopin’ he was mistaken, when I whooped a third
time. The third did the business. That third
whoop would have scared Indians. It was awful.
It was like a tornado blowin’ through a fog-horn
with a megaphone in front of it. When he heard
that, Mr. Bear turned on all four of his heels and
started on a scoot up into the woods that must have
carried him ten miles before I quit coughin’.

“An’ that’s why, Ma’am, I say that when you’ve
got to shoo bears for a livin’, an attack o’ whoopin’
cough is a useful thing to have around.”

Saying which, Beelzy departed to find Number
433’s left boot which he had left at Number 334’s
door by some odd mistake.

 “What do you think of that, Mr. Munchausen?”
asked Sapphira, as Beelzy left the room.

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Munchausen, with a
sigh. “I’m inclined to think that I am a trifle
envious of him. The rest of us are not in his
class.”

XIII

WRIGGLETTO

It was in the afternoon of a beautiful summer
day, and Mr. Munchausen had come up from
the simmering city of Cimmeria to spend a day or
two with Diavolo and Angelica and their venerable
parents. They had all had dinner, and were now
out on the back piazza overlooking the magnificent
river Styx, which flowed from the mountains to the
sea, condescending on its way thither to look in
upon countless insignificant towns which had
grown up on its banks, among which was the one in
which Diavolo and Angelica had been born and
lived all their lives. Mr. Munchausen was lying
comfortably in a hammock, collecting his thoughts.

Angelica was somewhat depressed, but Diavolo
was jubilant and all because in the course of a walk
they had had that morning Diavolo had killed a
snake.

“It was fine sport,” said Diavolo. “He was
lying there in the sun, and I took a stick and put
him out of his misery in two minutes.”

 Here Diavolo illustrated the process by whacking
the Baron over his waist-coat with a small
malacca stick he carried.

“Well, I didn’t like it,” said Angelica. “I don’t
care for snakes, but somehow or other it seems to
me we’d ought to have left him alone. He wasn’t
hurting anybody off there. If he’d come walking
on our place, that would have been one thing, but
we went walking where he was, and he had as much
right to take a sun-bath there as we had.”

“That’s true enough,” put in Mr. Munchausen,
resolved after Diavolo’s whack, to side against him.
“You’ve just about hit it, Angelica. It wasn’t
polite of you in the first place, to disturb his snakeship
in his nap, and having done so, I can’t see why
Diavolo wanted to kill him.”

“Oh, pshaw!” said Diavolo, airily. “What’s
snakes good for except to kill? I’ll kill ’em every
chance I get. They aren’t any good.”

“All right,” said Mr. Munchausen, quietly. “I
suppose you know all about it; but I know a thing
or two about snakes myself that do not exactly
agree with what you say. They are some good
 sometimes, and, as a matter of fact, as a general
rule, they are less apt to attack you without reason
than you are to attack them. A snake is
rather inclined to mind its own business unless he
finds it necessary to do otherwise. Occasionally
too you’ll find a snake with a truly amiable character.
I’ll never forget my old pet Wriggletto, for
instance, and as long as I remember him I can’t
help having a warm corner for snakes in my heart.”

Here Mr. Munchausen paused and puffed
thoughtfully on his cigar as a far-away half-affectionate
look came into his eye.

“Who was Wriggletto?” asked Diavolo, transferring
a half dollar from Mr. Munchausen’s pocket
to his own.

“Who was he?” cried Mr. Munchausen. “You
don’t mean to say that I have never told you about
Wriggletto, my pet boa-constrictor, do you?”

“You never told me,” said Angelica. “But I’m
not everybody. Maybe you’ve told some other little
Imps.”

“No, indeed!” said Mr. Munchausen. “You
two are the only little Imps I tell stories to, and as
 far as I am concerned, while I admit you are not
everybody you are somebody and that’s more than
everybody is. Wriggletto was a boa-constrictor I
once knew in South America, and he was without
exception, the most remarkable bit of a serpent I
ever met. Genial, kind, intelligent, grateful and
useful, and, after I’d had him a year or two, wonderfully
well educated. He could write with himself as
well as you or I can with a pen. There’s a recommendation
for you. Few men are all that—and few
boa-constrictors either, as far as that goes. I admit
Wriggletto was an exception to the general run of
serpents, but he was all that I claim for him, nevertheless.”

“What kind of a snake did you say he was?”
asked Diavolo.

“A boa-constrictor,” said Mr. Munchausen,
“and I knew him from his childhood. I first
encountered Wriggletto about ten miles out of
Para on the river Amazon. He was being swallowed
by a larger boa-constrictor, and I saved his
life by catching hold of his tail and pulling him
out just as the other was getting ready to give the
 last gulp which would have taken Wriggletto in
completely, and placed him beyond all hope of ever
being saved.”

“What was the other boa doing while you were
saving Wriggletto?” asked Diavolo, who was fond
always of hearing both sides to every question, and
whose father, therefore, hoped he might some day
grow up to be a great judge, or at least serve with
distinction upon a jury.

“He couldn’t do anything,” returned Mr. Munchausen.
“He was powerless as long as Wriggletto’s
head stuck in his throat and just before I
got the smaller snake extracted I killed the other
one by cutting off his tail behind his ears. It was
not a very dangerous rescue on my part as long as
Wriggletto was likely to be grateful. I must confess
for a minute I was afraid he might not comprehend
all I had done for him, and it was just possible
he might attack me, but the hug he gave me
when he found himself free once more was reassuring.
He wound himself gracefully around my
body, squeezed me gently and then slid off into the
road again, as much as to say ‘Thank you, sir.
 You’re a brick.’ After that there was nothing Wriggletto
would not do for me. He followed me everywhere
I went from that time on. He seemed to
learn all in an instant that there were hundreds of
little things to be done about the house of an old
bachelor like myself which a willing serpent could
do, and he made it his business to do those things:
like picking up my collars from the floor, and finding
my studs for me when they rolled under the
bureau, and a thousand and one other little services
of a like nature, and when you, Master Diavolo,
try in future to say that snakes are only good
to kill and are of no use to any one, you must at
least make an exception in favour of Wriggletto.”

“I will,” said Diavolo, “But you haven’t told us
of the other useful things he did for you yet.”

“I was about to do so,” said Mr. Munchausen.
“In the first place, before he learned how to do little
things about the house for me, Wriggletto acted
as a watch-dog and you may be sure that nobody
ever ventured to prowl around my house at night
while Wriggletto slept out on the lawn. Para was
quite full of conscienceless fellows, too, at that
 time, any one of whom would have been glad to
have a chance to relieve me of my belongings if they
could get by my watch-snake. Two of them tried
it one dark stormy night, and Wriggletto when he
discovered them climbing in at my window, crawled
up behind them and winding his tail about them
crept down to the banks of the Amazon, dragging
them after him. There he tossed them into the
river, and came back to his post once more.”

“Did you see him do it, Uncle Munch?” asked
Angelica.

“No, I did not. I learned of it afterwards.
Wriggletto himself said never a word. He was too
modest for that,” said Mr. Munchausen. “One of
the robbers wrote a letter to the Para newspapers
about it, complaining that any one should be
allowed to keep a reptile like that around, and suggested
that anyhow people using snakes in place of
dogs should be compelled to license them, and put
up a sign at their gates:

BEWARE OF THE SNAKE!

 “The man never acknowledged, of course, that
he was the robber,—said that he was calling on
business when the thing happened,—but he didn’t
say what his business was, but I knew better, and
later on the other robber and he fell out, and they
confessed that the business they had come on was
to take away a few thousand gold coins of the
realm which I was known to have in the house
locked in a steel chest.

“I bought Wriggletto a handsome silver collar
after that, and it was generally understood that he
was the guardian of my place, and robbers bothered
me no more. Then he was finer than a cat for
rats. On very hot days he would go off into the
cellar, where it was cool, and lie there with his
mouth wide open and his eyes shut, and catch rats
by the dozens. They’d run around in the dark, and
the first thing they’d know they’d stumble into
Wriggletto’s mouth; and he swallowed them and
licked his chops afterwards, just as you or I do
when we’ve swallowed a fine luscious oyster or a
clam.

“But pleasantest of all the things Wriggletto
 did for me—and he was untiring in his attentions in
that way—was keeping me cool on hot summer
nights. Para as you may have heard is a pretty
hot place at best, lying in a tropical region as it
does, but sometimes it is awful for a man used to
the Northern climate, as I was. The act of fanning
one’s self, so far from cooling one off, makes one
hotter than ever. Maybe you remember how it was
with the elephant in the poem:

“And that was the way it was with me in Para
on hot nights. I’d fan and fan and fan, but I
couldn’t get cool until Wriggletto became a member
of my family, and then I was all right. He
used to wind his tail about a huge palm-leaf fan
I had cut in the forest, so large that I couldn’t possibly
handle it myself, and he’d wave it to and fro
by the hour, with the result that my house was
always the breeziest place in Para.”

 “Where is Wriggletto now?” asked Diavolo.

“Heigho!” sighed Mr. Munchausen. “He died,
poor fellow, and all because of that silver collar I
gave him. He tried to swallow a jibola that
entered my house one night on wickedness intent,
and while Wriggletto’s throat was large enough
when he stretched it to take down three jibolas,
with a collar on which wouldn’t stretch he couldn’t
swallow one. He didn’t know that, unfortunately,
and he kept on trying until the jibola got a quarter
way down and then he stuck. Each swallow, of
course, made the collar fit more tightly and finally
poor Wriggletto choked himself to death. I
felt so badly about it that I left Para within a
month, but meanwhile I had a suit of clothes made
out of Wriggletto’s skin, and wore it for years, and
then, when the clothes began to look worn, I had
the skin re-tanned and made over into shoes and
slippers. So you see that even after death he was
useful to me. He was a faithful snake, and that is
why when I hear people running down all snakes I
tell the story of Wriggletto.”

“He used to wind his tail about a fan and
he’d wave it to and fro by the hour.” Chapter XIII.

 There was a pause for a few moments, when
Diavolo said, “Uncle Munch, is that a true story
you’ve been giving us?”

“True?” cried Mr. Munchausen. “True?
Why, my dear boy, what a question! If you don’t
believe it, bring me your atlas, and I’ll show you
just where Para is.”

Diavolo did as he was told, and sure enough, Mr.
Munchausen did exactly as he said he would, which
Diavolo thought was very remarkable, but he still
was not satisfied.

“You said he could write as well with himself as
you or I could with a pen, Uncle Munch,” he said.
“How was that?”

“Why that was simple enough,” explained Mr.
Munchausen. “You see he was very black, and
thirty-nine feet long and remarkably supple and
slender. After a year of hard study he learned to
bunch himself into letters, and if he wanted to say
anything to me he’d simply form himself into a
written sentence. Indeed his favourite attitude
when in repose showed his wonderful gift in chirography
 as well as his affection for me. If you will
get me a card I will prove it.”

Diavolo brought Mr. Munchausen the card and
upon it he drew the following:

“There,” said Mr. Munchausen. “That’s the
way Wriggletto always used to lie when he was at
rest. His love for me was very affecting.”

XIV

THE POETIC JUNE-BUG, TOGETHER WITH SOME REMARKS
ON THE GILLYHOOLY BIRD

“Uncle Munch,” said Diavolo one afternoon
as a couple of bicyclers sped past
the house at breakneck speed, “which would you
rather have, a bicycle or a horse?”

“Well, I must say, my boy, that is a difficult
question to answer,” Mr. Munchausen replied
after scratching his head dubiously for a few minutes.
“You might as well ask a man which he
prefers, a hammock or a steam-yacht. To that
question I should reply that if I wanted to sell
it, I’d rather have a steam-yacht, but for a pleasant
swing on a cool piazza in midsummer or under the
apple-trees, a hammock would be far preferable.
Steam-yachts are not much good to swing in under
an apple tree, and very few piazzas that I know
of are big enough—”

“Oh, now, you know what I mean, Uncle
Munch,” Diavolo retorted, tapping Mr. Munchausen
 upon the end of his nose, for a twinkle in Mr.
Munchausen’s eye seemed to indicate that he was in
one of his chaffing moods, and a greater tease than
Mr. Munchausen when he felt that way no one
has ever known. “I mean for horse-back riding,
which would you rather have?”

“Ah, that’s another matter,” returned Mr. Munchausen,
calmly. “Now I know how to answer
your question. For horse-back riding I certainly
prefer a horse; though, on the other hand, for
bicycling, bicycles are better than horses. Horses
make very poor bicycles, due no doubt to the fact
that they have no wheels.”

Diavolo began to grow desperate.

“Of course,” Mr. Munchausen went on, “all I
have to say in this connection is based merely on
my ideas, and not upon any personal experience.
I’ve been horse-back riding on horses, and bicycling
on bicycles, but I never went horse-back riding on
a bicycle, or bicycling on horseback. I should
think it might be exciting to go bicycling on horse-back,
but very dangerous. It is hard enough for
me to keep a bicycle from toppling over when I’m
 riding on a hard, straight, level well-paved road,
without experimenting with my wheel on a horse’s
back. However if you wish to try it some day and
will get me a horse with a back as big as Trafalgar
Square I’m willing to make the effort.”

Angelica giggled. It was lots of fun for her
when Mr. Munchausen teased Diavolo, though she
didn’t like it quite so much when it was her turn
to be treated that way. Diavolo wanted to laugh
too, but he had too much dignity for that, and to
conceal his desire to grin from Mr. Munchausen
he began to hunt about for an old newspaper, or a
lump of coal or something else he could make a
ball of to throw at him.

“Which would you rather do, Angelica,” Mr.
Munchausen resumed, “go to sea in a balloon or
attend a dumb-crambo party in a chicken-coop?”

“I guess I would,” laughed Angelica.

“That’s a good answer,” Mr. Munchausen put
in. “It is quite as intelligent as the one which
is attributed to the Gillyhooly bird. When the
Gillyhooly bird was asked his opinion of giraffes,
he scratched his head for a minute and said,

“Hoh” jeered Diavolo, who, attracted by the
allusion to a kind of bird of which he had never
heard before, had given up the quest for a paper
ball and returned to Mr. Munchausen’s side, “I
don’t think that was a very intelligent answer.
It didn’t answer the question at all.”

“That’s true, and that is why it was intelligent,”
said Mr. Munchausen. “It was noncommittal.
Some day when you are older and know
less than you do now, you will realise, my dear
 Diavolo, how valuable a thing is the reply that
answereth not.”

Mr. Munchausen paused long enough to let the
lesson sink in and then he resumed.

“The Gillyhooly bird is a perfect owl for wisdom
of that sort,” he said. “It never lets anybody
know what it thinks; it never makes promises, and
rarely speaks except to mystify people. It probably
has just as decided an opinion concerning
giraffes as you or I have, but it never lets anybody
into the secret.”

“What is a Gillyhooly bird, anyhow?” asked
Diavolo.

“He’s a bird that never sings for fear of straining
his voice; never flies for fear of wearying his
wings; never eats for fear of spoiling his digestion;
never stands up for fear of bandying his
legs and never lies down for fear of injuring his
spine,” said Mr. Munchausen. “He has no feathers,
because, as he says, if he had, people would
pull them out to trim hats with, which would be
painful, and he never goes into debt because, as
he observes himself, he has no hope of paying the
 bill with which nature has endowed him, so why
run up others?”

“I shouldn’t think he’d live long if he doesn’t
eat?” suggested Angelica.

“That’s the great trouble,” said Mr. Munchausen.
“He doesn’t live long. Nothing so ineffably
wise as the Gillyhooly bird ever does live long. I
don’t believe a Gillyhooly bird ever lived more
than a day, and that, connected with the fact that
he is very ugly and keeps himself out of sight, is
possibly why no one has ever seen one. He is
known only by hearsay, and as a matter of fact,
besides ourselves, I doubt if any one has ever heard
of him.”

Diavolo eyed Mr. Munchausen narrowly.

“Speaking of Gillyhooly birds, however, and to
be serious for a moment,” Mr. Munchausen continued
flinching nervously under Diavolo’s unyielding
gaze; “I never told you about the poetic
June-bug that worked the typewriter, did I?”

“Never heard of such a thing,” cried Diavolo.
“The idea of a June-bug working a typewriter.”

 “I don’t believe it,” said Angelica, “he hasn’t
got any fingers.”

“That shows all you know about it,” retorted
Mr. Munchausen. “You think because you are
half-way right you are all right. However, if you
don’t want to hear the story of the June-bug that
worked the type-writer, I won’t tell it. My tongue
is tired, anyhow.”

“Please go on,” said Diavolo. “I want to hear
it.”

“So do I,” said Angelica. “There are lots of
stories I don’t believe that I like to hear—‘Jack
the Giant-killer’ and ‘Cinderella,’ for instance.”

“Very well,” said Mr. Munchausen. “I’ll tell
it, and you can believe it or not, as you please. It
was only two summers ago that the thing happened,
and I think it was very curious. As you
may know, I often have a great lot of writing to
do and sometimes I get very tired holding a pen
in my hand. When you get old enough to write
real long letters you’ll know what I mean. Your
writing hand will get so tired that sometimes you’ll
 wish some wizard would come along smart enough
to invent a machine by means of which everything
you think can be transferred to paper as you think
it, without the necessity of writing. But as yet
the only relief to the man whose hand is worn out
by the amount of writing he has to do is the use of
the type-writer, which is hard only on the fingers.
So to help me in my work two summers ago I
bought a type-writing machine, and put it in the
great bay-window of my room at the hotel where
I was stopping. It was a magnificent hotel, but
it had one drawback—it was infested with June-bugs.
Most summer hotels are afflicted with mosquitoes,
but this one had June-bugs instead, and
all night long they’d buzz and butt their heads
against the walls until the guests went almost
crazy with the noise.

“At first I did not mind it very much. It was
amusing to watch them, and my friends and I
used to play a sort of game of chance with them
that entertained us hugely. We marked the walls
off in squares which we numbered and then made
little wagers as to which of the squares a specially
 selected June-bug would whack next. To
simplify the game we caught the chosen June-bug
and put some powdered charcoal on his head, so
that when he butted up against the white wall he
would leave a black mark in the space he hit. It
was really one of the most exciting games of that
particular kind that I ever played, and many a
rainy day was made pleasant by this diversion.

“But after awhile like everything else June-bug
Roulette as we called it began to pall and I grew
tired of it and wished there never had been such
a thing as a June-bug in the world. I did my best
to forget them, but it was impossible. Their buzzing
and butting continued uninterrupted, and
toward the end of the month they developed a particularly
bad habit of butting the electric call button
at the side of my bed. The consequence was
that at all hours of the night, hall-boys with iced-water,
and house-maids with bath towels, and
porters with kindling-wood would come knocking
at my door and routing me out of bed—summoned
of course by none other than those horrible butting
insects. This particular nuisance became so unendurable
 that I had to change my room for one
which had no electric bell in it.

“So things went, until June passed and July
appeared. The majority of the nuisances promptly
got out but one especially vigorous and athletic
member of the tribe remained. He became unbearable
and finally one night I jumped out of bed
either to kill him or to drive him out of my apartment
forever, but he wouldn’t go, and try as I
might I couldn’t hit him hard enough to kill him.
In sheer desperation I took the cover of my typewriting
machine and tried to catch him in that.
Finally I succeeded, and, as I thought, shook the
heedless creature out of the window promptly
slamming the window shut so that he might not
return; and then putting the type-writer cover
back over the machine, I went to bed again, but
not to sleep as I had hoped. All night long every
second or two I’d hear the type-writer click. This
I attributed to nervousness on my part. As far
as I knew there wasn’t anything to make the type-writer
click, and the fact that I heard it do so
 served only to convince me that I was tired and
imagined that I heard noises.

“Most singular of all was the fact that
consciously or unconsciously the insect had
butted out a verse.” Chapter XIV.

“The next morning, however, on opening the
machine I found that the June-bug had not only
not been shaken out of the window, but had actually
spent the night inside of the cover, butting his
head against the keys, having no wall to butt with
it, and most singular of all was the fact that, consciously
or unconsciously, the insect had butted
out a verse which read:

“Mercy! Really?” cried Angelica.

“Well I can’t prove it,” said Mr. Munchausen,
“by producing the June-bug, but I can show you
the hotel, I can tell you the number of the room;
I can show you the type-writing machine, and I
have recited the verse. If you’re not satisfied with
that I’ll have to stand your suspicions.”

 “What became of the June-bug?” demanded
Diavolo.

“He flew off as soon as I lifted the top of the
machine,” said Mr. Munchausen. “He had all the
modesty of a true poet and did not wish to be
around while his poem was being read.”

“It’s queer how you can’t get rid of June-bugs,
isn’t it, Uncle Munch,” suggested Angelica.

“Oh, we got rid of ’em next season all right,”
said Mr. Munchausen. “I invented a scheme that
kept them away all the following summer. I got
the landlord to hang calendars all over the house
with one full page for each month. Then in every
room we exposed the page for May and left it that
way all summer. When the June-bugs arrived
and saw these, they were fooled into believing that
June hadn’t come yet, and off they flew to wait.
They are very inconsiderate of other people’s comfort,”
Mr. Munchausen concluded, “but they are
rigorously bound by an etiquette of their own. A
self-respecting June-bug would no more appear
until the June-bug season is regularly open than
a gentleman of high society would go to a five
 o’clock tea munching fresh-roasted peanuts. And
by the way, that reminds me I happen to have a
bag of peanuts right here in my pocket.”

Here Mr. Munchausen, transferring the luscious
goobers to Angelica, suddenly remembered that he
had something to say to the Imps’ father, and hurriedly
left them.

“Do you suppose that’s true, Diavolo?” whispered
Angelica as their friend disappeared.

“Well it might happen,” said Diavolo, “but I’ve
a sort of notion that it’s ’maginary like the Gillyhooly
bird. Gimme a peanut.”

XV

A LUCKY STROKE

“Mr. Munchausen,” said Ananias, as he
and the famous warrior drove off from
the first hole at the Missing Links, “you never
seem to weary of the game of golf. What is its
precise charm in your eyes,—the health-giving
qualities of the game or its capacity for bad lies?”

“I owe my life to it,” replied the Baron. “That
is to say to my precision as a player I owe one of
the many preservations of my existence which have
passed into history. Furthermore it is ever varying
in its interest. Like life itself it is full of
hazards and no man knows at the beginning of his
stroke what will be the requirements of the next.
I never told you of the bovine lie I got once while
playing a match with Bonaparte, did I?”

“I do not recall it,” said Ananias, foozling his
second stroke into the stone wall.

“I was playing with my friend Bonaparte, for
the Cosmopolitan Championship,” said Munchausen,
“and we were all even at the thirty-sixth hole.
 Bonaparte had sliced his ball into a stubble field
from the tee, whereat he was inclined to swear,
until by an odd mischance I drove mine into the
throat of a bull that was pasturing on the fair
green two hundred and ninety-eight yards distant.
‘Shall we take it over?’ I asked. ‘No,’ laughed
Bonaparte, thinking he had me. ‘We must play
the game. I shall play my lie. You must play
yours.’ ‘Very well,’ said I. ‘So be it. Golf is
golf, bull or no bull.’ And off we went. It took
Bonaparte seven strokes to get on the green again,
which left me a like number to extricate my ball
from the throat of the unwelcome bovine. It was
a difficult business, but I made short work of it.
Tying my red silk handkerchief to the end of my
brassey I stepped in front of the great creature
and addressing an imaginary ball before him made
the usual swing back and through stroke. The
bull, angered by the fluttering red handkerchief,
reared up and made a dash at me. I ran in the
direction of the hole, the bull in pursuit for two
hundred yards. Here I hid behind a tree while Mr.
Bull stopped short and snorted again. Still there
 was no sign of the ball, and after my pursuer had
quieted a little I emerged from my hiding place
and with the same club and in the same manner
played three. The bull surprised at my temerity
threw his head back with an angry toss and tried to
bellow forth his wrath, as I had designed he should,
but the obstruction in his throat prevented him.
The ball had stuck in his pharynx. Nothing came
of his spasm but a short hacking cough and a
wheeze—then silence. ‘I’ll play four,’ I cried to
Bonaparte, who stood watching me from a place of
safety on the other side of the stone wall. Again
I swung my red-flagged brassey in front of the
angry creature’s face and what I had hoped for
followed. The second attempt at a bellow again
resulted in a hacking cough and a sneeze, and lo
the ball flew out of his throat and landed dead to
the hole. The caddies drove the bull away. Bonaparte
played eight, missed a putt for a nine, stymied
himself in a ten, holed out in twelve and I went
down in five.”

“Jerusalem!” cried Ananias. “What did Bonaparte
say?”

“Again I swung my red-flagged brassey in
front of the angry creature’s face, and what I
had hoped for followed.” Chapter XV.

 “He delivered a short, quick nervous address in
Corsican and retired to the club-house where he
spent the afternoon drowning his sorrows in Absinthe
high-balls. ‘Great hole that, Bonaparte,’
said I when his geniality was about to return.
‘Yes,’ said he. ‘A regular lu-lu, eh?’ said I.
‘More than that, Baron,’ said he. ‘It was a Waterlooloo.’
It was the first pun I ever heard the
Emperor make.”

“We all have our weak moments,” said Ananias
drily, playing nine from behind the wall. “I give
the hole up,” he added angrily.

“Let’s play it out anyhow,” said Munchausen,
playing three to the green.

“All right,” Ananias agreed, taking a ten and
rimming the cup.

Munchausen took three to go down, scoring six
in all.

“Two up,” said he, as Ananias putted out in
eleven.

“How the deuce do you make that out? This is
only the first hole,” cried Ananias with some show
of heat.

 “You gave up a hole, didn’t you?” demanded
Munchausen.

“Yes.”

“And I won a hole, didn’t I?”

“You did—but—”

“Well that’s two holes. Fore!” cried Munchausen.

The two walked along in silence for a few minutes,
and the Baron resumed.

“Yes, golf is a splendid game and I love it,
though I don’t think I’d ever let a good canvasback
duck get cold while I was talking about it.
When I have a canvasback duck before me I don’t
think of anything else while it’s there. But unquestionably
I’m fond of golf, and I have a very
good reason to be. It has done a great deal for me,
and as I have already told you, once it really saved
my life.”

“Saved your life, eh?” said Ananias.

“That’s what I said,” returned Mr. Munchausen,
“and so of course that is the way it was.”

“I should admire to hear the details,” said Ananias.
 “I presume you were going into a decline
and it restored your strength and vitality.”

“No,” said Mr. Munchausen, “it wasn’t that
way at all. It saved my life when I was attacked
by a fierce and ravenously hungry lion. If I hadn’t
known how to play golf it would have been farewell
forever to Mr. Munchausen, and Mr. Lion
would have had a fine luncheon that day, at which
I should have been the turkey and cranberry sauce
and mince pie all rolled into one.”

Ananias laughed.

“It’s easy enough to laugh at my peril now,”
said Mr. Munchausen, “but if you’d been with me
you wouldn’t have laughed very much. On the
contrary, Ananias, you’d have ruined what little
voice you ever had screeching.”

“I wasn’t laughing at the danger you were in,”
said Ananias. “I don’t see anything funny in
that. What I was laughing at was the idea of a
lion turning up on a golf course. They don’t have
lions on any of the golf courses that I am familiar
with.”

 “That may be, my dear Ananias,” said Mr. Munchausen,
“but it doesn’t prove anything. What
you are familiar with has no especial bearing upon
the ordering of the Universe. They had lions by
the hundreds on the particular links I refer to. I
laid the links out myself and I fancy I know what
I am talking about. They were in the desert of
Sahara. And I tell you what it is,” he added,
slapping his knee enthusiastically, “they were the
finest links I ever played on. There wasn’t a hole
shorter than three miles and a quarter, which gives
you plenty of elbow room, and the fair green had
all the qualities of a first class billiard table, so
that your ball got a magnificent roll on it.”

“What did you do for hazards?” asked Ananias.

“Oh we had ’em by the dozen,” replied Mr. Munchausen.
“There weren’t any ponds or stone
walls, of course, but there were plenty of others
that were quite as interesting. There was the
Sphynx for instance; and for bunkers the pyramids
can’t be beaten. Then occasionally right in
the middle of a game a caravan ten or twelve miles
long, would begin to drag its interminable length
 across the middle of the course, and it takes mighty
nice work with the lofting iron to lift a ball over a
caravan without hitting a camel or killing an Arab,
I can tell you. Then finally I’m sure I don’t know
of any more hazardous hazard for a golf player—or
for anybody else for that matter—than a real
hungry African lion out in search of breakfast,
especially when you meet him on the hole furthest
from home and have a stretch of three or four miles
between him and assistance with no revolver or
other weapon at hand. That’s hazard enough for
me and it took the best work I could do with my
brassey to get around it.”

“You always were strong at a brassey lie,” said
Ananias.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Munchausen. “There
are few lies I can’t get around. But on this morning
I was playing for the Mid-African Championship.
I’d been getting along splendidly. My
record for fifteen holes was about seven hundred
and eighty-three strokes, and I was flattering myself
that I was about to turn in the best card that
had ever been seen in a medal play contest in all
 Africa. My drive from the sixteenth tee was a
simple beauty. I thought the ball would never
stop, I hit it such a tremendous whack. It had a
flight of three hundred and eighty-two yards and a
roll of one hundred and twenty more, and when it
finally stopped it turned up in a mighty good lie
on a natural tee, which the wind had swirled up.
Calling to the monkey who acted as my caddy—we
used monkeys for caddies always in Africa, and
they were a great success because they don’t talk
and they use their tails as a sort of extra hand,—I
got out my brassey for the second stroke, took my
stance on the hardened sand, swung my club back,
fixed my eye on the ball and was just about to carry
through, when I heard a sound which sent my heart
into my boots, my caddy galloping back to the club
house, and set my teeth chattering like a pair of
castanets. It was unmistakable, that sound. When
a hungry lion roars you know precisely what it is
the moment you hear it, especially if you have
heard it before. It doesn’t sound a bit like the
miauing of a cat; nor is it suggestive of the rumble
of artillery in an adjacent street. There is no mistaking
 it for distant thunder, as some writers would
have you believe. It has none of the gently mournful
quality that characterises the soughing of the
wind through the leafless branches of the autumnal
forest, to which a poet might liken it; it is just a
plain lion-roaring and nothing else, and when you
hear it you know it. The man who mistakes it for
distant thunder might just as well be struck by
lightning there and then for all the chance he has
to get away from it ultimately. The poet who confounds
it with the gentle soughing breeze never
lives to tell about it. He gets himself eaten up for
his foolishness. It doesn’t require a Daniel come
to judgment to recognise a lion’s roar on sight.

“I should have perished myself that morning if
I had not known on the instant just what were the
causes of the disturbance. My nerve did not desert
me, however, frightened as I was. I stopped
my play and looked out over the sand in the direction
whence the roaring came, and there he stood
a perfect picture of majesty, and a giant among
lions, eyeing me critically as much as to say, ‘Well
this is luck, here’s breakfast fit for a king!’ but he
 reckoned without his host. I was in no mood to
be served up to stop his ravening appetite and I
made up my mind at once to stay and fight. I’m a
good runner, Ananias, but I cannot beat a lion
in a three mile sprint on a sandy soil, so fight it
was. The question was how. My caddy gone, the
only weapons I had with me were my brassey and
that one little gutta percha ball, but thanks to my
golf they were sufficient.

“Carefully calculating the distance at which the
huge beast stood, I addressed the ball with unusual
care, aiming slightly to the left to overcome my
tendency to slice, and drove the ball straight
through the lion’s heart as he poised himself on his
hind legs ready to spring upon me. It was a superb
stroke and not an instant too soon, for just as
the ball struck him he sprang forward, and even as
it was landed but two feet away from where I stood,
but, I am happy to say, dead.

“It was indeed a narrow escape, and it tried my
nerves to the full, but I extracted the ball and resumed
my play in a short while, adding the lucky
 stroke to my score meanwhile. But I lost the
match,—not because I lost my nerve, for this I did
not do, but because I lifted from the lion’s heart.
The committee disqualified me because I did not
play from my lie and the cup went to my competitor.
However, I was satisfied to have escaped
with my life. I’d rather be a live runner-up than
a dead champion any day.”

“A wonderful experience,” said Ananias. “Perfectly
wonderful. I never heard of a stroke to
equal that.”

“You are too modest, Ananias,” said Mr. Munchausen
drily. “Too modest by half. You and
Sapphira hold the record for that, you know.”

“I have forgotten the episode,” said Ananias.

“Didn’t you and she make your last hole on a
single stroke?” demanded Munchausen with an inward
chuckle.

“Oh—yes,” said Ananias grimly, as he recalled
the incident. “But you know we didn’t win any
more than you did.”

“Oh, didn’t you?” asked Munchausen.

 “No,” replied Ananias. “You forget that Sapphira
and I were two down at the finish.”

And Mr. Munchausen played the rest of the game
in silence. Ananias had at last got the best of him.