mother here express her passing wonder but she dare not open her mouth. “Come, dearest mate,” cried my father gayly. “Courage! Let us descend into this beautiful valley, for as yet we are only standing upon the borders of the “Land of the Melodious Sneezers” called in their soft and musical tongue Lâ-aah-chew-lâ.”
The pronunciation of this word again threw my poor parents into a perfect whirlwind of sneezes; but nothing daunted, they advanced to meet the natives, who at first sight fell prostrate on their faces and for several moments kept up a low plaintive hum of sneezes, with their noses thrust into the grass.
By degrees however, my father succeeding in convincing them that he was quite as peaceably inclined as they were.
Whereupon the Melodious Sneezers performed a most singular and withal pleasing dance of joy, their feet keeping perfect time with their chorus of sneezing.
As my father afterwards learned, the dance was to express their intense gratitude to the “white spirits” for not having eaten them alive.
The march homeward was now entered upon, my father walking hand in hand with the King Chew-chew-lô, and my mother escorted by a score or more of his wives, the favorite of the royal house being named Chew-lâ-â-â-â-â and each successive one according as she occupied a less lofty place in the King’s affections having a shorter name until at last Chew-lâ signified little better than a mere serving maid.
My father found that the villages of the Melodious Sneezers, on account of the frequency and the violence of inundations from the network of rivers which completely shut in their land, consisted of houses or habitations built in the trees or upon lofty piles.
He and my mother were lodged in one of the most commodious of the royal dwellings and so many slaves and attendants were assigned to care for their wants that there was little or no room to move about.
To their great sorrow, my father proceeded to dismiss several hundred in order that he might get close enough to my mother to converse without holloaing and then sent word to King Chew-chew-lô that both he and my mother would need at least a week of perfect rest and quiet to regain their health and strength after their terrible sufferings on the slopes of the Mountains of the Moon.
CHAPTER III.
My birth. The elder Baron reads my horoscope. Birth of Bulger. The elder Baron puts on mud-shoes and goes out for a walk. What he discovers. My wonderful precocity. My love for Bulger. My terrible fall into the lake of mud. How the Melodious Sneezers in their mud-shoes attempted to rescue me. Their failure. Bulger comes to their assistance. How I was dug out and restored to my mother. Remarkable effect of the warm mud on my head and brain. The Melodious Sneezers are afraid of me. My fondness for arithmetic and languages. Our farewell to the Melodious Sneezers, and return home. How I discharged my tutors, and how the elder Baron forced them to pay for the instruction I had given them.
BULGER WITH HIS MUD SHOES ON.
At this point my hand trembles and the ink flows unsteadily from my pen.
I am about to record certain events which, I feel assured the reader will agree with me in considering to be the most interesting of my strange and varied life. Possibly I should say interesting to me; for, gentle reader, one of these “certain events” above referred to is a no less important occurrence than my birth into this grand and beautiful world—a world which has proven to be full of wonderful things and of more wonderful beings, as you shall see as I go on with my story.
I was born in midsummer. It was the night season.
Ten thousand stars twinkled over the cradle of that wretched, little, helpless, lump of clay; but brighter than all, like a crimson torch flaming in the skies, Sirius, the dog star, shone down upon me!
My father looked up at the heavens and smiling, murmured: “Little stranger, thou shalt ever be a lover of dogs. Thy smile shall be joy to them, thy words music and in some four-footed beast of their race shalt thou find thy best, thy faithfulest, thy truest friend.”
As if to set the very stamp of truth upon my father’s words at that very instant a cry of a mother dog was heard in an adjoining room and one of the Royal household Chew-lâ-â came running into my presence with a basket of tiny puppies. My father laughingly seized the wicker cradle of this newly arrived family and holding it up to me, cried out:
“Choose, little baron, choose thee a friend and companion.” I put out my tiny baby hand and it rested upon one with a particularly large head. “Ha! ha!” laughed my father, “thou hast well chosen, little baron, for him thou hast chosen hath so much brain that his head doth fairly bulge with it.”
And when my infant tongue came to wrestle with that word, it was twisted into “Bulger.” And thus it was that Bulger and I started out on life’s journey at almost the same moment! Upon the following day my father made discovery that the waters had begun to recede in the night, and as he looked down from our lofty dwelling, he saw that it now stood apparently in the centre of quite an extensive island. After breakfast, in accordance with the custom of the country, my father put on a pair of King Chew-chew-lô’s wooden shoes which were worn by all of the Melodious Sneezers when attempting to move about on the surface of the soft mud occasioned by the inundation.
These wooden shoes are extremely light although quite as long and as broad as snow shoes. The soles being polished, the wearer is enabled to glide over the mud which, from the nature of the soil is very oily, with the same rapidity as a runner upon snow shoes.
After an excursion of several hours up hill and down dale my father returned with this piece of strange intelligence, namely, that their habitation had undoubtedly, prior to the falling of the waters been situated in a lake; but that by degrees, as the waters had receded, an island had been formed, which somewhat later had been transformed into a peninsula, which in its turn by a still further sinking of the waters, had been changed into the crown of a mountain with gently sloping sides so that, as he reported to my mother, to his dying day it would be impossible for him to say whether his son had been born in a lake, on an island, upon a peninsula or on a mountain top, a fact which pained him extremely, for, like all the members of his family, he took the greatest pride in recording important events with scrupulous exactitude, even to the smallest detail.
Unlike most babes, who seem content to pass the first half year or so of their lives eating, sleeping and crying, I from the very outset displayed a most astonishing precocity.
When only a few weeks old, although I could not talk, yet I had learned to whistle for Bulger, whose development in mind and body seemed to keep even pace with mine and who passed most of his time looking up into my childish face with an expression which meant only too plainly:
“Oh, I shall be so glad when that little tongue is unloosed so that you may call me Bulger and bid me do your will.”
Nor had he long to wait.
The one thing, which, at this early period of my life gave me most joy, was the sunlight.
Within doors, I was fretful, peevish, irritable, but once out in the open air, my whole nature changed. I drank in the soft, balmy atmosphere with a vigor and a satisfaction that delighted my father. My face brightened, my eyes traveled from valley to hill, from mountain-top to sky.
Into
