Chapter III

“The presumptuous beings on earth have the impudence to tell their children that the Moon is made of green cheese,” quoth the mammoth.

“Indeed, sir, but that is very true,” answered Bob. “When I was a boy I believed it was only a big cheese, and I can safely say that when I’ve seen it in the water, up at Bathurst, where we lived, I’ve been silly enough to wade into the water arter it, thinking to take it home and have my supper off it.”

“Ah, it’s rare fun to watch the moon-rakers try to grasp my shadow, Bob.”

“I believe you, sir. Lord, how you must laugh in your sleeve at ’em! Your Moonship must look down upon many a strange sight,” said the shepherd reflectively.

The Man in the Moon smiled widely. “Humph! I look upon all kindred of the terrestrial world,” he answered gravely. “I am but the pale reflection of the great luminary, the Sun, whose slave I am. When he fadeth from the surface of the globe, I borrow his beams and become the watchman of the night. The mighty human beings, and the lowly; rich and poor; the sinful and the good, are all beneath my vision. I watch the murderer crawling with stealthy feet towards his victim, and I note the robber lying in wait to plunder; I haunt the gloom where guilt and misery lie huddled together in rags. Wickedness in high places cannot escape me. Over the deep sleep of toiling millions my beams hold watch and ward, kissing the rosy lips of innocence, where yet lingers the soft breath of prayer. Hovering o’er the sighing maiden and the restless miser, weaving fancies which fill the poet’s brain with unutterable poesy, and with such shapes as live only in dreams of age and infancy, and vanish with the light of morn. Cuddlephum! Bobberish—Baa-lamb! Bo!”

“Just so,” said Bob, opening wide his eyes at the strange words. “I begs to say that French wasn’t taught at the school I went to. Howsoever, I’m quite willing to dine with you, if that’s what you mean. I’m beginning to feel pereshious hungry, I can tell yer.”

“Hungry! Base mortal, there is no such word known here,” echoed the monster.

“Good heavens! No eating!” cried Bob, aghast.

“None.”

“Scissors! I’m afraid visitors from Australia won’t overrun Moonland, if that’s the case.”

“Peace! Follow me, and thou shalt taste nectar, which shall banish the cravings of thy vulgar race.”

The Man in the Moon bounded away over the pumice-stone crags like a gigantic kangaroo, followed by Bob. Chaos and desolation were everywhere visible around them. Sad indeed and supremely melancholy looked the place. Mountains riven asunder; vast ravines and valleys choked with bleached bones of monsters unknown to men; immense plains, scattered thickly with the fossil remnants of ages; mingled dust and huge mounds of bony fragments of animal and reptile, which a thousand Cuviers could never have reconstructed. Up the rugged zigzags with tremendous leaps, echoless, shadowless, and across the dust, silent to their footfall, went the lunarian and the mortal.

“This is a dreary place, sir,” muttered the latter, almost breathless in his haste.

“Peace, or perchance the forms of these dead monsters will rise to rebuke thee!” answered his companion solemnly. “Here, where thou art standing, these enormous animals of the first period lived and roved at will. The human mind cannot conceive their colossal proportions, for they were extinct many ages before the advent of man.”

The shepherd followed his conductor in silence, wondering if it were possible that these mighty dead could take shape again and swallow him at one snap. Jonah had been bolted by a whale, but the skeletons of these creatures appeared large enough to engulf a hundred whales a day, and twice that number of Jonahs into the bargain.

Bob was almost ready to sink down amid the Golgotha when the Man in the Moon halted before a very high mountain. Making a sign to his companion to follow, he quickly disappeared from view. At first it seemed as if the mammoth had vanished within the mountain, but the mortal saw an opening at the base which he entered. What a study for a geologist! In the dim ages of the past, when the satellite of our Earth seethed and boiled as a vast crater, the solid intestines of this cone, yielding to some great power below it, had been riven in twain, leaving an unmeasurable grotto of winding galleries. Toiling along in the wake of the lunarian, the captive trod on a broad aisle, on each side of which rose a series of arches succeeding each other, like the noble arcades of some Gothic cathedral. Obelisk-like massive pillars stood out from the rent wall like mighty sentinels guarding the wreck. Had our hero been a mineralogist, armed with his hammer, his steel pointer, his magnetic needles, and his blow pipe, what a fund of information he might have gleaned here to place before the spectacles of professors and philosophers! Nay, had he but possessed the faintest idea of the science of building, what patterns, what studies around and above him, for every form of the art to hereafter confound architects of the nineteenth century!

Poor Bob was neither a mineralogist nor an architect, so he passed by these things without a second glance, and entered a vaulted chamber, upon whose round, jagged dome rested the whole weight of the mountain; the dented projections and the sharp points on wall and roof spun into an endless network of lines and seams, luminous as all things here seemed to be, and changing colour from silver-grey to deep crimson.

Wonder had lost its functions for Bob the shepherd, otherwise he would have stood aghast at the strange forms moving to and fro within this chamber; round in shape, and taller than giants of long ago, with arms and legs evidently telescoped at the joints, so that they could lengthen or shorten them at will, and each shedding their quota of refulgence to illuminate the scene. Monster glow-worms, gigantic fire-flies, with the trickery of monkeys, and the strength of bears, seized the shrinking man, and rose with him to the dome, which opened instantly and engulfed them. Amidst a circle of light, which changed quicker than the sparkles of a diamond, the poor shepherd found he was being borne upward and hemmed in by a ring of these natives of the Moon—upward and yet upward, without will to pause or stop, the mad whirlwind of light ever changing, red, blue, grey, yellow, white, azure, and the legion gathering in increased numbers every moment round him until the climax came, and the crater, that had been silent for countless ages, once more opened its ponderous jaws, casting him forth as a rocket, where—amidst fiery rings and bars, and blazing stars of light—he fell down, down, down into darkness and oblivion!

“I say, mate, how far is it to the Blue Mountains Inn?”

Old Bob, the shepherd, rubbed his eyes and looked up at the questioner. He was a stout, thick-set fellow, with a heavy swag on his back, and a black billy-can in his hand.

The man had to repeat his query ere the herdsman found speech.

“Why, surely, you’re not the Man in the Moon, eh?” asked Bob, with a wild stare.

The swagman stepped backward a pace or two, and regarded our hero with more attention.

“Man in the Moon!” he repeated. “Why, the old fellow’s gone off his head.”

“Where’s the others with the long legs and arms?” and the shepherd shuddered.

“He’s cranky, sure enough,” muttered the traveller audibly. “The coves as you were asking arter are all gone,” he said aloud. “You get up on your pins, or they’ll be back again Here’s a bob; come now, hook it, or they’ll have you,” saying which the swagman went on his way.

Our hero raised himself into a sitting posture. Before him lay the verdant slopes and ridges of the mountain, bathed in sunlight. Yonder his sheep fed peacefully, watched by the faithful Patch. Then the old man raised his vision higher than the earth and thanked Heaven that he was still safe and sound on terra firma.

“SAILOR.”

That great painter of animals, Sir Edwin Landseer, never sketched a nobler specimen of the canine race than the big, black, curly Newfoundland dog, Sailor, the hero of our story. He was a fine, faithful dog, and almost as large as a young foal, and every bit as frisky and as harmless, save when teased by naughty boys. If you tried ever so hard you couldn’t hide anything from Sailor. You might fasten him in a room and then attempt to conceal a ball, or a piece of wood, in the garden or the stables, but the moment you set him free Sailor would hunt the object out and return with it in his mouth. Besides being sagacious, the faithful brute could dive and swim like a fish; that is why he received such a suitable name.

Captain Hauser, of the barque South Australian, had brought him from India when but a puppy, but now the worthy captain had settled down ashore with his two boys at Anchordale on the River Murray, and the dog had become almost one of the family circle.

On a very hot afternoon, and when the New Year was scarcely a score of days old, Bertie Hauser and his cousin, Tom Blake, took it into their heads to have a row down the river. Anchordale was a pleasant cottage situated on the bank of the Murray, with a tiny skiff fastened to a stout post at the end of the orchard.

Bertie was only eight years of age, and Tom one year older; but the boat being so small and light they managed to get afloat and paddled away in high glee down the river. The dog, Sailor, was the only one who had seen them depart, and he, with wagging tail and out-hanging tongue, had begged, as only dumb animals can, to accompany them on their trip; but Tom Blake said the boat would be swamped with such a cargo, and so the lads had departed without him. Now, although Sailor was dumb, he wasn’t blind. Neither was the poor brute wanting in instinct. Many a day he had acted as a substitute for a pony for little Bertie, and had even suffered the child to put a string into his mouth for a bridle, and had trotted or cantered and walked up and down the lawn according to the whim of his infantile rider. Indeed, Sailor was a kind old dog, and probably thought it his duty to guard the person of his young master, on land or on the water.

Perhaps this instinct prompted the Newfoundland to crawl cat-like through the dense scrub on the bank of the river and keep the skiff in view. Be that as it may, the dog never lost sight of them for a moment. He saw Tom Blake guide the boat into a wide part of the stream, and where the banks were very high and almost as steep as the gable of a house.

“Oh, Bertie, here’s the place for a bathe. Are you game?” asked Tom, rocking the boat.

Bertie assented. They found a little cove, where they landed, and made fast the skiff; then ascending the high bank they began to prepare for the water. Both boys had been taught to swim—as all boys should be—but Bertie and his cousin had been warned not to bathe down the river, because there were places teeming with snags and dangerous undercurrents. Tom and his companion had forgotten all about the caution. The water at this spot appears very dark and still and cool, with the shadows of the overhanging trees upon it, and the drooping branches of the willows laving to and fro on its bosom with a dreamy sound.

“What a frightful jump!” cried Bertie, approaching the brink timidly, and looking over at the river beneath. “It’s a high leap, Tom; hadn’t we better go a little farther down?”

“Not at all,” responds Tom, swinging his arms about above his head. “I like a good header; you stand there and watch me dive.”

Bertie stands aside and watches him. Tom retires several paces, starts forward with a short, quick run, and springs headforemost from the cliff into the river. For a moment the waters bubble and widen out in circling eddies over the broad expanse. Bertie Hauser stands looking down trying to trace the white, shapely form of his cousin cleaving through the dark stream, expecting to see him rise to the surface twenty yards away from where he plunged in. But many seconds go by, and Tom Blake rises not, and poor Bertie, in an agony of suspense, calls to him to “come up at once, or he will be drownded,” as if the treacherous element would part its substance and carry his weak voice below, to its holes and caves, where his companion is struggling for his little life.

“Tom, Tom, dear cousin Tom,” cries the child on the bank, as the truth begins to dawn upon him that Tom is drowning. “Oh! what shall I do to help him? What shall I do?” When lo! old Sailor comes bounding towards him with a joyous bark. The boy clutches his favourite by the ears and draws him forward to the brink of the river, where, pointing down to the water, he urges on the dog with voice and gesture. “Ho, Sailor, fetch him out, old fellow, go on—bring him out.”

Sailor needs no second bidding. Before Bertie has the words out of his mouth, the dog comprehends the whole business, and leaps into the water and disappears. How anxiously the child watches for his re-appearance! At a spot half way up the stream, he observes the water begin to whirl and eddy and bubble upward, as being disturbed by a great commotion beneath; and here Sailor rises to the surface, and blows the water from his snout, like a whale; but the dog is alone. There is no sign of poor Tom Blake. Little Bertie becomes sick and faint with terror, but the boy does not lose his presence of mind. He has every confidence in the Newfoundland’s strength and courage.

“Ho, Sailor, fetch him out, old boy, bring him out.”

Downward plunges the gallant dog again, while his young master, naked as he is, rushes down to the skiff, jumps in, and pushes into midstream, running athwart the dog, as he rises once more. This time Sailor has something in his mouth, but the boat knocking against him causes him to let go. Yet he dives after it, and appears again in a moment with the drowning boy. Sailor has clutched him firmly by the hair of the head, and the dog’s great red eyes are all aflame as he buoys up the insensible child and paddles the water with ponderous strokes and lands him safe upon the bank.

What avail little Bertie’s terms of endearment and the affectionate appeals he makes to his still, silent cousin? Tom Blake is deaf. And although Bertie may make a hundred promises of bats and guns and ponies poor Tom cannot hear him.

It is fortunate that two men with swags upon their backs are passing at the time, who carry the unfortunate youth into the sunlight, and rub his body vigorously with their hands until the vitality that was almost extinct begins to revive again within him.

When Tom had partly recovered and could speak, he told his uncle, the captain, that when he dived he struck his head against a snag, which rendered him insensible, and no doubt in that state he was being carried away by the current when the dog found him.

And poor Tom was grateful for the service, for when he was quite well he bought the Newfoundland a grand collar, and had the following inscription engraven on it:—

“Sailor,

“Rescued Tom Anson Blake from drowning on the
18th January, 187-, at Anchordale, River Murray.”

NELLIE.