“They sailed
to the Western Sea, they did,
To a land all
covered with trees.
And they bought an Owl, and
a useful Cart,
And a pound of Rice, and a
Cranberry Tart,
And a hive of
silvery Bees.
And they bought a Pig, and
some green Jack-Daws,
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop
paws,
And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,
And no end of
Stilton Cheese.
Far
and few, far and few,
Are
the lands where the Jumblies live.
Their
heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And
they went to sea in a sieve.
And in twenty years they all
came back,
In twenty years
or more,
And every one said, ’How
tall they’ve grown!
For they’ve been to
the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills
of the Chankly Bore.’”
From the pedestrian excursion of the Table and the Chair, we cannot resist making a brief quotation, though in this, as in every case, the inability to quote the drawings also is a sad drawback:—
“So they both went slowly
down,
And walked about the town,
With a cheerful bumpy sound,
As they toddled round and
round.
And everybody cried,
As they hastened to their
side,
’See, the Table and
the Chair
Have come out to take the
air!’
“But in going down an
alley
To a castle in a valley,
They completely lost their
way,
And wandered all the day,
Till, to see them safely back,
They paid a Ducky-Quack,
And a Beetle and a Mouse,
Who took them to their house.
“Then they whispered
to each other,
’O delightful little
brother,
What a lovely walk we’ve
taken!
Let us dine on Beans and Bacon!’
So the Ducky and the leetle
Browny-Mousy, and the Beetle
Dined, and danced upon their
heads,
Till they toddled to their
beds.”
“The Story of the Four little Children who went Round the World” follows next, and the account of the manner in which they occupied themselves while on shipboard may be transcribed for the benefit of those unfortunate persons who have not perused the original: “During the day-time Violet chiefly occupied herself in putting salt-water into a churn, while her three brothers churned it violently in the hope it would turn into butter, which it seldom if ever did.” After journeying for a time, they saw some land at a distance, “and when they came to it they found it was an island made of water quite surrounded by earth. Besides that it was bordered by evanescent isthmuses with a great Gulf-Stream running about all over it, so that it was perfectly beautiful, and contained only a single tree, five hundred and three feet high.” In a later passage, we read how “by-and-by the children came to a country where there were no houses, but only an incredibly innumerable number of large