Towards the end of the season, and in Bude’s smoking-room, about five in the July morning after a ball at Eglintoun House, Merton opened his approaches.  He began, cautiously, from talk of moors and forests; he touched on lochs, he mentioned the Highland traditions of water bulls (which haunt these meres); he spoke of the Beathach mor Loch Odha, a legendary animal of immeasurable length.  The Beathach has twelve feet; he has often been heard crashing through the ice in the nights of winter.  These tales the narrator has gleaned from the lips of the Celtic peasantry of Letter Awe.

‘I daresay he does break the ice,’ said Bude.  ’In the matter of cryptic survivals of extinct species I can believe a good deal.’

‘The sea serpent?’ asked Merton.

‘Seen him thrice,’ said Bude.

‘Then why did not Jones Harvey weigh in with a letter to Nature?’

’Jones Harvey has a scientific reputation to look after, and knows he would be laughed at.  That’s the kind of hair-pin he is,’ said Bude, quoting Miss McCabe.  ‘By Jove, Merton, that girl—­’ and he paused.

‘Yes, she is pretty,’ said Merton.

’Pretty!  I have seen the women of the round world—­before I went to—­well, never mind where, I used to think the Poles the most magnificent, but she—­’

‘Whips creation,’ said Merton.  ‘But I,’ he went on, ’am rather more interested in these other extraordinary animals.  Do you seriously believe, with your experience, that some extinct species are—­not extinct?’

’To be sure I do.  The world is wide.  But they are very shy.  I once stalked a Bunyip, in Central Australia, in a lagoon.  The natives said he was there:  I watched for a week, squatting in the reeds, and in the grey of the seventh dawn I saw him.’

‘Did you shoot?’

‘No, I observed him through a field glass first.’

‘What is the beggar like?’

’Much like some of the Highland water cattle, as described, but it is his ears they take for horns.  Australia has no indigenous horned animal.  He is, I should say, about nine feet long, marsupial (he rose breast high), and web-footed.  I saw that when he dived.  Other white men have seen him—­Buckley, the convict, for one, when he lived among the blacks.’

‘Buckley was not an accurate observer.’

‘Jones Harvey is.’

‘Any other queer beasts?’

’Of course, plenty.  You have heard of the Mylodon, the gigantic Sloth?  His bones, skin, and hair were lately found in a cave in Patagonia, with a lot of his fodder.  You can see them at the British Museum in South Kensington.  Primitive Patagonian man used the female of the species as a milch-cow.  He was a genial friendly kind of brute, accessible to charm of manner and chopped hay.  They fed him on that, in a domesticated state.’

’But he is extinct.  Hesketh Pritchard went to look for a live Mylodon, and did not find him.’