“He was the only man who had any at all, for that matter,” suggested Shem, “and it required all his courage to show it.  Everybody was guying him.  Sinners stood around the yard all day and every day, criticising the model; one scoffer pretended he thought her a canal-boat, and asked how deep the flood was likely to be on the tow-path, and whether we intended to use mules in shallow water and giraffes in deep; another asked what time allowance we expected to get in a fifteen-mile run, and hinted that a year and two months per mile struck him as being the proper thing—­”

“It was far from pleasant,” said Noah, tapping his fingers together reflectively.  “I don’t want to go through it again, and if, as Raleigh suggests, history is likely to repeat herself, I’ll sublet the contract to Barnum here, and let him get the chaff.”

“It was all right in the end, though, dad,” said Shem.  “We had the great laugh on ‘hoi polloi’ the second day out.”

“We did, indeed,” said Noah.  “When we told ’em we only carried first-class passengers and had no room for emigrants, they began to see that the Ark wasn’t such an old tub, after all; and a good ninety per cent. of them would have given ten dollars for a little of that time allowance they’d been talking to us about for several centuries.”

Noah lapsed into a musing silence, and Barnum rose to leave.

“I still wish you’d saved a Discosaurus,” he said.  “A creature with a neck twenty-two feet long would have been a gold mine to me.  He could have been trained to stand in the ring, and by stretching out his neck bite the little boys who sneak in under the tent and occupy seats on the top row.”

“Well, for your sake,” said Noah, with a smile, “I’m very sorry; but for my own, I’m quite satisfied with the general results.”

And they all agreed that the patriarch had every reason to be pleased with himself.

CHAPTER XII:  THE HOUSE-BOAT DISAPPEARS

Queen Elizabeth, attended by Ophelia and Xanthippe, was walking along the river-bank.  It was a beautiful autumn day, although, owing to certain climatic peculiarities of Hades, it seemed more like midsummer.  The mercury in the club thermometer was nervously clicking against the top of the crystal tube, and poor Cerberus was having all he could do with his three mouths snapping up the pestiferous little shades of by-gone gnats that seemed to take an almost unholy pleasure in alighting upon his various noses and ears.

Ophelia was doing most of the talking.

“I am sure I have never wished to ride one of them,” she said, positively.  “In the first place, I do not see where the pleasure of it comes in, and, in the second, it seems to me as if skirts must be dangerous.  If they should catch in one of the pedals, where would I be?”

“In the hospital shortly, methinks,” said Queen Elizabeth.