This amused her ladyship a little, but not so much as the postscript,
which was indeed the neatest thing in its way she had met with, and she
had some experience, too.

"P.S.--I say, Cicely, I think I should like to marry you. Would you
mind?"

Let us defy time and space to give you Lady Cicely's reply: "I should
enjoy it of all things, Taddy. But, alas! I am too young."

N.B.--She was twenty-seven, and Tad sixteen. To be sure, Tad was four
feet eleven, and she was only five feet six and a half.

To return to my narrative (with apologies), this meeting of the vessels
caused a very agreeable excitement that day; but a greater was in store.
In the afternoon, Tadcaster, Staines, and the principal officers of the
ship, being at dinner in the captain's cabin, in came the officer of the
watch, and reported a large spar on the weather-bow.

"Well, close it, if you can; and let me know if it looks worth picking
up."

He then explained to Lord Tadcaster that, on a cruise, he never liked
to pass a spar, or anything that might possibly reveal the fate of some
vessel or other.

In the middle of his discourse the officer came in again, but not in
the same cool business way: he ran in excitedly, and said, "Captain, the
signalman reports it ALIVE!"

"Alive?--a spar! What do you mean? Something alive ON it, eh?"

"No, sir; alive itself."

"How can that be? Hail him again. Ask him what it is."

The officer went out, and hailed the signalman at the mast-head. "What
is it?"

"Sea-sarpint, I think."

This hail reached the captain's ears faintly. However, he waited quietly
till the officer came in and reported it; then he burst out, "Absurd!
there is no such creature in the universe. What do you say, Dr.
Staines?--It is in your department."

"The universe in my department, captain?"

"Haw! haw! haw!" went Fitzroy and two more.

"No, you rogue, the serpent."

Dr. Staines, thus appealed to, asked the captain if he had ever seen
small snakes out at sea.

"Why, of course. Sailed through a mile of them once, in the
archipelago."

"Sure they were snakes?"

"Quite sure; and the biggest was not eight feet long."

"Very well, captain; then sea-serpents exist, and it becomes a mere
question of size. Now which produces the larger animals in every
kind,--land or sea? The grown elephant weighs, I believe, about five
tons. The very smallest of the whale tribe weighs ten; and they go as
high as forty tons. There are smaller