once, because if you have any news like that to tell it only makes it
worse if you wait about. When we had told him he said--

'You little ---.' I shall not say what he said besides that, because
I am sure he must have been sorry for it next Sunday when he went to
church, if not before.

We did not take any notice of what he said, but just kept on saying how
sorry we were; and he did not take our apology like a man, but only
said he daresayed, just like a woman does. Then he went to look at his
bridge, and we went in to our tea. The jackets were never quite the same
again.

Really great explorers would never be discouraged by the daresaying of
a farmer, still less by his calling them names he ought not to. Albert's
uncle was away so we got no double slating; and next day we started
again to discover the source of the river of cataracts (or the region of
mountain-like icebergs).

We set out, heavily provisioned with a large cake Daisy and Dora had
made themselves, and six bottles of ginger-beer. I think real explorers
most likely have their ginger-beer in something lighter to carry than
stone bottles. Perhaps they have it by the cask, which would come
cheaper; and you could make the girls carry it on their back, like in
pictures of the daughters of regiments.

We passed the scene of the devouring conflagration, and the thought
of the fire made us so thirsty we decided to drink the ginger-beer and
leave the bottles in a place of concealment. Then we went on, determined
to reach our destination, Tropic or Polar, that day.

Denny and H. O. wanted to stop and try to make a fashionable
watering-place at that part where the stream spreads out like a
small-sized sea, but Noel said, 'No.' We did not like fashionableness.

'YOU ought to, at any rate,' Denny said. 'A Mr Collins wrote an Ode to
the Fashions, and he was a great poet.'

'The poet Milton wrote a long book about Satan,' Noel said, 'but I'm not
bound to like HIM.' I think it was smart of Noel.

'People aren't obliged to like everything they write about even, let
alone read,' Alice said. 'Look at "Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!"
and all the pieces of poetry about war, and tyrants, and slaughtered
saints--and the one you made yourself about the black beetle, Noel.'

By this time we had got by the pondy place and the danger of delay was
past; but the others went on talking about poetry for quite a field and
a half, as we walked along by the banks of the stream