ent 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. The stream was
broad and shallow at this part, and you could see the stones and gravel
at the bottom, and millions of baby fishes, and a sort of
skating-spiders walking about on the top of the water. Denny said the
water must be ice for them to be able to walk on it, and this showed we
were getting near the north pole. But Oswald had seen a kingfisher by
the wood, and he said it was an ibis, so this was even.

When Oswald had had as much poetry as he could bear, he said, "Let's be
beavers and make a dam."

And everybody was so hot they agreed joyously, and soon our clothes were
tucked up as far as they could go and our legs looked green through the
water, though they were pink out of it.

Making a dam is jolly good fun, though laborious, as books about beavers
take care to let you know.

Dicky said it must be Canada if we were beavers, and so it was on the
way to the polar system, but Oswald pointed to his heated brow, and
Dicky owned it was warm for polar regions. He had brought the ice-axe
(it is called the wood-chopper sometimes), and Oswald, ever ready and
able to command, set him and Denny to cut turfs from the bank while we
heaped stones across the stream. It was clayey here, or of course
dam-making would have been vain, even for the best-trained beaver.

When we had made a ridge of stones we laid turfs against them--nearly
across the stream, leaving about two feet for the water to go
through--then more stones, and then lumps of clay sta