land at a distance, "and when they came to it they found it was an island
made of water quite surrounded by earth. Besides that it was bordered by
evanescent isthmuses with a great Gulf-Stream running about all over it, so
that it was perfectly beautiful, and contained only a single tree, five
hundred and three feet high." In a later passage, we read how "by-and-by
the children came to a country where there were no houses, but only an
incredibly innumerable number of large bottles without corks, and of a
dazzling and sweetly susceptible blue color. Each of these blue bottles
contained a bluebottlefly, and all these interesting animals live
continually together in the most copious and rural harmony, nor perhaps in
many parts of the world is such perfect and abject happiness to be found."
Our last quotation from this inimitable recital shall be from the
description of their adventure on a great plain where they espied an object
which "on a nearer approach and on an accurately cutaneous inspection,
seemed to be somebody in a large white wig sitting on an arm-chair made of
sponge-cake and oyster-shells." This turned out to be the "Co-operative
Cauliflower," who, "while the whole party from the boat was gazing at him
with mingled affection and disgust ... suddenly arose, and in a somewhat
plumdomphious manner hurried off towards the setting sun, his steps
supported by two superincumbent confidential cucumbers ... till he finally
disappeared on the brink of the western sky in a crystal cloud of sudorific
sand. So remarkable a sight of course impressed the four children very
deeply; and they returned immediately to their boat with a strong sense of
undeveloped asthma and a great appetite."

In his third book, Mr. Lear takes occasion in an entertaining preface to
repudiate the charge of harboring any ulterior motive beyond that of
"Nonsense pure and absolute" in any of his verses or pictures, and tells a
delightful anecdote illustrative of the "persistently absurd report" that
the Earl of Derby was the author of the first book of "Nonsense." In this