was still gliding swiftly across the morass between the lowland and the
river. It came forward through the marsh undeviatingly toward the tree
clump, the tall reeds quivering as it passed, but its approach indicated
by no sound or other token of disturbance. The slight bank reached, there
was uplifted a great serpent head, and then, without hesitation, the
monster swept forward to the trees and soon hung dangling from the
branches of the largest one, its great coils twined loosely about trunk
and limb, its head swinging gently back and forth just below the lower
branch. It was a serpent at least sixty feet in length, and two feet or
more in breadth at its huge middle. It was queerly but not brilliantly
spotted, and its head was very nearly that of the anaconda of to-day.
Already the sea-serpent had become amphibious. It had already acquired
the knowledge it has transmitted to the anaconda, that it might leave the
stream, and, from some vantage point upon the shore, find more surely a
victim than in the waters of the sea or river. This monster serpent was
but waiting for the advent of any land animal, save perhaps those so
great as the mammoth or the great elk, or, possibly, even the cave
bear or the cave tiger. The mammoth was, of course, an impossibility,
even to the sea-serpent. The elk, with its size and vast antlers, was, to
put it at the mildest, a perplexing thing to swallow. The rhinoceros was
dangerous, and as for the cave bear and the cave tiger, they were
uncomfortable customers for anything alive. But there were the cattle,
the aurochs and the urus, and the little horses and deer, and wild hog
and a score of other creatures which, in the estimation of the
sea-serpent, were extremely edible. A tidbit to the serpent was a man, but
he did not get one in half a century.

Not long did the boys remain even in a harborage so distant. Each fled
homeward with his story.