The emperor was so much interested in the Polos and in the stories they told about their country that he wanted to hear more. So he persuaded them to stay with him and tell him more. He gave them rich presents. Then he made them his advisers and assistants in ruling his empire. So the Polos stayed on for years and years and years and learned the language and came to be very important people in Cathay. At last after they had spent about twenty years in Cathay the Polos thought it was about time to go home and see their own people again. So they begged leave to return. Kublai Khan did not want them to go. They were so useful to him and helped him so much in ruling that he didn’t want to lose them. But in the end he did let them go, and they started back to what once had been their home. When they at last arrived in Venice, they had been away so long and had been traveling so far that no one knew them. They had almost forgotten how to speak their own language, and they talked like foreigners. Their clothes had become worn out and ragged by their long trip. They looked like tramps, and not even their old friends recognized them. No one would believe that these ragged, dirty strangers were the same fine Venetian gentlemen who had disappeared almost twenty years before. The Polos told their townspeople all about their adventures and the wonderfully rich lands and cities that they had visited. But the townspeople only laughed at them, for they thought them story-tellers. Then the Polos ripped open their ragged garments, and out fell piles of magnificent and costly jewels, diamonds and rubies and sapphires and pearls--enough to buy a kingdom. The people looked in wonder and amazement and began to believe. Marco Polo told his stories to a man who wrote them down and made a book of them called “The Travels of Marco Polo.” This is an interesting book for you to read even to-day, although we cannot believe all the tales he told. We know that he exaggerated a great many things, for he liked to amaze people. Marco Polo described the magnificence of Kublai Khan’s palace. He told of its enormous dining-hall, where thousands of guests could sit down at the table at one time. He told of a bird so huge that it could fly away with an elephant. He said that Noah’s Ark was still on Mount Ararat, only the mountain was so high and so dangerous to climb on account of the ice and snow with which it was covered that no one could go to see if the ark really were there. [Illustration] 56 “Thing-a-ma-jigger” and “What-cher-may-call-it” or a Magic Needle and a Magic Powder