“Very well, Harry, my boy; we will finish it here. Now, if you stand there, I will fasten a plank across here between these two stumps—no, that won’t do exactly. I must put a piece on to this one, to raise it to a level with the other—then we shall have a seat in a few minutes.” Hammer and nails were busy again; and in a few minutes they sat down to enjoy the “soft pipling cold” which swung all the leaves about like little trap-doors that opened into the Infinite. Harry was highly contented. He drew a deep breath of satisfaction as, looking above and beneath and all about him, he saw that they were folded in an almost impenetrable net of foliage, through which nothing could steal into their sanctuary, save “the chartered libertine, the air,” and a few stray beams of the setting sun, filtering through the multitudinous leaves, from which they caught a green tint as they passed. “Fancy yourself a fish,” said Hugh, “in the depth of a cavern of sea weed, which floats about in the slow swinging motion of the heavy waters.” “What a funny notion!” “Not so absurd as you may think, Harry; for just as some fishes crawl about on the bottom of the sea, so do we men at the bottom of an ocean of air; which, if it be a thinner one, is certainly a deeper one.” “Then the birds are the swimming fishes, are they not?” “Yes, to be sure.” “And you and I are two mermen—doing what? Waiting for mother mermaid to give us our dinner. I am getting hungry. But it will be a long time before a mermaid gets up here, I am afraid.” “That reminds me,” said Hugh, “that I must build a stair for you, Master Harry; for you are not merman enough to get up with a stroke of your scaly tail. So here goes. You can sit there till I fetch you.” Nailing a little rude bracket here and there on the stem of the tree, just where Harry could avail himself of hand-hold as well, Hugh had soon finished a strangely irregular staircase, which it took Harry two or three times trying, to learn quite off. CHAPTER IX. GEOGRAPHY POINT. I will fetch you a tooth-picker now from the farthest inch of Asia; bring you the length of Prester John’s foot; fetch you a hair off the great Cham’s beard; do you any embassage to the Pigmies. Much Ado about Nothing. The next day, after dinner, Mr. Arnold said to the tutor: “Well, Mr. Sutherland, how does Harry get on with his geography?” Mr. Arnold, be it understood, had a weakness for geography. “We have not done anything at that yet, Mr. Arnold.”