"Yes," said Mopsa; "but I don't feel old. Let us go down the river, and see what we can find." So they got into the boat, and it floated into the middle of the river, and then made for the opposite bank, where the water was warm and very muddy, and the river became so very wide that it seemed to be afternoon when they got near enough to see it clearly; and what they saw was a boggy country, green, and full of little rills; but the water,--which, as I told you, was thick and muddy,--the water was full of small holes! You never saw water with eyelet-holes in it; but Jack did. On all sides of the boat he saw holes moving about in pairs, and some were so close that he looked and saw their lining: they were lined with pink, and they snorted! Jack was afraid, but he considered that this was such a long time ago that the holes, whatever they were, could not hurt him; but it made him start, notwithstanding, when a huge flat-head reared itself up close to the boat, and he found that the holes were the nostrils of creatures who kept all the rest of themselves under water. In a minute or two, hundreds of ugly flat-heads popped up, and the boat danced among them as they floundered about in the water. "I hope they won't upset us," said Jack. "I wish you would land." Mopsa said she would rather not, because she did not like the hairy elephants. "There are no such things as hairy elephants," said Jack, in his dream; but he had hardly spoken when out of a wood close at hand some huge creatures, far larger than our elephants, came jogging down to the water. There were forty or fifty of them, and they were covered with what looked like tow. In fact, so coarse was their shaggy hair that they looked as if they were dressed in door-mats; and when they stood still and shook themselves, such clouds of dust flew out that, as it swept over the river, it almost stifled Jack and Mopsa. "Odious!" exclaimed Jack, sneezing. "What terrible creatures these are!" "Well," answered Mopsa, at the other end of the boat (but he could hardly see her for the dust), "then why do you dream of them?" Jack had just decided to dream of something else, when, with a noise greater than fifty trumpets, the elephants, having shaken out all the dust, came thundering down to the water to bathe in the liquid mud. They shook the whole country as they plunged; but that was not all. The awful river-horses rose up, and, with shrill screams, fell upon them, and gave them battle; while up from every rill peeped above the rushes frogs as large as oxen, and with blue and green eyes that gleamed like the eyes of cats.