"I remember, once," said the old gentleman, "that while his lieutenant paddled us around under the spray of the fall yonder, and over to the steps which used to hang from the rocks there on the opposite side, Merrill read us an autograph letter from Queen Victoria, dated in the kitchen at Buckingham Palace while the august lady said that she was rolling apple-dumplings,--and also gave us a lecture on geography, in which he proved that this spot was the very centre of the earth, from which all latitude and longitude ought to be calculated." "Well, he was right in some degree," said Halstead Rowan, who stood near, and who fixed his regards at the same moment on Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, still looking after the welfare of that interesting child. There was not even the suspicion of a smile upon his face as he went on, and there certainly was not upon the face of the lady for whose benefit the discourse was evidently intended. "I do not know about the latitude and longitude, but this Pool is certainly the centre of the earth and exactly opposite to China, so that a plummet, with _a line long enough_, dropped here, would be certain to come out somewhere on the shores of the Hoangho or the Kiangku." "Nonsense!" said one grave lady (not Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame) who did not appreciate the joke. "Not a bit of it, madame!" said the scamp, who thereupon turned his battery at once in her direction. "There is no doubt whatever of the truth of the statement, for I have been here myself when the defunct pig-tailed Chinamen came popping up, who had committed suicide by drowning themselves on the other side of the world, on account of the cruelty of a copper-colored divinity with almond eyes and feet the size and shape of the last dumpling in the pot, or a trifling deficiency in the rat-crop or the dog-census." "Impudence!" muttered _that_ lady, who seemed to regard the "whopper" as a personal insult; but the majority of the company appeared to view the affair in a very different light and to be rather pleased than otherwise with the go-ahead fellow who could walk over verbal and physical bridges with the same charming recklessness. It may be anticipating to say that there was one among them, whose face had paled when he trod the log over the Flume, and who could not even laugh at the light words which she otherwise enjoyed,--so much deep and new and strange feeling lay at the bottom of the interest. And it may _not_ be anticipating, in the minds of any who have perused the late foregoing pages with due attention, to say that that silent, thoughtful, observing one was Clara Vanderlyn, between whom and the Illinoisan there yawned a gulf of circumstance and position so wide and deep that no one but a madman (or what is madder still--a mad _woman_) could possibly have dreamed of stepping over it. CHAPTER XIV.