90 TROTTY’S WEDDING TOUR.

are wild roses on it, and a water-rat; and the harbor throws
out a round, green arm, and loops it in, roses, rat, and all ;
and it is a very pleasant place; I hardly believe in the Ser-
pent myself when I get up here.

But it really was an August morning, in the year 1817,
and there really was a boy, and he came over after a real
cow, who had wandered off this way, over the grass and
through a little gate, — who knows but she saw the Great
Serpent first, after all? At any rate, here she was, and here
the rock was, and is, and here the boy was, when the water
just below my feet here stirred — it was a calm morning —
and rippled and grew brown.

“T declare!” said the boy, “ what a tremendous spar
And he called another boy. “ Let’s have it!”

“ All right,” said boy No. 2.

So they tried to stick it, and draw it in. But it behaved
curiously for a spar. In the first place it wriggled. In the
next place it did n’t. It had gone, vanished. It had pon-
derously squirmed and was not.

The boys did not draw it in. I think, on the whole, it was
just as well.

That spar stayed in the harbor a fortnight, and the poorest
fisherman on shore made no effort to draw it in to add to his
winter’s fuel.

The “ spar”? was seen by hundreds of people during its
visit to Gloucester, and “ten depositions,” says the “ His-
tory ” of this enterprising town, “‘ were given in, all of them

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