Page:An Old English Home and Its Dependencies.djvu/281

Rh weir of the river, where the water was running over, 'with his mouth open.' The man did as he was told, and open-mouthed and expectant placed himself by the side of the weir. "The lizard inside, tormented by the salt food, and parched for want of water, heard the sound of the running stream, and came scampering up the man's throat, and jumping out of his mouth, ran down to the water to drink. The sudden appearance of the brute so terrified the weakened patient that he fainted away, still with his mouth open. In the meantime the lizard had drunk his full, and was coming back to return down the man's throat into his stomach; he had nearly succeeded in so doing when the patient awoke, and seizing his enemy by the tail, killed him on the spot." And Frank Buckland remarks thereupon, "I consider this story to be one of the finest strings of impossibilities ever recorded." But such stories are told to this day, and believed in implicitly. What imagination will do I can show from my own experience. When a boy, in the Pyrenees, I once drank from a spring, and