Page:Burnett - Two Little Pilgrims' Progress A Story of the City Beautiful.djvu/153

Rh with speckled trout leaping, and deep, deep seas, where whales lay rocking far below, and porpoises rolled, and devil fish spread hideous far-reaching tentacles for prey.

Oh! What a day it was! What wonders they saw and hung over and dwelt on with passions of young delight! The great sea gave up its deeps to them, great forests and trackless jungles their wonderful growths; kings' palaces and queens' coffers their rarest treasures; the ages of long ago their relics and strange legends in stone and wood and brass and gold.

They did not know how often people turned or stopped to look at their two close leaning figures and vivid, dark, ecstatic-eyed faces. They certainly never chanced to see that one figure was often behind them at a safe distance, and seemed rather to have fallen into the habit of going where they went and listening to what they said. It was their Man curiously enough, and it was true that he was rather a gloomy looking man when one observed him well. His keen, business-like, well-cut face had a cloud resting upon it; he looked listless and unsmiling even in the palaces that most stirred the children's souls, and in fact it seemed to be their odd enthusiasm which had attracted him a little, because he was in the mood to feel none himself. He had been within hearing distance when