Page:I Know a Secret (1927).pdf/115

 look very large on a map of the world, though it is almost always marked. But the place you live in, wherever it is, is always big enough to begin your geography with. Escargot was very fond of pencil-and-paper games, and also very anxious to learn about America; so they used to get out the atlas and have great fun moving Long Island round the map. They discovered, for instance, that if you turn the Island around, and put its nose at the lower end of New York City (at the Aquarium, where a fish's nose would feel quite at home) it would stretch up the Hudson River almost to Albany. And then, going on, they would use Long Island as a kind of measuring stick, and travel across the country. Put Long Island's nose at Albany, then it reaches most of the way to Syracuse. And from Syracuse nearly to Buffalo; and from Buffalo to Ashtabula; from Ashtabula to Sandusky, from Sandusky to Fort Wayne. I am pleased to have it reach so exactly to Fort Wayne, because I had a very good roast-beef sandwich in the railroad station there, late one night, when I was tired and hungry.

When they discovered, in this game of pushing Long Island round the map, that it was about as