Page:Sketches by Mark Twain.djvu/92

90 it was received with enormous eclat and escorted to its future abiding-place by thousands of enthusiastic citizens, King Bullfrog XVI, himself attending and condescending to sit enthroned upon it throughout the progress.

The growing rigour of the weather was now admonishing the scientists to close their labours for the present, so they made preparations to journey homeward. But even their last day among the Caverns bore fruit; for one of the scholars found in an out-of-the-way corner of the Museum or "Burial-Place" a most strange and extraordinary thing. It was nothing less than a double Man-Bird lashed together breast to breast by a natural ligament, and labelled with the untranslatable words, "Siamese Twins." The official report concerning this thing closed thus:

"Wherefore it appears that there were in old times two distinct species of this majestic fowl, the one being single and the other double. Nature has a reason for all things. It is plain to the eye of science that the Double-Man originally inhabited a region where dangers abounded; hence he was paired together to the end that while one part slept the other might watch; and likewise that danger being discovered, there might always be a double instead of a single power to oppose it. All honour to the mystery-dispelling eye of godlike science!"

And near the Double Man-Bird was found what was plainly an ancient record of his, marked upon numberless sheets of a thin white substance and bound together. Almost the first glance that Professor Woodlouse threw into it revealed this following sentence, which he instantly