But what he did at home was nothing to the exploits
which Fred recounted of him in foreign lands.
I fancy Fred must have read some real accounts of South America, the
tropical forests, the wonderful birds and flowers, and the ruins of
those buried cities which have no history; and that on these real
marvels he built up his own romances of the Great Stone City, where
the captain encountered an awful race of giants with no legs, who
carved stones into ornaments with clasp-knives, as the Swiss cut out
pretty things in wood, and cracked the cocoa-nuts with their fingers.
I am sure he invented flowers as he went along when he was telling me
about the forests. He used to look round the garden (which would have
satisfied any one who had not seen or heard of what the captain had
come across) and say in his slow way, "The blue chalice flower was
about the shape of that magnolia, only twice as big, and just the
colour of the gentians in the border, and it had a great white tassel
hanging out like the cactus in the parlour window, and all the leaves
were yellow underneath; and it smelt like rosemary."
If the captain's experiences in other countries outshone what had
befallen him in his native land, both these paled before the wonders
he had seen, and the emergencies he had been placed in at sea.
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