d they were covered
with what looked like tow. In fact, so coarse was their shaggy hair
that they looked as if they were dressed in door-mats; and when they
stood still and shook themselves, such clouds of dust flew out that,
as it swept over the river, it almost stifled Jack and Mopsa.

"Odious!" exclaimed Jack, sneezing. "What terrible creatures these
are!"

"Well," answered Mopsa, at the other end of the boat (but he could
hardly see her for the dust), "then why do you dream of them?"

Jack had just decided to dream of something else, when, with a noise
greater than fifty trumpets, the elephants, having shaken out all the
dust, came thundering down to the water to bathe in the liquid mud.
They shook the whole country as they plunged; but that was not all.
The awful river-horses rose up, and, with shrill screams, fell upon
them, and gave them battle; while up from every rill peeped above the
rushes frogs as large as oxen, and with blue and green eyes that
gleamed like the eyes of cats.

The frogs croaking, and the shrill trumpeting of the elephants,
together with the cries of the river-horses, as all these creatures
fought with horn and tusk, and fell on one another, lashing the water
into whirlpools, among which the boat danced up and down like a
cork,--the blinding spray, and the flapping about of great bats over
the boat and in it,--so confused Jack, that Mopsa had spoken to him
several times before he answered.

"O Jack!" she said, at last; "if you can't dream any better, I must
call the Craken."

"Very well," said Jack. "I'm almost wrapped up and smothered in bats'
wings, so call anything you please."

Thereupon Mopsa whistled softly, and in a minute or two he saw, almost
spanning the river, a hundred yards off, a thing like a rainbow, or a
slender bridge, or still more, like one ring or coil of an enormous
serpent; and presently the creature's head shot up like a fountain,
close to the boat, almost as high as a ship's mast. It was the Craken;
and when Mopsa saw it, she began to cry, and said, "We are caught in
this crowd of creatures, and we cannot get away from the land of
dreams. Do help us, Craken!"

Some of the bats that hung to the edges of the boat had wings as large
as sails; and the first thing the Craken did was to stoop its lithe
neck, pick two or three of them off, and eat them.

"You can swim your boat home under my coils where the water is calm,"
the Craken said, "for she is so extremely