With his teeth he could have ground me to
atoms at one bite. Without them he was as powerless as a bowl of
currant jelly, and when he opened his huge jaws, as he supposed to
bite me in two, he was the most surprised looking fish you ever saw on
land or sea to discover that the effect his jaws had upon my safety
was about as great as had they been nothing but two feather bed
mattresses."

"You must have been badly frightened, though," said Ananias.

"No," said the Baron. "I laughed in the poor disappointed thing's
face, and with a howl of despair, he rushed back into the sea again. I
made the best time I could back to the yacht for fear he might return
with assistance."

"And didn't you ever see him again, Baron?" asked Sapphira.

"Yes, but only from the deck of the yacht as we were weighing anchor,"
said Mr. Munchausen. "I saw him and a dozen others like him doing
precisely what I thought they would do, going ashore to search me out
so as to have a little cold Munch for dinner. I'm glad they were
disappointed, aren't you?"

"Yes, indeed," said Ananias and Sapphira, but not warmly.

Ananias was silent for a moment, and then walking over to one of the
bookcases, he returned in a moment, bringing with him a huge atlas.

"Where are the Amphibian Islands, Mr. Munchausen?" he said, opening
the book. "Show them to me on the map. I'd like to print the map with
my story."

"Oh, I can't do that," said the Baron, "because they aren't on the map
any more. When I got back to Europe and told the map-makers about the
dangers to man on those islands, they said that the interests of
humanity demanded that they be lost. So they took them out of all the
geographies, and all the cyclopaedias, and all the other books, so that
nobody ever again should be tempted to go there; and there isn't a
school-teacher or a sailor in the world to-day who could tell you
where they are."

"But, you know, don't you?" persisted Ananias.

"Well, I did," said the Baron; "but, really I have had to remember so
many other things that I have forgotten that. All that I know is that
they were named from the fact that they were infested by Amphibious
animals, which are animals that can live on land as well as on water."

"How strange!" said Sapphira.

"It's just too queer for anything," said Ananias, "but on the whole
I'm not surprised."

And the Baron said he was glad to hear it.

[Illustration: "I laughed in the poor disappointed thing's face, an