influence to the
side of _The Lyre_." _Chapter II._]

"He was," sighed Munchausen. "He landed on the deck and by sheer force
of his weight the yacht went down under him. I swam ashore and the
whole crew with me. The next day Mr. Whale floated in strangled. He'd
swallowed the thousand yards of line and it got so tangled in his
tonsils that it choked him to death. Come around next week and I'll
give you a couple of pounds of whalebone for Mrs. Ananias, and all the
oil you can carry."

I thanked the old gentleman for his kind offer and promised to avail
myself of it, although as a newspaper man it is against my principles
to accept gifts from public men.

"It was great luck, Baron," said I. "Or at least it would have been if
you hadn't lost your yacht."

"That was great luck too," he observed nonchalantly. "It cost me ten
thousand dollars a month keeping that yacht in commission. Now she's
gone I save all that. Why it's like finding money in the street,
Ananias. She wasn't worth more than fifty thousand dollars, and in six
months I'll be ten thousand ahead."

I could not but admire the cheerful philosophy of the man, but then I
was not surprised. Munchausen was never the sort of man to let little
things worry him.

"But that whale business wasn't a circumstance to my catch of three
tons of trout with a single cast of a horse-whip in the Blue Hills,"
said the Baron after a few moments of meditation, during which I could
see that he was carefully marshalling his facts.

"I never heard of its equal," said I. "You must have used a derrick."

"No," he replied suavely. "Nothing of the sort. It was the simplest
thing in the world. It was along about five o'clock in the afternoon
when with my three guides and my valet I drove up the winding roadway
of Great Sulphur Mountain on my way to the Blue Mountain House where I
purposed to put up for a few days. I had one of those big mountain
wagons with a covered top to it such as the pioneers used on the
American plains, with six fine horses to the fore. I held the reins
myself, since we were in the midst of a terrific thunderstorm and I
felt safer when I did my own driving. All the flaps of the leathern
cover were let down at the sides and at the back, and were securely
fastened. The roads were unusually heavy, and when we came to the last
great hill before the lake all but I were walking, as a measure of
relief to the horses. Suddenly one of the horses balked right in the
mi