makes itself green, young man,' and then he
turned from him with a fling.

"The doctor laughed, and came forward among the men, and began to tell
us stories and ask questions. Ah! he was a real hearty fellow; he
would tell you all kinds of queer things, and would pump you dry of all
you knew in no time. Well, but the thing I was going to tell you was
this. One of the men said to him he had heard that the greenness of
the Greenland Sea was caused by the little things like small bits of
jelly on which the whales feed. As soon as he heard this he got a
bucket and hauled some sea-water aboard, and for the next ten days he
was never done working away with the sea-water; pouring it into
tumblers and glasses; looking through it by daylight and by lamplight;
tasting it, and boiling it, and examining it with a microscope."

"What's a microscope?" enquired one of the men.

"Don't you know?" said Tom Lokins, "why, it's a glass that makes little
things seem big, when ye look through it. I've heerd that say beasts
that are so uncommon small you that can't see them at all are made to
come into sight and look quite big by means o' this glass. But I can't
myself say that it's true."

"But I can," said Fred, "for I have seen it with my own eyes. Well,
after a good while, I made bold to ask the young doctor what he had
found out.

"'I've found,' said he, 'that the greenness of these seas is in truth
caused by uncountable numbers of medusae----'"

"Ha! that's the word," shouted Tom Lokins, "Medoosy, that's wot the
captain calls 'em. Heave ahead, Fred."

"Well then," continued Fred, "the young doctor went on to tell me that
he had been counting the matter to himself very carefully, and he found
that in every square mile of sea-water there were living about eleven
quadrillions, nine hundred and ninety-nine trillions of these little
creatures!"

"Oh! hallo! come now!" we all cried, opening our eyes very wide indeed.

"But, I say, how much is that?" enquired Tom Lokins.

"Ah! that's just what I said to the young doctor, and he said to me,
'I'll tell you what, Fred Borders, no man alive understands how much
that is, and what's more, no man ever will; but I'll give you _some
notion_ of what it means'; and so he told me how long it would take
forty thousand men to count that number of eleven quadrillions, nine
hundred and ninety-nine trillions, each man of the forty thousand
beginning 'one ', 'two', 'three', and going on till