es, making a hollow sound. Echoes
multiplied the sound until the air was full of hollow mutterings,
like the smothered reports of very distant guns. Kalliope led on.
To her the way was familiar. The dim light and hollow noises were
commonplace. At last she stopped and with a little cry pointed
forward.

The Queen looked. Her eyes were well accustomed now to the dim light.
She saw.

There in the depths of the mysterious cavern, it would not have
surprised the girl to see strange things. She would scarcely have been
astonished if Kalliope had pointed to a group of mermaids combing damp
hair with long curved shells. Old Triton with his wreathed horn would
have been in place, almost an expected vision, if he had sat on a
throne of rock, sea carved, with panting dolphins at his feet. The
Queen saw no such beings. What she did see called from her a little
cry of surprise, made her cling suddenly to Kalliope's arm.

"Oh!" she said. "Oh, Kalliope, what are they?"

"Damn boxes," said Kalliope.

Before the eyes of the Queen, stretching along the back of the cave,
was a long row of large galvanized iron tanks, strongly made, with
heavily studded seams, each with a great copper tap. They were ranged
in a most orderly line, like some grey monsters carefully drilled.
They were all exactly the same width, the same height, and the copper
spouts exactly matched each other.

"Damned boxes," said Kalliope cheerfully.

Any one looking at them might almost have agreed with her. They were
not precisely boxes. They were cisterns, tanks, but they gave the
impression of being damnable and damned.

"But," said the Queen, "what are they for? What's the meaning of
them? How did they get here? Who brought them?"

Kalliope did not understand the questions, but guessed at what her
mistress asked. She had been learning English for three days only. She
had been quick to pick up certain words from the Queen, words in
frequent use between them. But in face of questionings like these the
vocabulary of millinery and hair dressing failed her hopelessly. She
fell back on what she had picked up from the sailors' lips and from
her brothers who were already enriching the island language with
English slang.

"Blighters," she said, "mucky ship--go row, go row--damn boxes."

In spite of the pale light and the sinister mystery of the tanks
in front of her the Queen laughed aloud. The pursuing echoes
made Kalliope's English irresistibly absurd. Then s