t, Peregrine," said Mamma.

We are all apt to speak inaccurately. Mamma did not mean that the
subject was a comical one, but that it was remarkable that the children
should have started it at dessert, when the grown-up people had been
discussing it at dinner.

They had not been talking about Robinson Crusoe's wave, but about the
loss of an Australian vessel, in sad circumstances which were in every
one's mouth. A few people only had been saved. They had spent many days
in an open boat in great suffering, and the particular question
discussed at dinner was, whether the captain of a certain vessel which
had passed without rescuing them had been so inhuman as to see and yet
to leave them.

"How could he help seeing them?" Mamma had indignantly asked. "It was
daylight, and of course somebody was on the deck, even if the captain
was still in bed. Don't talk to me, Peregrine! You would say black is
white for the sake of argument, especially if it was to defend somebody.
But little as I know about the sea, I know that it's flat."

"And that's flat!" interposed Papa.

"It's all very well making fun of me," Mamma had continued with
good-humoured vehemence, "but there were no Welsh hills and valleys to
block the view of castaway fellow-creatures not a mile off, and it was
daylight, and he _must_ have seen them."

"I'm not quite sure about the hills and valleys," Cousin Peregrine had
replied; "and hills of water are quite as troublesome to see through as
hills of earth."

At this moment the dining-room door had opened to admit the children,
Maggie coming first, and making her courtesy in the doorway, with the
old fat, brown-calf-bound _Robinson Crusoe_ under her arm. It opened
without the slightest difficulty at the picture of the big wave, and the
children appealed to Cousin Peregrine as has been related.

Maggie was a little taken aback by a decision which was in favour of her
brother's judgment. She was apt to think rather highly of her own, and
even now she pondered, and then put another question--

"But if the waves were so very, very big, Cousin, they would swallow up
the ships!"

"No, Maggie, not if the sailors manage their ship properly, and turn her
about so that she meets the wave in the right way. Then she rides over
it instead of being buried under it."

"It would be dreadful if they didn't!" said Maggie.

"I remember being in a ship that didn't meet one of these waves in the
right way," said Cousin Pere