"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 cyclopædias, 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."
"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, and with a howl of despair he rushed back into the sea." _Chapter X._]
The Twins had been on the lookout for the Baron for at least an hour, and still he did not come, and the little Imps were beginning to feel blue over the prospect of getting the usual Sunday afternoon story. It was past four o'clock, and for as long a time as they could remember the Baron had never failed to arrive by three o'clock. All sorts of dreadful possibilities came up before their mind's eye. They pictured the Baron in accidents of many sorts. They conjured up visions of him lying wounded beneath the ruins of an apartment house, or something else equally heavy that might have fallen upon him on his way from his rooms to the station, but that he was more than wounded they did not believe, for they knew that the Baron was not the sort of man to be killed by anything killing under the sun.