The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby
Now among the lot was a little groom-boy, a very little groom indeed;
and he was the same who had ridden up the court, and told Tom to come to
the Hall; and he said--
"Twenty pounds or none, I will go down over Lewthwaite Crag, if it's
only for the poor boy's sake. For he was as civil a spoken little chap
as ever climbed a flue."
So down over Lewthwaite Crag he went: a very smart groom he was at the
top, and a very shabby one at the bottom; for he tore his gaiters, and
he tore his breeches, and he tore his jacket, and he burst his braces,
and he burst his boots, and he lost his hat, and what was worst of all,
he lost his shirt pin, which he prized very much, for it was gold, and
he had won it in a raffle at Malton, and there was a figure at the top
of it, of t'ould mare, noble old Beeswing herself, as natural as life;
so it was a really severe loss: but he never saw anything of Tom.
And all the while Sir John and the rest were riding round, full three
miles to the right, and back again, to get into Vendale, and to the foot
of the crag.
When they came to the old dame's school, all the children came out to
see. And the old dame came out too; and when she saw Sir John, she
curtsied very low, for she was a tenant of his.
"Well, dame, and how are you?" said Sir John.
"Blessings on you as broad as your back, Harthover," says she--she
didn't call him Sir John, but only Harthover, for that is the fashion in
the North country--"and welcome into Vendale: but you're no hunting the
fox this time of the year?"
"I am hunting, and strange game too," said he.
"Blessings on your heart, and what makes you look so sad the morn?"
"I'm looking for a lost child, a chimney-sweep, that is run away."
"Oh, Harthover, Harthover," says she, "ye were always a just man and a
merciful; and ye'll no harm the poor little lad if I give you tidings of
him?"
"Not I, not I, dame. I'm afraid we hunted him out of the house all on a
miserable mistake, and the hound has brought him to the top of
Lewthwaite Crag, and----"
Whereat the old dame broke out crying, without letting him finish his
story.
"So he told me the truth after all, poor little dear! Ah, first
thoughts are best, and a body's heart'll guide them right, if they will
but hearken to it." And then she told Sir John all.
"Bring the dog here, and lay him on," said Sir John, without another
word, and he set his teeth very hard.
And the dog opened at once; and went away at the back of the cottage,
over the road, and over the meadow, and through a bit of alder copse;
and there, upon an alder stump, they saw Tom's clothes lying. And then
they knew as much about it all as there was any need to know.
And Tom?
Ah, now comes the most wonderful part of this wonderful story. Tom, when
he woke, for of course he woke--children always wake after they have
slept exactly as long as is good for them--found himself swimming about
in the stream, being about four inches, or--that I may be
accurate--3.87902 inches long, and having round the parotid region of
his fauces a set of external gills (I hope you understand all the big
words) just like those of a sucking eft, which he mistook for a lace
frill, till he pulled at them, found he hurt himself, and made up his
mind that they were part of himself, and best left alone.
In fact, the fairies had turned him into a water-baby.
A water-baby? You never heard of a water-baby. Perhaps not. That is the
very reason why this story was written. There are a great many things in
the world which you never heard of; and a great many more which nobody
ever heard of; and a great many things, too, which nobody will ever hear
of, at least until the coming of the Cocqcigrues, when man shall be the
measure of all things.
"But there are no such things as water-babies."
How do you know that? Have you been there to see? And if you had been
there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there were
none. If Mr. Garth does not find a fox in Eversley Wood--as folks
sometimes fear he never will--that does not prove that there are no such
things as foxes. And as is Eversley Wood to all the woods in England, so
are the waters we know to all the waters in the world. And no one has a
right to say that no water-babies exist, till they have seen no
water-babies existing; which is quite a different thing, mind, from not
seeing water-babies; and a thing which nobody ever did, or perhaps ever
will do.
"But surely if there were water-babies, somebody would have caught one
at least?"
Well. How do you know that somebody has not?
"But they would have put it into spirits, or into the _Illustrated
News_, or perhaps cut it into two halves, poor dear little thing, and
sent one to Professor Owen, and one to Professor Huxley, to see what
they would each say about it."
Ah, my dear little man! that does not follow at all, as you will see
before the end of the story.
"But a water-baby is contrary to nature."
Well, but, my dear little man, you must learn to talk about such things,
when you grow older, in a very different way from that. You must not
talk about "ain't" and "can't" when you speak of this great wonderful
world round you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest
corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking
up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean.
You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to
nature. You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody
knows; not even Sir Roderick Murchison, or Professor Owen, or Professor
Sedgwick, or Professor Huxley, or Mr. Darwin, or Professor Faraday, or
Mr. Grove, or any other of the great men whom good boys are taught to
respect. They are very wise men; and you must listen respectfully to all
they say: but even if they should say, which I am sure they never would,
"That cannot exist. That is contrary to nature," you must wait a little,
and see; for perhaps even they may be wrong. It is only children who
read Aunt Agitate's Arguments, or Cousin Cramchild's Conversations; or
lads who go to popular lectures, and see a man pointing at a few big
ugly pictures on the wall, or making nasty smells with bottles and
squirts, for an hour or two, and calling that anatomy or chemistry--who
talk about "cannot exist," and "contrary to nature." Wise men are afraid
to say that there is anything contrary to nature, except what is
contrary to mathematical truth; for two and two cannot make five, and
two straight lines cannot join twice, and a part cannot be as great as
the whole, and so on (at least, so it seems at present): but the wiser
men are, the less they talk about "cannot." That is a very rash,
dangerous word, that "cannot"; and if people use it too often, the Queen
of all the Fairies, who makes the clouds thunder and the fleas bite, and
takes just as much trouble about one as about the other, is apt to
astonish them suddenly by showing them, that though they say she cannot,
yet she can, and what is more, will, whether they approve or not.
And therefore it is, that there are dozens and hundreds of things in the
world which we should certainly have said were contrary to nature, if we
did not see them going on under our eyes all day long. If people had
never seen little seeds grow into great plants and trees, of quite
different shape from themselves, and these trees again produce fresh
seeds, to grow into fresh trees, they would have said, "The thing cannot
be; it is contrary to nature." And they would have been quite as right
in saying so, as in saying that most other things cannot be.
Or suppose again, that you had come, like M. Du Chaillu, a traveller
from unknown parts; and that no human being had ever seen or heard of an
elephant. And suppose that you described him to people, and said, "This
is the shape, and plan, and anatomy of the beast, and of his feet, and
of his trunk, and of his grinders, and of his tusks, though they are
not tusks at all, but two fore teeth run mad; and this is the section of
his skull, more like a mushroom than a reasonable skull of a reasonable
or unreasonable beast; and so forth, and so forth; and though the beast
(which I assure you I have seen and shot) is first cousin to the little
hairy coney of Scripture, second cousin to a pig, and (I suspect)
thirteenth or fourteenth cousin to a rabbit, yet he is the wisest of all
beasts, and can do everything save read, write, and cast accounts."
People would surely have said, "Nonsense; your elephant is contrary to
nature"; and have thought you were telling stories--as the French
thought of Le Vaillant when he came back to Paris and said that he had
shot a giraffe; and as the king of the Cannibal Islands thought of the
English sailor, when he said that in his country water turned to marble,
and rain fell as feathers. They would tell you, the more they knew of
science, "Your elephant is an impossible monster, contrary to the laws
of comparative anatomy, as far as yet known." To which you would answer
the less, the more you thought.
Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years,
that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know
that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world?
People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are
ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying
dragons could exist.
The truth is, that folks' fancy that such and such things cannot be,
simply because they have not seen them, is worth no more than a savage's
fancy that there cannot be such a thing as a locomotive, because he
never saw one running wild in the forest. Wise men know that their
business is to examine what is, and not to settle what is not. They know
that there are elephants; they know that there have been flying dragons;
and the wiser they are, the less inclined they will be to say positively
that there are no water-babies.
No water-babies, indeed? Why, wise men of old said that everything on
earth had its double in the water; and you may see that that is, if not
quite true, still quite as true as most other theories which you are
likely to hear for many a day. There are land-babies--then why not
water-babies? _Are there not water-rats, water-flies, water-crickets,
water-crabs, water-tortoises, water-scorpions, water-tigers and
water-hogs, water-cats and water-dogs, sea-lions and sea-bears,
sea-horses and sea-elephants, sea-mice and sea-urchins, sea-razors and
sea-pens, sea-combs and sea-fans; and of plants, are there not
water-grass, and water-crowfoot, water-milfoil, and so on, without end?_
"But all these things are only nicknames; the water things are not
really akin to the land things."
That's not always true. They are, in millions of cases, not only of the
same family, but actually the same individual creatures. Do not even you
know that a green drake, and an alder-fly, and a dragon-fly, live under
water till they change their skins, just as Tom changed his? And if a
water animal can continually change into a land animal, why should not
a land animal sometimes change into a water animal? Don't be put down by
any of Cousin Cramchild's arguments, but stand up to him like a man, and
answer him (quite respectfully, of course) thus:--
If Cousin Cramchild says, that if there are water-babies, they must grow
into water-men, ask him how he knows that they do not? and then, how he
knows that they must, any more than the Proteus of the Adelsberg caverns
grows into a perfect newt.
If he says that it is too strange a transformation for a land-baby to
turn into a water-baby, ask him if he ever heard of the transformation
of Syllis, or the Distomas, or the common jelly-fish, of which M.