“You are hired to dig, sir—­that is all.  We need your muscle, not your brains.  When we want your opinion on scientific matters, we will hasten to let you know.  Your coolness is intolerable, too—­loafing about here meddling with august matters of learning, when the other laborers are pitching camp.  Go along and help handle the baggage.”

The Tumble-Bug turned on his heel uncrushed, unabashed, observing to himself, “If it isn’t land tilted up, let me die the death of the unrighteous.”

Professor Bull Frog (nephew of the late explorer) said he believed the ridge was the wall that inclosed the earth.  He continued: 

“Our fathers have left us much learning, but they had not traveled far, and so we may count this a noble new discovery.  We are safe for renown now, even though our labors began and ended with this single achievement.  I wonder what this wall is built of?  Can it be fungus?  Fungus is an honorable good thing to build a wall of.”

Professor Snail adjusted his field-glass and examined the rampart critically.  Finally he said: 

“’The fact that it is not diaphanous convinces me that it is a dense vapor formed by the calorification of ascending moisture dephlogisticated by refraction.  A few endiometrical experiments would confirm this, but it is not necessary.  The thing is obvious.”

So he shut up his glass and went into his shell to make a note of the discovery of the world’s end, and the nature of it.

“Profound mind!” said Professor Angle-Worm to Professor Field-Mouse; “profound mind! nothing can long remain a mystery to that august brain.”

Night drew on apace, the sentinel crickets were posted, the Glow-Worm and Fire-Fly lamps were lighted, and the camp sank to silence and sleep.  After breakfast in the morning, the expedition moved on.  About noon a great avenue was reached, which had in it two endless parallel bars of some kind of hard black substance, raised the height of the tallest Bull Frog, above the general level.  The scientists climbed up on these and examined and tested them in various ways.  They walked along them for a great distance, but found no end and no break in them.  They could arrive at no decision.  There was nothing in the records of science that mentioned anything of this kind.  But at last the bald and venerable geographer, Professor Mud Turtle, a person who, born poor, and of a drudging low family, had, by his own native force raised himself to the headship of the geographers of his generation, said: 

“’My friends, we have indeed made a discovery here.  We have found in a palpable, compact, and imperishable state what the wisest of our fathers always regarded as a mere thing of the imagination.  Humble yourselves, my friends, for we stand in a majestic presence.  These are parallels of latitude!”

Every heart and every head was bowed, so awful, so sublime was the magnitude of the discovery.  Many shed tears.