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Updated: June 28, 2025
But that day one of the tired water-babies went so sound asleep that he didn't paddle enough, and the wind played a joke on him by shoving him along to the snaggy edge of the cove and bumping him against a log. That was a surprise, and he woke with a start and swam quickly back to the middle of the cove, where the other Olair was resting in the open water.
And about this time there happened to Tom a very strange and important adventure so important, indeed, that he was very near never finding the water-babies at all; and I am sure you would have been sorry for that. I hope that you have not forgotten the little white lady all this while. At least, here she comes, looking like a clean white good little darling, as she always was, and always will be.
The old Greeks, heathens as they were, saw as much as that two thousand years ago; and I care very little for Cousin Cramchild, if he sees even less than they. And so forth, and so forth, till he is quite cross. And then tell him that if there are no water-babies, at least there ought to be; and that, at least, he cannot answer.
Time went on, and he was regarded as dead. On a certain 1st of May the sweeps arrived to clean Mrs. Montagu's chimneys, and a climbing-boy was sent up to his horrible task. Like Tom in the Water-Babies, he lost his way in the network of flues and emerged in a different room to the one he had started from.
Reminded in 1862 of a promise he had made that "Rose, Maurice, and Mary have got their books, the baby must have his," Kingsley produced the story about little Tom, which forms the first chapter in "The Water-Babies," a fairy tale occupying a nook of its own in the literature of fantasy for children.
And then he left the buoy, and used to go along the sands and round the rocks, and come out in the night like the forsaken Merman in Mr. Arnold's beautiful, beautiful poem, which you must learn by heart some day and sit upon a point of rock, among the shining sea-weeds, in the low October tides, and cry and call for the water-babies; but he never heard a voice call in return.
What has been once can never come over again. And people can be little babies, even water-babies, only once in their lives. Besides, people who make up their minds to go and see the world, as Tom did, must needs find it a weary journey. Lucky for them if they do not lose heart and stop half-way, instead of going on bravely to the end as Tom did.
While those who could get nowhere else sat down on the sand, and cuddled her feet for no one, you know, wear shoes in the water, except horrid old bathing-women, who are afraid of the water-babies pinching their horny toes. And Tom stood staring at them; for he could not understand what it was all about. "And who are you, you little darling?" she said.
"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."
"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.
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