A Series of Unfortunate Events Book 1 | Page 2

alligator from
a crocodile. He knew who killed Julius Caesar. And he knew much about
the tiny, slimy animals found at Briny Beach, which he was examining
now. Sunny
Baudelaire, the youngest, liked to bite things. She was an infant,
and very small for her age, scarcely larger than a boot. What she
lacked in size, however, she made up for with the size and sharpness
of her four teeth. Sunny was at an age where one mostly speaks
in a series of unintelligible shrieks. Except when she used the few
actual words in her vocabulary, like “bottle,” “mommy,” and “bite,” most
people had trouble understanding what it was that Sunny was saying.
For instance, this morning she was saying “Gack!” over and over,
which probably meant, “Look at that mysterious figure emerging from
the fog!” Sure
enough, in the distance along the misty shore of Briny Beach there
could be seen a tall figure striding toward the Baudelaire children.
Sunny had already been staring and shrieking at the figure for
some time when Klaus looked up from the spiny crab he was examining,
and saw it too. He reached over and touched Violet's arm, bringing
her out of her inventing thoughts. “Look
at that,” Klaus said, and pointed toward the figure. It was

drawing
closer, and the children could see a few details. It was about the
size of an adult, except its head was tall, and rather square. “What
do you think it is?” Violet asked. “I
don't know,” Klaus said, squinting at it, “but it seems to be moving right
toward us.” “We're
alone on the beach,” Violet said, a little nervously. “There's nobody
else it could be moving toward.” She felt the slender, smooth stone
in her left hand, which she had been about to try to skip as far as
she could. She had a sudden thought to throw it at the figure, because
it seemed so frightening. “It
only seems scary,” Klaus said, as if reading his sister's thoughts, “because
of all the mist.” This
was true. As the figure reached them, the children saw with relief that
it was not anybody frightening at all, but somebody they knew: Mr.
Poe. Mr. Poe was a friend of Mr. and Mrs. Baudelaire's whom the children
had met many times at dinner parties. One of the things Violet,
Klaus, and Sunny really liked about their parents was that they didn't
send their children away when they had company over, but allowed
them to join the adults at the dinner table and participate in the
conversation as long as they helped clear the table. The children remembered
Mr. Poe because he always had a cold and was constantly excusing
himself from the table to have a fit of coughing in the next room.
Mr.
Poe took off his top hat, which had made his head look large and square
in the fog, and stood for a moment, coughing loudly into a white
handkerchief. Violet and Klaus moved forward to shake his hand and
say how do you do. “How
do you do?” said Violet. “How
do you do?” said Klaus. “Odo
yow!” said Sunny. “Fine,
thank you,” said Mr. Poe, but he looked very sad. For a few seconds
nobody said anything, and the children