ary
caress. Oswald looked too insufferably complacent. It was the look to be
forgiven a man only when he wears it in the presence of his first-born.
If snapshots tell anything at all, these told that Oswald was the father
of a mammoth sauropod and had merely dug up the baby in a fossil bed
somewhere.

"That's where the man's heart really lies," said his stern critic,
"even if he does drivel about his little flower with bones and a voice!
Probably by now he's wishing the voice had been left out of his little
flower." Impressively she planted a rigid forefinger on the print of the
mounted skeleton.

"That there," she glibly rattled off, "is the organic remains of a
three-toed woolly bronsolumphicus of the carboniferous limestone, or
Upper Silurian trilobite period. I believe I have the name correct.
It was dug up out of a dry lake in Wyoming that years ago got to be
mere loblolly, so that this unfortunate critter bogged down in it. The
poor thing passed on about six million or four hundred million years
ago--somewhere along there. Oswald and his new father-in-law dug it
from its quiet resting place in the old cemetery. Such is their
thrilling work in life.

"This father-in-law is just an old body snatcher that snoops round
robbing the graves of antiquity and setting up his loot in their museum
at the university. No good telling that old ghoul to let the dead rest.
He simply won't hear of it. He wants remains. He wants to have 'em out
in the light of day and stick labels on their long-peaceful skulls. He
don't act subdued or proper about it either, or kind of buttery sad, like
a first-class undertaker. He's gleeful. Let him find the skeleton of
something as big as a freight car, that perished far in the dead past,
and he's as tickled as a kid shooting at little sister with his new air
gun.

"Bones in his weakness--and periods of geology. He likes period bones
the way some folks like period furniture; and rocks and geography and
Lower Triassics, and so forth. He knows how old the earth is within a
few hundred million years; how the scantling and joists for it was put
together, and all the different kinds of teeth that wild animals have.
He's a scientist. Oswald is a scientist. I was a scientist myself two
summers ago when they was up here.

"By the time they left I could talk a lot of attractive words. I could
speak whole sentences so good that I could hardly understand myself. Of
course after they left I didn't keep