up my science. I let myself get
rusty in it. I probably don't know so much more about it now than you
would. Oh, perhaps a little more. It would all come back to me if I took
it up again."

So I said that I had nothing to do for an hour or so, and if she would
not try to be scientific, but talk in her own homely words, I might
consent to listen; in this event she might tell the whole thing, omitting
nothing, however trifling it might seem to her, because she was no proper
judge of values. I said it was true I might be overtaken by sleep, since
my day had been a hard one, reaching clear to the trout pool under the
big falls and involving the transportation back to seventeen rainbow
trout weighing well over seventeen pounds, more or less, though feeling
much like more. And what about Oswald and the primeval ooze, and so
forth. And would it be important if true? The lady said--well, yes, and
no; but, however--

He's Professor Marwich up at the university--this confirmed old coroner
I'm telling you about. Has a train of capital letters streaming along
after he's all through with his name. I don't know what they mean--doctor
of dental surgery, I guess, or zoology or fractions or geography, or
whatever has to do with rocks and animals and vertebraes. He ain't a bad
old scout out of business hours. He pirooted round here one autumn about
a dozen years ago and always threatened to come back and hold some more
of these here inquests on the long departed; but I heard nothing until
two summers ago. He wrote that he wanted to come up to do field work.
That's the innocent name he calls his foul trade by. And he wanted to
bring his assistant, Professor Pennypacker; and could I put them up?

I said if they would wait till haying was over I could and would. He
answered they would wait till my hay was garnered--that's the pretty word
he used--and could he also bring his mouthless chit with him? I didn't
quite make him. He writes a hand that would never get by in a business
college. I thought it might be something tame he carried in a cage, and
would stay quiet all day while he was out pursuing his repulsive
practices. It didn't sound troublesome.

I never made a worse guess. It was his daughter he talked about that
way. She was all right enough, though astounding when you had expected
something highly zoological and mouthless instead of motherless. She was
a tall roan girl with the fashionable streamline body, devoted to the
ukulel