ar above
her station to one of Oswald's serious magnitude.

I never have made out what she saw in him. But then we never do. She
used to kid about him--and kid him, for that matter. She'd say to me:
"He does care frightfully about himself, doesn't he?" And she said to
me and said to him that he had mice in his wainscoting. Mice or rats,
I forget which. Any wise bookmaker would of posted her up in this race
as a hundred-to-one shot. She had plenty of blandishment for Oswald, but
not his kind. She'd try to lure him with furtive femininity and plaintive
melodies when she ought to have been putting on a feverish interest in
organic fauna. Oswald generally looked through or past her. He give a
whole lot more worry to whether his fountain pen would clog up on him.
They was both set in their ways, and they was different ways; it looked
to me like they never could meet. They was like a couple of trained seals
that have learned two different lines of tricks.

Of course Oswald was sunk at last, sunk by a chance shot; and there
was no doubt about his being destroyed, quantities of oil marking the
surface where he went down. But it seemed like pure chance. Yet, if you
believe Oswald and scientific diagnosis, he'd been up against it since
the world was first started, twenty million or five hundred million years
ago--I don't really know how many; but what's a few million years between
scientists? I don't know that I really care. It's never kept me wakeful
a night yet. I'd sooner know how to get eighty-five per cent. of calves.

Anyway, it was Oswald's grand new wardrobe trunk that had been
predestined from the world's beginning to set him talkative about his
little flower with bones and a voice; this same new wardrobe trunk that
was the pride of his barren life and his one real worry because he
might sometime lose the keys to it.

It's an affecting tale. It begun the night Oswald wanted the extra table
put in his room. They'd come in that day with a good haul of the oldest
inhabitants round here that had passed to their long rest three million
years ago--petrified fishworms and potato bugs, and so forth, and rocks
with bird tracks on 'em. Oswald was as near human as I'd seen him, on
account of having found a stone caterpillar or something--I know it had
a name longer than it was; it seemed to be one like no one else had, and
would therefore get him talked about, even if it had passed away three
million years before the Oregon Shor