arties, or anything like that. It had proved to be a wine of almost
a too-recent _cru_. Ma Pettengill said that if Uncle Henry was aiming
to put it on the market in quantity production he had ought to name
it the Stingaree brand, because it was sure some stuff, making for
malevolence even to the lengths of matricide, if that's what killing
your mother is called. She said, even at a Polish wedding down across
the tracks of a big city, it would have the ambulances and patrol
wagons clanging up a good half hour quicker than usual.

Be that as it may, or is, when I had expected sleep to steal swiftly
to the mending of the day's ravages I merely found myself wakeful and
wondering. This stuff of Uncle Henry's is an able ferment. I wondered
about a lot of things. And at the same time I wondered interminably about
that remarkable boulder at the side of the Tom Thumb Grand Canon. I was
even wakeful enough and discursive enough--my hostess had taken but one
glass from the bottle--to wonder delightedly about all rocks and stones,
and geology, and that sort of thing. It was almost scientific, the way
I wondered, as I sat there idly toying with my half-filled glass.

Take this particular boulder, for example. It had once been mere star
dust, hadn't it? Some time ago, I mean, or thereabouts. But it had been
star dust; and then, next thing it knew, it got to be a kind of cosmic
stew, such as leisurely foreigners patch out highways with, and looking
no more like a granite boulder than anything.

Then something happened, like someone letting the furnace fire go out the
night of the big freeze; and this stuff I'm talking about grew cold and
discouraged, and quit flat, apparently not caring a hoot what shape it
would be found in years and years later, the result being that it was
found merely in the general shape of rocks or boulders--to use the more
scientific term--which is practically no shape at all, as you might say,
being quite any shape that happens, or the shape of rocks and boulders
as they may be seen on almost every hand by those of us who have learned
to see in the true sense of the word.

I have had to be brief in this shorter science course on the earth's
history before the time of man, because more important matters claim my
attention and other speakers are waiting. The point is that this boulder
up there by the dwarf canon had survived from unremembered chaos; had
been melted, stewed, baked, and chilled until it had no m