ic bachelors, I modestly
sat down beside the rough young man, although there was more room
beside the younger lady. "Some lazy loafer reading a penny dreadful,"
I thought, glancing at him, then at the title of his book. Hearing me
beside him, he turned around and blinked over his shabby shoulder, and
the movement uncovered the page he had been silently conning. The
volume in his hands was Darwin's famous monograph on the monodactyl.

He noticed the astonishment on my face and smiled uneasily, shifting
the short clay pipe in his mouth.

"I guess," he observed, "that this here book is too much for me,
mister."

"It's rather technical," I replied, smiling.

"Yes," he said, in vague admiration; "it's fierce, ain't it?"

After a silence I asked him if he would tell me why he had chosen
Darwin as a literary pastime.

"Well," he said, placidly, "I was tryin' to read about annermals, but
I'm up against a word-slinger this time all right. Now here's a
gum-twister," and he painfully spelled out m-o-n-o-d-a-c-t-y-l,
breathing hard all the while.

"Monodactyl," I said, "means a single-toed creature."

He turned the page with alacrity. "Is that the beast he's talkin'
about?" he asked.

The illustration he pointed out was a wood-cut representing Darwin's
reconstruction of the dingue from the fossil bones in the British
Museum. It was a well-executed wood-cut, showing a dingue in the
foreground and, to give scale, a mammoth in the middle distance.

"Yes," I replied, "that is the dingue."

"I've seen one," he observed, calmly.

I smiled and explained that the dingue had been extinct for some
thousands of years.

"Oh, I guess not," he replied, with cool optimism. Then he placed a
grimy forefinger on the mammoth.

"I've seen them things, too," he remarked.

Again I patiently pointed out his error, and suggested that he
referred to the elephant.

"Elephant be blowed!" he replied, scornfully. "I guess I know what I
seen. An' I seen that there thing you call a dingue, too."

Not wishing to prolong a futile discussion, I remained silent. After a
moment he wheeled around, removing his pipe from his hard mouth.

"Did you ever hear tell of Graham's Glacier?" he demanded.

"Certainly," I replied, astonished; "it's the southernmost glacier in
British America."

"Right," he said. "And did you ever hear tell of the Hudson Mountings,
mister?"

"Yes," I replied.

"What's behind 'em?" he snapped out.

"Nobody knows," I