er the minute the deluge arrives."

This was about all the satisfaction I was ever able to get out of my
son on the subject of his Ark, and after two or three hundred years I
stopped arguing with him on the futile extravagance of his course. As
we have seen in the last chapter of my memoirs, I did write a bit of
verse on the subject which made him very angry, but beyond that I did
nothing, and then the great scandal came!

[Illustration: Noah regrets having shipped guinea pigs.]

It was the blackest hour of my life when it came to be rumored in and
about Enochsville that Noah, now grown to independent estate, had
method in his madness, and was about to embark upon a questionable
financial enterprise. One of the yellow journals of the day--for we
had them even then, although they were not put forth from printing
presses, but displayed on board fences in scare-head letters six or
eight feet high--one of the yellow journals of the day, I say, issued
a muck-raking Extra, exposing what it termed _The International Marine
and Zoo Flotation Company_, and most unfortunately there was just
enough truth in the story in so far as its details went, to lend
color to its sensational accusations. It could not be denied, as was
stated in _The Enochsville Evening Gad_, that Noah had built a large,
unwieldy vessel of his own designing in the old pasture up back of our
Enochsville farm, miles away from tide-level. That it resembled what
_The Gad_ called a cross between a cow-barn and a Lehigh Valley
Coal-Barge, was evident to anybody who had merely glanced at it. But
what was its apparent purpose? asked the reporter of _The Gad_. Stated
to be the housing of a menagerie during a projected cruise of
forty-odd days! "What philanthropy!" ejaculated the editor of _The
Gad_. What a kindly old soul was the projector of this wonderful
enterprise, that he should take a couple of tired old elephants off on
a Mediterranean trip out of the sheer kindness of his heart! Was it
not the acme of generosity for a man who had lately been so hard up
that he had mortgaged his farm to go to the expense of building a
huge floating barge on which the gorillas, giraffes, and rhinoceri of
the land, having lately shown signs of enfeebled health, might take a
winter's trip to the Riviera, or to the recuperative sands of the
Sahara?

The article was indeed a scathing arraignment, a masterpiece of
ridicule, but as it went on it became even worse, for it now got do