pretty pass when comparatively
new people ventured to instruct the oldest of the old settlers as to
what was or was not good form. The only person who ever succeeded in
bowling him over on this point was Uncle Zib, hitherto referred to as
the billionaire member of our family, who, after listening to a long
and somewhat supercilious discourse from Adam on the subject of
family, turned like a flash and asked:

"And who pray was your grandfather?"

The old gentleman flushed deeply, and for once was silent, being as I
have already intimated rather sensitive, and therefore inclined to
reticence on the score of his ancestry.

[Illustration: Adam's Dress Chart.]

He took a great deal of pride in his success as a namer of animals,
but as my grandson Noah remarked several hundred years later, it was a
commonplace achievement after all.

"A dog is a dog, and a cat is a cat, and a horse is a horse. Any fool
would know that, so what virtue there was in his calling the beasts by
their real names I don't quite see," said Noah.

I am disposed, however, to give the old fellow the credit that is his
due for making so few mistakes. That he should instantly be able to
tell the difference between a dromedary and a camel without any
previous instruction, strikes me as evidence of a more or less
remarkable intuition, the like of which we do not often find to-day,
and his dubbing that long-eared, four-footed piece of resistant
uselessness the Ass an ass, always seemed to me to be a master
stroke, although my father used to say that his greatest achievement
lay in correctly designating the pig at first sight.

"If there is any animal in the whole category of four-legged creatures
that more thoroughly deserves to be called a pig than the pig, I don't
know what it is. He looks like a pig, he behaves like a pig, and he
eats like a pig--in fact he is a pig, and Adam never did anything
better than when he invented that name and applied it."

The old gentleman was present when my father said that, and his face
flushed with pleasure at his words of praise.

"Thank you, Enoch," he said. "I am rather proud of it, but I think I
did quite as well when it came to the hen. Anything more aptly
answering to the word hen in all its various shades of meaning than
the hen itself I don't know, but it took me a full week to reason the
thing out. It was not until I heard its absurd cackling over the
laying of a strictly fresh egg, strutting about the b