r and tree. The
supremacy of the Giant Reptiles had passed.

A few representatives of their most colossal and highly-specialized
forms still survived, still terrible and supreme in those vast,
steaming, cane-clothed savannahs which most closely repeated the
conditions of an earlier age. But Nature, pleased with her experiments
in the more promising mammalian type, had turned her back upon them
after her fashion, and was coldly letting them die out. Her failures,
however splendid, have always found small mercy at her hands.

But it was little like a failure he looked, the giant who now heaved
his terrible, three-horned front from the lilied surface of the lagoon
wherein he had been wallowing, and came ponderously ploughing his way
ashore. As he emerged upon dry ground, he halted--with the tip of his
massive, lizard-like tail still in the water--and shook a shower from
the hollows of his vast and strangely armored head.

His eyes, coldly furious, and set in a pair of goggle-like projections
of horn, peered this way and that, as if suspecting the neighborhood
of a foe. His gigantic snout--horned, cased in horn, and hooked like
the beak of a parrot--he lifted high, sniffing the heavy air. Then, as
if to end his doubts by either drawing or daunting off the unknown
enemy, he opened his grotesquely awful mouth and roared. The huge
sound that exploded from his throat was something between the bellow
of an alligator and the coughing roar of a tiger, but of infinitely
vaster volume.

The next moment, as if in deliberate reply to the challenge, an
immense black beast stepped from behind a thicket of pea-green bamboo,
and stood scrutinizing him with wicked little pig-like eyes.

It was the old order confronted by the new, the latest most terrible
and perhaps most efficient of the titanic but vanishing race of the
Dinosaurs, face to face with one of those monstrous mammalian forms
upon which Nature was now trying her experiments.

And the place of this meeting was not unfitted to such a portentous
encounter. The further shore of the lagoon was partly a swamp of
rankest growth, partly a stretch of savannah clothed with rich
cane-brake and flowering grasses that towered fifteen or twenty feet
into the air. But the hither shore was of a hard soil mixed with sand,
carpeted with a short, golden-green herbage, and studded with clumps
of bamboo, jobo, mango and mahogany, with here and there a thicket of
canary-flowered acacia, brist