pushed back his chair and took off his spectacles. "Upon my
word, sir," he cried; "and so the first thing you do after they pull you
out of the earth is to come here and break my commands."

"I came on the invitation of your daughter, sir."

"And what right has she to invite you, I'd like to know?"

"She has every right, for to her I owe my existence."

"What rabid nonsense!" exclaimed the old gentleman. "People don't owe
their existence to the silly creatures they fall in love with."

"I assure you I am correct, sir." And then I related to him what his
daughter had done, and how through her angelic agency my rescuers had
found me a living being instead of a frozen corpse.

"Stuff!" said Mr. Havelot. "People can live in a temperature of
thirty-two degrees above zero all winter. Out in Minnesota they think
that's hot. And you gave him victuals and drink through your diploma
case! Well, miss, I told you that if you tried to roast chestnuts in
that diploma case the bottom would come out."

"But you see, father," said Agnes, earnestly, "the reason I did that
was because when I roasted them in anything shallow they popped into the
fire, but they could not jump out of the diploma case."

"Well, something else seems to have jumped out of it," said the old
gentleman, "and something with which I am not satisfied. I have been
looking over these books, sir, and have read the articles on ice,
glaciers and caves, and I find no record of anything in the whole
history of the world which in the least resembles the cock-and-bull
story I am told about the butt-end of a glacier which tumbled into a
cave in your ground, and has been lying there through all the geological
ages, and the eras of formation, and periods of animate existence down
to the days of Noah, and Moses, and Methuselah, and Rameses II, and
Alexander the Great, and Martin Luther, and John Wesley, to this day,
for you to dig out and sell to the Williamstown Ice Co."

"But that's what happened, sir," said I.

"And besides, father," added Agnes, "the gold and silver that people
take out of mines may have been in the ground as long as that ice has
been."

"Bosh!" said Mr. Havelot. "The cases are not at all similar. It is
simply impossible that a piece of a glacier should have fallen into a
cave and been preserved in that way. The temperature of caves is always
above the freezing-point, and that ice would have melted a million years
before you were born."

"But, f