re perhaps the fewest blots. He decided to begin there.

"Paleontologically,"

the first sentence smote him--

"Paleontologically the periods are characterized by absence of
the large marine saurians, Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs--"

"eh?" gasped Barton.

"Why, of course!" called Edgarton, a bit impatiently, from the window.

Laboriously Barton went back and reread the phrase to himself.
"Oh--oh, yes," he conceded lamely.

"Paleontologically,"

he began all over again. "Oh, dear, no!" he interrupted himself. "I
was farther along than that!--Absence of marine saurians? Oh, yes!

"Absence of marine saurians,"

he resumed glibly,

"Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs--so abundant in the--in the
Cretaceous--of Ammonites and Belemnites,"

he persisted--heroically. Hesitatingly, stumblingly, without a glimmer
of understanding, his bewildered mind worried on and on, its entire
mental energy concentrated on the single purpose of trying to
pronounce the awful words.

"Of Rudistes, Inocerami--Tri--Trigonias,"

the horrible paragraph tortured on ...

"By the marked reduction in the--Brachiopods compared
with the now richly developed Gasteropods and--and
sinupalliate--Lamellibranchs,"--

it writhed and twisted before his dizzy eyes.

Every sentence was a struggle; more than one of the words he was
forced to spell aloud just out of sheer self-defense; and always
against Eve Edgarton's little intermittent nod of encouragement was
balanced that hateful sniffing sound of surprise and contempt from the
orchid table in the window.

Despairingly he skipped a few lines to the next unfamiliar words that
met his eye.

"The Neozoic flora,"

he read,

"consists mainly of--of Angio--Angiosper--"

Still smiling, but distinctly wan around the edges of the smile, he
slammed the handful of papers down on his knee. "If it really doesn't
make any difference where we begin, Miss Eve," he said, "for Heaven's
sake--let's begin somewhere else!"

"Oh--all right," crooned little Eve Edgarton.

Expeditiously Barton turned to another page, and another, and
another. Wryly he tasted strange sentence after strange sentence. Then
suddenly his whole wonderful face wreathed itself in smiles again.

"Three superfamilies of turtles,"

he began joyously. "Turtles! Ha!--I know turtles!" he proceeded with
real triumph. "Why, that's the first word I've recognized in all
this--this