“She may turn up any day. She is coming round by way of the Isthmus. From what I hear, she is really a very fine, clever girl. She held a responsible position in the shop, and----”
“Well, let us sink the shop, and get back to the rational and instructive conversation that we--or, to be more accurate, that I was engaged in when this digression began. I presume you are aware that all the indications are lacustrine?”
Hereupon, a hammock, suspended near the talkers, and filled with what appeared to be a bundle of lace and silken shawls, became agitated, and developed at one end a slender arched foot in an open-work silk stocking and sandal-slipper, and at the other end a dark, youthful, oval face, with glorious eyes and dull black hair. A voice of music asked,--
“Oh, so you are awake again, Senorita Miriam?”
“I haven’t been asleep. What is lacustrine?”
“Lacus, you know, my dear,” said the latter, “means fresh-water indications as against salt.”
“Oh, for that matter, the whole ocean was fresh originally. Moisture, evaporation, precipitation. Water is a great solvent: earthquakes break the crust, and there you are!”
“Then, before the earthquakes, the Salt Lakes were fresh?” rejoined the hammock.
“There was fresh water west of the Rockies and south of---- Why,” cried the professor, interrupting himself, “when I was in Wyoming and around there, this spring, in what they call the Bad Lands,--cliffs and buttes of indurated yellow clay and sandstone, worn and carved out by floods long before the Aztecs started to move out of Canada,--I saw fossil bones sticking out of the cliffs, the least of which would make the fortune of a museum. That was between the Rockies and the Wahsatch.”
“People’s bones?” asked the hammock, agitating itself again, and showing a glimpse of a smooth throat and a slender ankle.
“Bless my soul! If there were people in those days they must have had an anxious time of it!” returned the sage. “No, no, my dear. There was brontosaurus, and atlantosaurus, and hydrosaurus, and iguanodon,--lizards, you know, not like these little black fellows that run about in the pulverized feldspar here, but chaps eighty or a hundred feet long, and twenty or thirty high; and turtles, as big as a house.”