After a silence I asked him if he would tell me why he had chosen
Darwin as a literary pastime.

"Well," he said, placidly, "I was tryin' to read about annermals, but
I'm up against a word-slinger this time all right. Now here's a
gum-twister," and he painfully spelled out m-o-n-o-d-a-c-t-y-l,
breathing hard all the while.

"Monodactyl," I said, "means a single-toed creature."

He turned the page with alacrity. "Is that the beast he's talkin'
about?" he asked.

The illustration he pointed out was a wood-cut representing Darwin's
reconstruction of the dingue from the fossil bones in the British
Museum. It was a well-executed wood-cut, showing a dingue in the
foreground and, to give scale, a mammoth in the middle distance.

"Yes," I replied, "that is the dingue."

"I've seen one," he observed, calmly.

I smiled and explained that the dingue had been extinct for some
thousands of years.

"Oh, I guess not," he replied, with cool optimism. Then he placed a
grimy forefinger on the mammoth.

"I've seen them things, too," he remarked.