caves are, I found myself lately together with a young French couple,
newly married. The little bride was vastly interested in the attendant's
explanations of the habits of those remote folk, but, as I could plainly
see, growing more and more distrustful of his statements as to what
happened all those hundreds of thousands of years ago.

"And this, Messieurs, is the jaw-bone of a cave-bear--the competitor,
one might say, in the matter of lodging-houses, with the gentleman whose
anatomy we have just inspected. Here are bones of hippopotamus, and
rhinoceros, which he hunted with the weapons you saw. And the object on
which your arm is reposing, Madame, is the tooth of an elephant. Our
ancestor must have been pretty costaud to kill an elephant with a
stone."

"Elephants?" she queried. "Did elephants scramble about these precipices
and ravines? I should like to have seen that."

"Pardon me, Madame. He probably killed them down there," and his arm
swept over the blue Mediterranean, lying at our feet. "Do you mean to
say that elephants paddled across from Algiers in order to be
assassinated by your old skeleton? I should like to have seen that."

"Pardon me, Madame. The Mediterranean did not exist in those days."

The suggestion that this boundless sea should ever have been dry land,
and in the time of her own ancestors, was too much for the young lady.
She smiled politely, and soon I heard her whispering to her husband:

"I had him there, eh? Quel farceur!"