The THIRTEENTH Chapter


The following morning, after leaving the hotel on some trifling errand,
I returned to find Arthur awaiting me. He stood by my table, and
occupied himself in turning the leaves of one of my books. He was
looking with much interest at a picture in a work on paleontology, a
book which by some chance had accompanied a few selected works that I
had brought with me from England. The picture that so interested him, I
saw as I drew nearer, represented the skeleton of a prehistoric mammoth
with a man standing by its side, the latter figure placed in the
picture, no doubt, for the purpose of showing relations of size. As I
stepped up close to Arthur's side, he turned a page in the book and
disclosed a still more startling representation, that of a reconstructed
mammoth, wool, long coarse hair, enormous tusks, and the rest. Arthur,
with his usual curiosity, wanted to be told "all about it," and I with
my usual desire to teach the searcher after knowledge even of little
things--though a mammoth is scarcely a "little thing"--briefly gave him
some insight of the subject, running over the differences between the
mastodontine and the elephantine mammoth; and then remarked to him,
incidentally, that an American _mastodon giganteus_, found not far from
where we stood, over in Missouri, a third of a century before, was now
in our British Museum, where I had seen it. Of course Arthur had many
questions to ask concerning the "gigantic-cus" which I had actually
seen. I gave him, from memory, the best description possible, telling
him that it was more than twenty feet in length, about ten feet high,
and so on. He seemed very thoughtful for several moments, whilst I sat
down to look at my morning paper. After somewhat of a pause, he asked