“‘Peter,’ I said, for he was very excited at the noise, ‘we must be in the presence of an Archæopteryx! No other Jurassic concern could make that unutterable burlesque of melody.’ And I was right. A moment later I came across an Archæopteryx sitting on a fallen tree stump and singing, or, at least, under the impression that he was doing so. I stood and listened to the first dawnings of bird music; I, who knew what the lark, and the thrush, and the nightingale could produce at their best, gave ear to that cock Archæopteryx warbling according to his limited lights. It was pathetic to see how he enjoyed it himself, and how his hen enjoyed it. He was the very first thing of his kind that Nature had managed; naturally he could conceive of nothing finer than his primitive self and preposterous voice. He gurgled and hissed, and squeaked, and even tried to trill. Then Peter, who recognised in him a true bird, despite the fact that he had claws on his wings and teeth in his mouth, captured that unfortunate Archæopteryx after a tough struggle, and dragged him to me in some joy. “Anon we walked the sea-shore, threading in and out amidst prodigious tortoises and sleeping saurians, some of the latter nearly thirty feet in length. And then a misfortune befell me, and I lost my faithful Peter. The silly beast became too venturesome. Familiarity with Jurassic marvels bred contempt in his feline mind, and he went too near the water. Whereupon a hungry Plesiosaurus popped ten feet of neck out of the waves, and Peter’s interest in Mesozoic matters ended. I was extremely sorry. Peter had been, as it were, a link connecting me with the future. He had belonged to my wife, and I could picture her bitter regret at this uncouth termination to his picturesque existence. And then I remembered that I was concerned with a period millions of years before Adam and Eve. This reflection sobered me and made me feel for the first time something lonely and separated from my fellow-men. I knew that I had entered my sixtieth year only a week before, and I felt that it was, humanly speaking, doubtful in the last degree whether I could exist until the dawn of the Christian era. It irritated me also to reflect that I should die twelve millions of years before my wife was born; and what was the good of being an Archdeacon of the Church of England ages and ages prior to the time when ‘Britain first, at Heaven’s command,’ had risen from out the azure main? Two things were transparently clear: there would be no professional work for me, and no salary either, for a considerable number of æons. I distinctly remember worrying about the salary, and also about the unquestionable certainty that I should never see the cathedral again. Why, at the most generous computation, our world had only reached the twentieth verse of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis! Candidly I was discouraged; and, at this moment of depression, I met Brontosaurus Excelsus--almost the largest of the Deinosaurs.