With that delicacy peculiar to lonely scientific bachelors, I modestly sat down beside the rough young man, although there was more room beside the younger lady. "Some lazy loafer reading a penny dreadful," I thought, glancing at him, then at the title of his book. Hearing me beside him, he turned around and blinked over his shabby shoulder, and the movement uncovered the page he had been silently conning. The volume in his hands was Darwin's famous monograph on the monodactyl. He noticed the astonishment on my face and smiled uneasily, shifting the short clay pipe in his mouth. "I guess," he observed, "that this here book is too much for me, mister." "It's rather technical," I replied, smiling. "Yes," he said, in vague admiration; "it's fierce, ain't it?" 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. Again I patiently pointed out his error, and suggested that he referred to the elephant. "Elephant be blowed!" he replied, scornfully. "I guess I know what I seen. An' I seen that there thing you call a dingue, too." Not wishing to prolong a futile discussion, I remained silent. After a moment he wheeled around, removing his pipe from his hard mouth. "Did you ever hear tell of Graham's Glacier?" he demanded. "Certainly," I replied, astonished; "it's the southernmost glacier in British America." "Right," he said. "And did you ever hear tell of the Hudson Mountings, mister?" "Yes," I replied. "What's behind 'em?" he snapped out. "Nobody knows," I answered. "They are considered impassable." "They ain't, though," he said, doggedly; "I've been behind 'em." "Really!" I replied, tiring of his yarn. "Ya-as, reely," he repeated, sullenly. Then he began to fumble and search through the pages of his book until he found what he wanted. "Mister," he said, "jest read that out loud, please." The passage he indicated was the famous chapter beginning: