“Well, let us sink the shop, and get back to the rational and instructive conversation that we--or, to be more accurate, that I was engaged in when this digression began. I presume you are aware that all the indications are lacustrine?” Hereupon, a hammock, suspended near the talkers, and filled with what appeared to be a bundle of lace and silken shawls, became agitated, and developed at one end a slender arched foot in an open-work silk stocking and sandal-slipper, and at the other end a dark, youthful, oval face, with glorious eyes and dull black hair. A voice of music asked,-- “What is lacustrine, papa?” “Oh, so you are awake again, Senorita Miriam?” “I haven’t been asleep. What is lacustrine?” “Ask the professor.” “Lacus, you know, my dear,” said the latter, “means fresh-water indications as against salt.” “Then how does Great Salt Lake----” “Oh, for that matter, the whole ocean was fresh originally. Moisture, evaporation, precipitation. Water is a great solvent: earthquakes break the crust, and there you are!” “Then, before the earthquakes, the Salt Lakes were fresh?” rejoined the hammock. “There was fresh water west of the Rockies and south of---- Why,” cried the professor, interrupting himself, “when I was in Wyoming and around there, this spring, in what they call the Bad Lands,--cliffs and buttes of indurated yellow clay and sandstone, worn and carved out by floods long before the Aztecs started to move out of Canada,--I saw fossil bones sticking out of the cliffs, the least of which would make the fortune of a museum. That was between the Rockies and the Wahsatch.” “People’s bones?” asked the hammock, agitating itself again, and showing a glimpse of a smooth throat and a slender ankle. “Bless my soul! If there were people in those days they must have had an anxious time of it!” returned the sage. “No, no, my dear. There was brontosaurus, and atlantosaurus, and hydrosaurus, and iguanodon,--lizards, you know, not like these little black fellows that run about in the pulverized feldspar here, but chaps eighty or a hundred feet long, and twenty or thirty high; and turtles, as big as a house.” “How did they get there?” “Got mired while they were feeding, perhaps; or the water drained off and left them high and dry.” “But where did the water go to?” The general chuckled at this juncture, and lit another cigar. “She knows more questions than you do the answers to them,” quoth he. “But I wouldn’t mind hearing where the water went to, myself. I should like to see some of it back again.” “Ask the earthquakes, and the sun. There’s a hundred and thirty degrees of heat in some of these valleys,--abysses, rather, three or four hundred feet below sea-level. The earth is very thin-skinned in this region, too, and whatever water wasn’t evaporated from above would be likely to come to grief underneath.”