This day, however, among these workmen was Hugh Miller, who was also a stone-mason by trade. Hugh got as excited over this fish as a boy. (He was only seventeen at the time, I believe.) "The story of this queer fish," he said to himself, "must be as good as Sinbad the Sailor, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Jack the Giant Killer, that I used to like so well when I was a little lad;"[29] and he determined to find out all he could about it. He found from the geology books that there was much yet to be learned about such fish, and so he proceeded to study the stones. He opened the stones with his hammer as you open a book. He put in all his leisure time at this work, with the result that he not only became one of the world's famous geologists, but he wrote books in which he made it a point to tell these curious stories of ancient life in the sea, so that people without any previous scientific knowledge could read and enjoy them. [Footnote 29: He had read all these stories and a lot more, so my old Chambers' Encyclopedia says.] Besides "The Old Red Sandstone" he wrote "Footprints of the Creator," "The Testimony of the Rocks," "My Schools and School Masters," "Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland," and a book of poems. Not all the conclusions he came to are accepted to-day--for geology, like all the sciences, is always growing--but the history of its growth and how men reasoned things out is quite as interesting and profitable as the facts themselves, and Hugh Miller has a particularly attractive way of telling things. So you see those Indians who painted up old Big Chief Boulder were on the right track; they were deeply interested in it and its being there as a great and mysterious work of nature. They named it "Waukon," an Indian word meaning "mystery." Oh, yes, and about boulders in art, it's the stone in the upper of the two pictures that Ruskin considers "massy and ponderous" and hence true to nature. Turner painted it. CHAPTER VIII (AUGUST) In the parching August wind Cornfields bow the head. --_Christina G. Rossetti._ Over the sea-like, pathless, Limitless waste of the desert. --_Longfellow._ THE DESERT August is usually such a hot, dry month that it ought to be a good time for talking of deserts. We can realize better what a desert is and what an interesting region it must be to those who spend their lives there--the Arabs and the camels, for instance. In fact, there are so many strange and striking things to be seen and learned in deserts that whole books--including many stories--have been written about them, and I'm sorry we can give the subject only one chapter. I. The Face of the Desert