Presently she invited me to meet her husband, and, leading the way, she took me to an inner room, where, in a rocking-chair before a wood fire on a large, open hearth, sat a man of about her own age. He looked his character perfectly, for he was a hard-handed frontiersman of rugged, sinewy frame, with hair and beard unkempt, apparently, but you saw at once that he was faultlessly clean, as was the beautifully whitewashed room in which he sat, with its muslin ceiling sagging here and there. He did not rise to meet us, only turned a little in his chair and allowed his paper to rest on his knees as, for a moment, he fixed upon me his dark eyes full of the unfathomable mystery and sadness of life. I marked in him at once the same well-bred repose and self-possession which I had noticed in his wife. We talked at first of indifferent matters until I, keen with interest in the shelves of books which I saw about the walls, and other shelves on which fragments of many kinds of rock were lying in order and all labelled, ventured an inquiry as to whether he was interested in geology. With shame do I confess that there was in my witless head at the moment a patronizing, supercilious curiosity at the fact that the rough old backwoodsman who sat before me in his shirt-sleeves should have surrounded himself with objects about which he could know so little. I got it full between the eyes. “Yes,” he said quietly, in answer to my inquiry, “I have been a good deal interested in the science for the last twenty-five years, for my ranch turned out to be remarkably rich in paleontological remains and in geological material, particularly of the cretaceous period.” And then with natural straightforward ease he began to go into details, describing to me his first chance discoveries on the ranch when, soon after the civil war, he had moved out from New England and pre-empted a homestead here. It was a fascinating narrative most modestly told, of one discovery leading to another, of interest awakened in an unknown field, of a book secured here and there, of a widening intellectual horizon, and of an awakening to undreamed-of worlds of infinite interest and wonder, of communication with men of science, of personal acquaintance with some of them, and finally of a recent visit to a great Eastern university where the best of his specimens are all mounted in the Geological Museum. Now and then he would reach down a fragment of rock bearing the impress of some paleontologic form and would illustrate in concrete detail. In a single sentence he would be far beyond my shallow depth of meagre, book-learned science, but he generously paid me the compliment of taking for granted that I knew, and he could hardly have had a more interested listener.