

OF A FORMER WORLD. 55 



don. There's his ! ! ! Work away, my good fellows 



never give up ; we shall all go down to posterity. It's the 

 first the first the first nobody knows what that's been 

 discovered in the world. 



Here, lend me a spade, and I'll help. So, I'll tell you 

 what, we're all Columbuses, every man Jack of us ! but I 

 can't dig it breaks my back. Never mind : there he is 

 and his tail with a broad arrow at the end ! It's a Hy- 

 Iceosaurus f but no that scapula's a wing it's the Pte- 

 rodactyle by Saint George, it's a flying dragon. 



Huzza ! shouts Boniface, the landlord of the village inn 

 that has the Saint George and the Dragon as his sign. 



Huzza ! echoes every Knight of the Garter. 



Huzza! cries each schoolboy who has read the Seven 

 Champions. 



Huzza, huzza ! roar the illustrators of Schiller's Kampf 

 mit dem Drauchen. 



Huzza, huzza, huzza ! chorus the descendants of Moor of 

 Moor Hall. 

 The legends are all true, then ? 



Not a bit of it ! cries a stony-hearted professor of fossil 

 osteology. Look at the teeth, they're all molar ; he's a My- 

 lodon! That creature ate neither sheep, nor oxen, nor 

 children, nor tender virgins, nor hoary pilgrims, nor even 

 geese and turkeys he lived on 



What ? what ? what ? they all exclaim. Why, on raw 

 potatoes, and undressed salads, to-be-sure ! 



In .Lucretius, we have a description of quadrupeds, rec- 

 ognized as existing previous to man and the present race of 

 animals, which might almost warrant the belief that some 

 fossil gigantic skeleton had met his eye : 



" Hence, doubtless, earth prodigious forms at first 

 Gender'd, of face and members most grotesque ; 

 Monsters, half-man, half-woman 



