156 The Cretaceous Seas 



CHAPTER XII 



WHAT THE CRETACEOUS SEAS BROUGHT FORTH 



One has some strange day dreams often, at 

 least I have. My only daughter died some years 

 ago ; though in imagination she is often with me, 

 I thought once I had gone to sleep. When I woke 

 next morning I realized that time had turned 

 backward. I found myself beside the boundless 

 sea, and it was not the sea I had looked on but 

 yesterday, I was sitting under a limestone escarp- 

 ment, with a beach before me of fine sand. The 

 waves rolling outside of a bar that had been de- 

 posited by a river, whose mouth I could see on 

 the eastern side of the steep bluff under which I 

 sat. "Thank God," I cried, "You have taken me 

 back to the old Cretaceous Ocean." I had ex- 

 plored her elevated and denuded bed for twenty 

 seasons in the Short Grass country of Western 

 Kansas ; collecting her rich fauna of reptiles and 

 fishes. To know that I was to be permitted to 

 actually see the animals themselves, in their nat- 

 ural environments. To explore her shore-lines. 

 Her sheltered bays. To see her fleets of plesio- 

 saurs come sailing in after an ocean cruise; her 

 great mosasaurs, and bony fishes. How glorious, 

 but where is Maud. The thought came to me like 

 a flash. Life had seemed so much more enjoy- 



