THE STORY OF A STONE. 229 
time of the old fishes came and went, and many 
more times came and went, but still Favosites lay 
in the ground at Oconto. 
Then came the long, hot, wet summer, when the 
mists hung over the earth so thick that you might 
have had to cut your way through them with a 
knife; and great ferns and rushes, big as an oak 
and tall as a steeple, grew in the swamps of Indi- 
ana and Illinois. Their green plumes were so long 
and so densely interwoven that the Man of the 
Moon might have fancied that the earth was feath- 
ering out. Then all about, huge reptiles, with jaws 
like the gates of doom and teeth like cross-cut 
saws, and little reptiles with wings like bats, 
crawled, and swam, and flew. 
But the ferns died, and the reptiles died, and 
the rush-trees fell in the swamps, and the Illinois 
and the Sangamon and the Wabash and all the 
other rivers covered them up. They stewed away 
under layers of clay and sand, till at last they 
turned into coal and wept bitter tears of petro- 
leum. But‘all this while Favosites lay in the rocks 
in Wisconsin. 
Then the mists cleared away, and the sun shone, 
and the grass began to grow, and strange animals 
came from somewhere or nowhere to feed upon it. 
There were queer little striped horses, with three 
or four hoofs on each foot, and no bigger than a 
Newfoundland dog, but as smart as ever you saw. 
There were great hairy elephants with teeth like 
sticks of wood. There were hogs with noses so 
long that they could sit on their hind legs and root. 
And there were many still stranger creatures which 
