A STORY IN STONE.
A Yankee traveling in England listened for some time to a crowd of men talking together about the wonders they had seen in other lands. While others expressed surprise at what they heard, the Yankee remained passive, and he even yawned when others were working up to a high pitch of excitement. At length one of the travelers said to him:
“Have you anything in your country so superior and so much more wonderful that you could tell about?”
“Waal, I just have,” drawled the Yankee. “There’s hundreds of more wonderful things over in Ameriky that we don’t pay no heed to.”
“Do you mean Niagara Falls and the Mammoth Cave and such things?” said one.
“Pshaw! We don’t count caves, nor waterfalls, nor burning mountains, nor boiling springs, though we can beat creation in such things. Say, did any of you fellows hear of the petrified forest in Arizony?—hundreds of thousands of acres of stone forests!”
“And the trees standing?”
“The trees standing? Waal, I should say so; and not only standing, but all in leaf and some of ’em in blossom, and others, again, full of nuts and other fruit, all turned into stone, mind you.”
“And I suppose there were birds in the trees?” sneered one.
“Birds! Yes, sir, no end of birds, all of the most beautiful plumage and all turned into stone. Even the nests in the trees and the eggs in them were petrified in the most wonderful manner you ever saw. I see some of you fellows doubt me. Waal, all I have to say is that what I am telling you is true, and I’ll bet any sum on it and take you there to prove it. I’ll tell you what I saw last time I was in the petrified forest. There was a hunter who must have been in the forest when the petrification took place, for he was petrified, too, and there he stood as straight as you please, with a petrified gun on his shoulder a-taking aim at a petrified bird. Why, the whole thing was so natural that you could see the shot and smoke coming out of the muzzle of the——”
“I’ve got you there!” interrupted the Englishman. “The law of gravitation would have brought down the smoke and the shot.”
“So it would,” said the Yankee, “but the funny thing about it was that the law of gravitation was petrified, too, and so the blamed thing could not work.”—Tit-Bits.