“Excuse me, George,” Charles broke in, “but I always used to think they found those old mastodons under ground; and these bones are on the ground.”
“EH?”
“Yes; don’t they dig all those horrid old telegraph poles of bones out of the ground?”
George rose, looking very black and wretched. That important fact had escaped him. His castle in the air toppled down as Marmaduke’s had done, and all his grand ideas were buried in its ruins.
“Perhaps I’m wrong,” Charles continued; “but,” proudly, “I’ve read a little about such things, and I believe they come out of the ground. But you know better than I do, George; so, which way is it? Which of us is right?”
It was cruel for him to ask such a question. George, however, was not a boy obstinately to persist that he was right, when common sense said that he was not. In justice to the boy, it must be observed that, although he was fully aware of his own cleverness, he did not consider himself infallible, but was at all times open to reason. To be still more explicit, he was apt to change his opinions very abruptly.
“No, Charley,” he said, “you are right enough. But I’m astonished to think we should take those paltry bones for a fossil! Why—”
“I never did!” Marmaduke interrupted furiously.
“Why,” he continued, “of course not! A real fossil would be ashamed to look at such bones; they would be to him what a minnow’s bones are to ours. I—I didn’t think, boys; I know what a fossil is, of course.”