The financier smiled.
“You don’t imagine that you’re not an expense, do you?” he queried. “But I don’t mind footing the bill for anything that will give you a real start in the world at the kind of work you want to do. I don’t believe in wasting money on things you don’t need—that’s why I wouldn’t buy you that two-cylinder motorcycle—but I’ll keep my wallet open, any time that you want something that is really worth while. Now trot along, son, and I’ll write to Uncle George and see what he thinks about the whole project.”
“Thanks ever and ever and ever so much, Father,” the boy said, heartily, getting up from his chair, “and I do hope I can go! Oh, and say, Father,” he continued, pointing to the faded green book which lay on the table, “can I take this along and go over it a bit more thoroughly? I’ll be ever so careful.”
“All right, son,” the other answered, “but don’t take what you see in there, literally. There are enough weird creatures in that book to make the fortunes of a dozen Barnums, if they could ever be found and put under a circus tent. Watch out that they don’t give you a nightmare!”
“I’ve dreamt about fossils, heaps and heaps of times, Father,” said Perry grinning, as he opened the door. “Some of these days, I’m going to make all those dreams come real, too!”
As, in his own room, the boy turned over the pages of that book of his father’s childhood, the fascination of the monsters of the past crept over him more and more. There was no doubt that Perry had inherited this interest, for every leaf of the volume before him was indelibly stamped with the eagerness of a boy absorbed in the subject.
Although Perry was more or less familiar with the three-horned Triceratops, the twenty-ton Brontosaurus and the gaunt-winged Pterodactyl, the still stranger creatures in the faded green book were unknown to him. The Roc, the Griffin, the Chimæra, the Phœnix, the Basilisk—they were like characters in a fairy tale. Still, as he looked at the pictures of them limned by the boy of forty years ago, a strange feeling came over Perry that perhaps—in some remote corner of the world—these creatures might be living still.
There was an air of expectant reality in their pose, and, not only had his father drawn them in the book, but he had also—in a round immature scrawl—copied upon the opposite page the words of the old naturalists who claimed to have seen the monsters with their own eyes.
One page showed (in red and yellow chalk) a blazing fire in an Egyptian temple courtyard, the flames of which shot higher than the pylons of the temple gateway. Full in the center of the flames, wearing a peaceful look as though enjoying the process of being burned alive, was a large bird, with a crest of yellow feathers on its head, like an imperial crown. Under the picture was written “The Phœnix,” and on the page opposite, the story read:
“Sir Thomas Browne says: ‘There is but one Phœnix in all the world, which after many hundred years burns herself, and from the ashes thereof riseth up another, is a conceit (belief) of great antiquity, not only delivered by humane (learned) writers but frequently expressed by holy writers.’”