“As the world grew colder,” Antoine continued, “the soft vegetation died away and harder grasses and trees and shrubs took its place, needing creatures with better teeth to chew the stronger fibers. And still the grip of the cold increased.
“In that time of miserable frigidity, the flying lizards suffered terribly. Their thin wings of membrane had no resistance to the biting blasts that whistled over the ever-rising land. Their cold blood afforded no store of vitality against the frost.
“The birds, their rivals, protected with feathers, with warm blood in their veins, with deep breastbones giving them muscles enabling them to fly long distances, got the pick of the food. One by one the shivering pterodactyls disappeared, and perhaps the great specimen of Pteranodon in our Museum was the very last of the giant flying reptiles.
“We can almost see him, half-starved, half-frozen, gliding over the waters of the sea, his gaunt ungainly frame growing weaker and more feeble as numbness stole over him, only, at last, to fall into the ocean that once flowed over what is now the State of Kansas. And so he died, the great Pteranodon, the last of his kind, and, for size, the crested monarch of all that flew in any age that had been or was to come.”
CHAPTER IV
SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT
For the next two days Perry was kept busily at work on his examinations, for, as his father had suggested, it was on ship-board that the boy’s uncle felt the time to be most opportune for getting that work done. He was deep in one of his examination papers, when, suddenly, his uncle called to him:
“Here’s a sea-serpent, Perry!”
The boy came out of his deck-chair with a jump, tripping over his steamer rug and nearly pitching headlong in his hurry. He scrambled to the rail and followed with his glance his uncle’s pointing finger.
There, not more than seventy-five feet from the vessel’s side, were the moving and undulating coils of what, at first sight, appeared to be a huge snake. Just for a moment, and then a picture that he had seen flashed back to the boy’s remembrance, and he turned to his uncle with a look of reproach.
“Uncle George, that’s only a school of porpoises!”