“And what right has she to invite you, I'd like to know?”
“She has every right, for to her I owe my existence.”
“What rabid nonsense!” exclaimed the old gentleman. “People don't owe their existence to the silly creatures they fall in love with.”
“I assure you I am correct, sir.” And then I related to him what his daughter had done, and how through her angelic agency my rescuers had found me a living being instead of a frozen corpse.
“Stuff!” said Mr. Havelot. “People can live in a temperature of thirty-two degrees above zero all winter. Out in Minnesota they think that's hot. And you gave him victuals and drink through your diploma case! Well, miss, I told you that if you tried to roast chestnuts in that diploma case the bottom would come out.”
“But you see, father,” said Agnes, earnestly, “the reason I did that was because when I roasted them in anything shallow they popped into the fire, but they could not jump out of the diploma case.”
“Well, something else seems to have jumped out of it,” said the old gentleman, “and something with which I am not satisfied. I have been looking over these books, sir, and have read the articles on ice, glaciers and caves, and I find no record of anything in the whole history of the world which in the least resembles the cock-and-bull story I am told about the butt-end of a glacier which tumbled into a cave in your ground, and has been lying there through all the geological ages, and the eras of formation, and periods of animate existence down to the days of Noah, and Moses, and Methuselah, and Rameses II, and Alexander the Great, and Martin Luther, and John Wesley, to this day, for you to dig out and sell to the Williamstown Ice Co.”
“But that's what happened, sir,” said I.
“And besides, father,” added Agnes, “the gold and silver that people take out of mines may have been in the ground as long as that ice has been.”
“Bosh!” said Mr. Havelot. “The cases are not at all similar. It is simply impossible that a piece of a glacier should have fallen into a cave and been preserved in that way. The temperature of caves is always above the freezing-point, and that ice would have melted a million years before you were born.”