“The Doctor is on the same trail,” said the Admiral. “Why can’t you be content, like I am, to let the summers drift along like the blossoms the wind is blowing off those fruit trees yonder?”
“Because we are children,” returned the Doctor promptly, quite as though his fifty-seven years were fifteen. “Last year I hunted a certain kind of polypus, remember, Polly? This year, I am seriously thinking of skipping away to Wyoming on a still hunt after a dinosaurus.”
“Oh, Doctor,” cried Polly, eagerly. “Are you? Those are the lizards that were running around before the Flood, aren’t they? And they’re terribly long, hundreds and hundreds—”
“Now, Polly,” warned the Admiral.
“Of inches,” finished Polly, mischievously. “Ruth was telling us about them. Ruth reads all that kind of stuff, you know. She’s walked right through a whale—I mean through the skeleton. She told us of some museum of natural history where there is a whale hanging in mid air, and a nice little gang plank is built through him so you trot across and feel like Jonah.”
“Preposterous, Polly!” laughed the Doctor.
“Truly,” Polly insisted earnestly. “I think it was at Charleston. Ruth’s been all around seeing interesting things, and she always remembers the most interesting of all to tell us girls.”
“I should say she did,” said the Doctor, gravely. “Polly, that whale story shall be preserved, and passed down to posterity. Now, I am really going up to Wyoming, and I sincerely believe that I shall tap the foothills and the buttes, and discover the long-buried remains of a dinosaurus, yet I feel that Ruth has gone me one better as a naturalist.”
“Wyoming,” repeated Polly, pushing her hair up from her forehead. “Grandfather dear, there’s another sign-post.”
“What do you mean, child?”