“That was only an accident,” said Noah, reddening. “You can’t expect a man six hundred odd years of age—”
“Certainly not,” said Raleigh, soothingly, “and nobody thinks less of you for it. Considering how you must have hated the sight of water, the wonder of it is that it didn’t become a fixed habit. Let us hear what it is that Mr. Barnum does criticise in you.”
“His taste, that’s all,” said Mr. Barnum. “I contend that, compared to the animals he might have had, the ones he did have were as ant-hills to Alps. There were more magnificent zoos allowed to die out through Noah’s lack of judgment than one likes to think of. Take the Proterosaurus, for instance. Where on earth do we find his equal to-day?”
“You ought to be mighty glad you can’t find one like him,” put in Adam. “If you’d spent a week in the Garden of Eden with me, with lizards eight feet long dropping out of the trees on to your lap while you were trying to take a Sunday-afternoon nap, you’d be willing to dispense with things of that sort for the balance of your natural life. If you want to get an idea of that experience let somebody drop a calf on you some afternoon.”
“I am not saying anything about that,” returned Barnum. “It would be unpleasant to have an elephant drop on one after the fashion of which you speak, but I am glad the elephant was saved just the same. I haven’t advocated the Proterosaurus as a Sunday-afternoon surprise, but as an attraction for a show. I still maintain that a lizard as big as a cow would prove a lodestone, the drawing powers of which the pocket-money of the small boy would be utterly unable to resist. Then there was the Iguanadon. He’d have brought a fortune to the box-office—”
“Which you’d have immediately lost,” retorted Noah, “paying rent. When you get a reptile of his size, that reaches thirty feet up into the air when he stands on his hind-legs, the ordinary circus wagon of commerce can’t be made to hold him, and your menagerie-room has to have ceilings so high that every penny he brought to the box-office would be spent storing him.”
“Mischievous, too,” said Adam, “that Iguanadon. You couldn’t keep anything out of his reach. We used to forbid animals of his kind to enter the garden, but that didn’t bother him; he’d stand up on his hind-legs and reach over and steal anything he’d happen to want.”
“I could have used him for a fire-escape,” said Mr. Barnum; “and as for my inability to provide him with quarters, I’d have met that problem after a short while. I’ve always lamented the absence, too, of the Megalosaurus—”
“Which simply shows how ignorant you are,” retorted Noah. “Why, my dear fellow, it would have taken the whole of an ordinary zoo such as yours to give the Megalosaurus a lunch. Those fellows would eat a rhinoceros as easily as you’d crack a peanut. I did have a couple of Megalosaurians on my boat for just twenty-four hours, and then I chucked them both overboard. If I’d kept them ten days longer they’d have eaten every blessed beast I had with me, and your Zoo wouldn’t have had anything else but Megalosaurians.”
“Papa is right about that, Mr. Barnum,” said Shem. “The whole Saurian tribe was a fearful nuisance. About four hundred years before the flood I had a pet Creosaurus that I kept in our barn. He was a cunning little devil—full of tricks, and all that; but we never could keep a cow or a horse on the place while he was about. They’d mysteriously disappear, and we never knew what became of ’em until one morning we surprised Fido in—”