"Let's have a lecture," she urged, "and," handing her grandfather a small lump of coal, "here's your text."
Mr. Emerson turned the bit of coal over and over.
"When I look at this little piece of black stone," he said, "I seem to see dense forests filled with luxuriant foliage and shrubbery and mammoth trees under which move sluggish streams draining the swampy ground. The air is damp and heavy and warm."
"What about the animals?"
"There are few animals. Most of them are water creatures, though there are a few that can live on land and in the water, too, and in the latter part of the coal-making period enormous reptiles crawled over the wet floor of the forest. Life is easy in all this leafy splendor and so is death, but no eye of man is there to look upon it, no birds brighten the dense green of the trees, and the ferns and shrubs have no flowers as we know them. The air is heavy with carbon."
"Where was the coal?"
"The coal wasn't made yet. You know how the soil of the West Woods at home is deep with decayed leaves? Just imagine what soil would be if it were made by the decay of these huge trees and ferns! It became yards and yards deep and silt and water pressed it down and crushed from it almost all the elements except the carbon, and it was transformed into a mineral, and that mineral is coal."
"Coal? Our coal?"
"Our coal. See the point of a fern leaf on this bit?" and he held out the piece of coal he had been holding. "That fern grew millions of years ago."
"Isn't it delicate and pretty!" exclaimed Ethel Blue, as it reached her in passing from hand to hand, "and also not as clean as it once was!" she added ruefully, looking at her fingers.