"Well," he said, placidly, "I was tryin' to read about annermals, but I'm up against a word-slinger this time all right. Now here's a gum-twister," and he painfully spelled out m-o-n-o-d-a-c-t-y-l, breathing hard all the while.
"Monodactyl," I said, "means a single-toed creature."
He turned the page with alacrity. "Is that the beast he's talkin' about?" he asked.
The illustration he pointed out was a wood-cut representing Darwin's reconstruction of the dingue from the fossil bones in the British Museum. It was a well-executed wood-cut, showing a dingue in the foreground and, to give scale, a mammoth in the middle distance.
"Yes," I replied, "that is the dingue."
"I've seen one," he observed, calmly.
I smiled and explained that the dingue had been extinct for some thousands of years.
"Oh, I guess not," he replied, with cool optimism. Then he placed a grimy forefinger on the mammoth.
"I've seen them things, too," he remarked.
Again I patiently pointed out his error, and suggested that he referred to the elephant.