The professor crossed one long, lean leg over the other, and punched down the ashes in his pipe-bowl with the square tip of his middle finger.

The thermometer on the shady veranda marked eighty-seven degrees of heat, and nature wooed the soul to languor and revery; but nothing could abate the energy of this bony sage.
"They talk about their Atlantises,--their submerged continents!" he exclaimed, with a sniff through his wide, hairy nostrils.

"Why, Trednoke, do you realize that we are living literally at the bottom of a Mesozoic--at any rate, Cenozoic--sea ?" The gentleman thus indignantly addressed contemplated his questioner with the serenity of one conscious of freedom from geologic responsibility.

He was a man of about the professor's age,--say, sixty years,--but not like him in appearance.

His figure was stately and massive,--that of one who in his youth must have possessed vast physical strength, rigidly developed and disciplined.