“They lay beneath the mighty ribs as in a cage, of which the intercostal spaces were a foot in width, and the bars of a strength to maintain the enormous pressure of that which had surrounded and entombed them; they lay in one close group, their naked limbs smeared with the stain of their prison—­a man, a woman, and a tiny child.  From their faces, and their unfallen flesh, they might have been sleeping; but they were not; they were come down to us, a transfixture of death—­prehistoric people in a prehistoric brute, and their eyes—­their eyes!”

Dinah’s voice trailed off into silence.  Some expression that I could not interpret was on her face.  There was regret in it, but nothing of pathos or mysticism.  Suddenly she breathed out a great sigh and resumed her narrative.

“You will want to know how they looked, these lifeless survivors of a remote race from a remote time?  I will try to tell you.  The men hacked away the ribs with their axes, and laid bare the group lying in the hollow scooped out of the fallen beast.  They were little people, and the man, according to your modern canons of taste, was by far the most beautiful of the three.  He sat erect, with one uplifted arm projected through the ribs; as if, surprised by the frost-stroke, he had started to escape, and had been petrified in the act.  His face, wondering and delicate as a baby’s, was hairless; and his head only a pretty infantile down covered—­a curling floss as radiant as spun glass.  His wide-open eyes glinted yet with a hyacinth blue, and it was difficult to realize that they were dead and vacant.

“The woman was of coarser mould, ruddy, vigorous, brown-haired and eyed.  She looked the very hamadryad of some blossoming tree, a sweet capricious daughter of the blameless earth.  Everything luxuriated in her—­colour, hair, and lusty flesh; and the child she held to her bosom with a manner that indescribably commingled contempt, and resentment, and a passion of proprietorship.

“This baby—­joining the prominent characteristics of the two—­was the oddest little mortal I have ever seen.  What did its expression convey to me?  ‘I am fairly caught, and must brazen out the situation!’ There! that was what it was; I cannot put it more lucidly.  Only the thing’s wee face was animal conscious for the first time of itself, and inclined to rejoice in that primitive energy of knowledge.

“Now, my friend, I must tell you how the sight operated upon me and upon my companion.  For myself, I can only say that, looking upon that fine, independent fore-mother of my race, I felt the sun in my veins and the winy fragrance of antique woods and pastures.  I laughed; I clapped my hands; I danced on the ice-rubbish, so that they thought me mad.  But, for the other—­the man—­he was in a different plight.  He was transfigured; his nervousness was gone in a flash.  He cast himself down upon his knees, and gazed and gazed, his hands clasped, upon that sleek, mild progenitor of his, that pure image of gentle self-containment, whose very meekness suggested an indomitable will.