“This father-in-law is just an old body snatcher that snoops round robbing the graves of antiquity and setting up his loot in their museum at the university.  No good telling that old ghoul to let the dead rest.  He simply won’t hear of it.  He wants remains.  He wants to have ’em out in the light of day and stick labels on their long-peaceful skulls.  He don’t act subdued or proper about it either, or kind of buttery sad, like a first-class undertaker.  He’s gleeful.  Let him find the skeleton of something as big as a freight car, that perished far in the dead past, and he’s as tickled as a kid shooting at little sister with his new air gun.

“Bones in his weakness—­and periods of geology.  He likes period bones the way some folks like period furniture; and rocks and geography and Lower Triassics, and so forth.  He knows how old the earth is within a few hundred million years; how the scantling and joists for it was put together, and all the different kinds of teeth that wild animals have.  He’s a scientist.  Oswald is a scientist.  I was a scientist myself two summers ago when they was up here.

“By the time they left I could talk a lot of attractive words.  I could speak whole sentences so good that I could hardly understand myself.  Of course after they left I didn’t keep up my science.  I let myself get rusty in it.  I probably don’t know so much more about it now than you would.  Oh, perhaps a little more.  It would all come back to me if I took it up again.”

So I said that I had nothing to do for an hour or so, and if she would not try to be scientific, but talk in her own homely words, I might consent to listen; in this event she might tell the whole thing, omitting nothing, however trifling it might seem to her, because she was no proper judge of values.  I said it was true I might be overtaken by sleep, since my day had been a hard one, reaching clear to the trout pool under the big falls and involving the transportation back to seventeen rainbow trout weighing well over seventeen pounds, more or less, though feeling much like more.  And what about Oswald and the primeval ooze, and so forth.  And would it be important if true?  The lady said—­well, yes, and no; but, however—­

He’s Professor Marwich up at the university—­this confirmed old coroner I’m telling you about.  Has a train of capital letters streaming along after he’s all through with his name.  I don’t know what they mean—­doctor of dental surgery, I guess, or zoology or fractions or geography, or whatever has to do with rocks and animals and vertebraes.  He ain’t a bad old scout out of business hours.  He pirooted round here one autumn about a dozen years ago and always threatened to come back and hold some more of these here inquests on the long departed; but I heard nothing until two summers ago.  He wrote that he wanted to come up to do field work.  That’s the innocent name he calls his foul trade by.  And he wanted to bring his assistant, Professor Pennypacker; and could I put them up?