Then something happened, like someone letting the furnace fire go out the night of the big freeze; and this stuff I’m talking about grew cold and discouraged, and quit flat, apparently not caring a hoot what shape it would be found in years and years later, the result being that it was found merely in the general shape of rocks or boulders—­to use the more scientific term—­which is practically no shape at all, as you might say, being quite any shape that happens, or the shape of rocks and boulders as they may be seen on almost every hand by those of us who have learned to see in the true sense of the word.

I have had to be brief in this shorter science course on the earth’s history before the time of man, because more important matters claim my attention and other speakers are waiting.  The point is that this boulder up there by the dwarf canon had survived from unremembered chaos; had been melted, stewed, baked, and chilled until it had no mind of its own left; then bumped round by careless glaciers until it didn’t care where it came to rest; and at last, after a few hundred million years of stony unconcern for its ultimate fate, here it had been drawn by the cunning hand of man sprang into the complex mechanism of our industrial human scramble.

That is to say, this boulder I speak of, the size of a city hall, lying there in noble neglect since long before wise old water animals were warning their children that this here fool talk about how you could go up out of the water and walk round on dry land would get folks into trouble, because how could a body breathe up there when there wasn’t any water to breathe in?  And the fools that tried it would soon find out; and serve ’em right!  Well, I mean to say, this boulder that had lain inert and indifferent while the ages wrought man from a thing of one cell—­and not much of a cell at that—­bore across that face of it nearest the winding trail, a lettered appeal, as from one man to another.  The letters were large and neatly done in white paint and the brushwork was recent.  And the letters said, with a good deal of pathos, it seemed to me: 

Wagner’s sylvan glen, only thirty-two miles.  Herman Wagner, sole prop.

Let this teach us, one and all, this morning, that everything in Nature has its use if we but search diligently.  I mean, even big rocks like this, which are too big to build homes or even courthouses of.  May we not, at least, paint things on them in plain letters with periods and commas, and so on, and so give added impetus to whatever is happening to us?

But the evening wears on and the whipping mental urge of grape juice meddled with by Uncle Henry wears off.  And so, before it all ends, what about Herman Wagner, Sole Prop. of Wagner’s Sylvan Glen?