“O, Corry, you make me shudder with your villainous puns.”

“That’s nothing to what I heard once.  There were some fellows camping, and they had two tents and some dogs for deerhunting.  As it was raining, they let the hounds sleep in one of the tents, when one of the fellows goes round and says:  ‘Shut down your curtains.’  ’Were you telling them that to keep the rain out?’ asked one, when the rascal answered:  ’To all in tents and purp houses.’  Wasn’t that awful, now?”

The water was cold but pleasant on a hot day, and the swimmers enjoyed striking out some distance from shore and then being washed in by the homeward-bound waves.  They sat, with their palms pressed down beside them, on smooth ledges of rock, and let the breakers lap over them.  The lawyer was thinking it time to get out, when he saw Wilkinson back into the waves with a scared face.  “Are you going for another swim, Wilks, my boy?” he asked.  “Look behind you,” whispered the schoolmaster.  Coristine looked, and was aware of three girls, truly rural, sitting on the bank and apparently absorbed in contemplating the swimmers.  “This is awful!” he ejaculated, as he slid down into deep water; “Wilks, it’s scare the life out of them I must, or we’ll never get back to our clothes.  Now, listen to me.”  Dipping his head once more under water till it dripped, he let out a fearful sound, like “Gurrahow skrrr spat, you young gurruls, an’ if yeez don’t travel home as fast as yer futs’ll taake yeez, it’s I’ll be afther yeez straight, och, garrahow skrr spat whishtubbleubbleubble!” The rural maidens took to their heels and ran, as Coristine swam into shore.  In a minute the swimmers were into their clothes and packs, and resumed their march, much refreshed by the cool waters of the Georgian Bay.

“And where is it we’re bound for now, Wilks?”

“For the abandoned shale-works at the foot of the Blue Mountains.”

“Fwhat’s that, as Jimmie Butler said about the owl?”

“The Utica formation, which crops out here, consists largely of bituminous shales, that yield mineral oil to the extent of twenty gallons to the ton.  But, since the oil springs of the West have been in operation, the usefulness of these shales is gone.  The Indians seem to have made large use of the shale, for a friend of mine found a hoe of that material on an island in the Muskoka lakes.  Being easily split and worked, it was doubtless very acceptable to the metal wanting aborigines.”

“But, if the works are closed up, what will we see?”

“We shall meet with fossils in the shale, with trilobites, such as the Asaphus Canadensis, a crustacean, closely allied to the wood-louse, and occasionally found rolled up, like it, into a defensive ball, together with other specimens of ancient life.”

“Wilks, my son, who’s doing Gosse’s Canadian Naturalist, now, I’d like to know?  Pity we hadn’t the working geologist along for a lesson.”