6.  ‘It must have been alive,’ said Harry.  ‘Was it an animal?’

‘No.’

‘Then it was a plant!’ cried Dora.

7.  ’Well, it is all that is left of many plants and trees, whole forests of plants and trees, that grew long, long ago.’

‘Before you were born, mother?’

8.  ’Yes, long before that!  It was hundreds and thousands of years ago.  It was so far back that the trees were not like the trees we have now.  Many of them were big ferns.  Think of a fern grown up to be a tree!  And many were great horse-tails.  You know what a horse-tail is?’

9.  ‘Oh yes,’ said Dora, ’we find them in the ditch down the lane.  It is such fun pulling them to pieces and putting them together again—­like puzzles!’

[Illustration:  Horse-tail.]

10.  ‘Those trees must have been very strange,’ said Harry.  ’They would not be nice to climb.  But there were no boys in those days, so it did not matter.’

[Illustration]

FIRE.

min’-er-al coal fen’-der prop’-er walk’-ing laugh’-ing grate cru’-el Lon’-don smoke al-read’-y flame blaze beast cage pic’-tures

1.  ‘Don’t you think,’ said Harry, ’that a bit of coal would be a good thing for our mineral box?’

2.  ‘I do,’ said his father.  ’Get a little lump, and put it in.  And, by the way, we want more coal on the fire.  I must get some.’

3.  ‘How nice a fire is on a cold day!’ said Dora, sitting down on the fender, to be as near to it as she could.

‘Very nice,’ said her mother, ‘in its proper place—­in the grate.’

4.  ‘Ah, we should not like it to come walking about the room!’ said Harry, laughing.  ’There would soon be no room’——­

‘And no house!’ said Dora, shaking her head.  ’And then what should we do?’

5.  Father came back with the coal, and put some into the grate, saying: 

’Fire is a good servant but a bad master.  If it gets its own way it is a cruel thing.  It would burn a town down.  It once burned big London.’

6.  Harry was looking at one of the lumps that had been put on the fire.  Smoke was coming out of it already.  A flame burst out in front, and soon the whole lump was in a blaze.

7.  ‘It seems such a pity that it should all be burned up,’ said Harry, ‘when it took so long to make.’

‘That is the way of fire,’ said father, ’it eats up everything, and when it has nothing more to feed on it comes to an end—­it goes out, we say.’

8.  ‘We don’t want it to go out, and so we keep on feeding it,’ said mother.  ‘It is like a wild beast in a cage.’

‘Now look at the coal!’ said father.

9.  By this time the lumps were red and very hot.  The children went down on their knees to look for pictures in the fire.  They soon saw what looked like men and dogs, rocks, hills, and trees, and at last a great cat with red-hot eyes and a very curly tail.