So the old Favosites died or ran away or were walled up by the younger ones, and new ones filled their places, and the colony thrived for a long while, until it had accumulated31Outlandish: strange.
2Secede: withdraw; separate from. 3 Accumulated: collected; stored up.
a large stock of lime. But one day there came a freshet in the Menomonee River1, and piles of dirt and sand and mud were brought down, and all the little Favosites" mouths were filled with it. This they did not like, so they died; but we know that the rock-house they were building was not spoiled, for we have it here.
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But it was tumbled about a good deal in the dirt, and the rolling pebbles knocked the corners off and the mud worked into the cracks and its beautiful color was destroyed.
There it lay in the mud for ages, till the earth gave a great long heave that raised Wisconsin out of the ocean, and the mud around our little Favosites packed and dried into hard rock, and closed it in. So it became part of the dry land, and lay imbedded in the rock for centuries and centuries, while the old-fashioned ferns grew above it and whispered to it strange stories of what was going on above ground in the land where things were living.
Then the time of the first fishes came, and the other animals looked in wonder at them, as the Indians looked on Columbus. Some of them were like the little garpike of our river here, only much larger-big as a stovepipe, and with crust as hard as a turtle"s. Then there were sharks of strange forms, and some of them had teeth like bowie knives, with tempers to match. The time of the old fishes came and went, and many more times1 Menomonee River: a river in Wisconsin and Michigan.
came and went, but still Favosites lay in the ground at Oconto.
Then came the long, hot, wet summer, when the mists hung over the earth so thick that you would have had to cut your way through them with a knife; and great ferns and rushes big as an oak and tall as a steeple grew in the swamps of Indiana and Illinois. Their green plumes were so long and so densely interwoven that the man in the moon might have fancied that the earth was feathering out. Then huge reptiles with huge jaws and teeth like cross-cut saws, and little reptiles with wings like bats, crawled and swam and flew.
But the ferns died, and the reptiles died, and the rush trees fell in the swamps, and the Illinois and the Sangamon and the Wabash and the other rivers covered them up. They stewed away under layers of clay and sand, till at last they turned into coal and wept bitter tears of petroleum1. But all this while Favosites lay in the rocks in Wisconsin.
Then the mists cleared away, and the sun shone, and the grass began to grow, and strange animals came from somewhere or nowhere to feed upon it. There were queer little striped horses, which had three or four hoofs on each foot and were no bigger than Newfoundland dogs. There were great hairy elephants with teeth like sticks of wood. There were hogs with noses so long that they could sit on their hind legs and root, and there were many still stranger creatures which no man ever saw alive. But still Favosites lay in the ground and waited.
1 Petroleum: rock or natural oil.
So the long, long summer passed by, and the autumn and the Indian summer. At last the winter came, and it snowed and snowed, and it was so cold that the snow did not go off till the Fourth of July. Then it snowed and snowed till the snow did not go off at all. And then it became so cold that it snowed all the time, till the snow covered the animals and then the trees and then the mountains.
Then it would thaw a little and streams of water would run over the snow. Then it would freeze again and the snow would pack into solid ice. So it went on snowing and thawing and freezing till nothing but snow-banks could be seen in Wisconsin, and most of Indiana was fit only for a skating-rink.
So it went on for a great many years. Then the spring came, the south winds blew, and the snow began to thaw. Then the ice came sliding down from the mountains and hills and from the north toward the south. It went on tearing up rocks, little and big, from the size of a chip to the size of a house, crushing forests as you would crush an eggshell and wiping out rivers as you would wipe out a chalk-mark. So it came pushing, grinding, thundering along, not very fast, but with tremendous force, like a plow drawn by a million oxen, for a thousand feet of ice is very heavy.
And the ice-plow scraped over Oconto, and little Favosites was torn from the place where he had lain so long; but by good fortune he happened to fall into a crevice of the ice where he was not much crowded, else he would have been ground to powder and I should not have had this story to tell.
And the ice melted as it slid along and it made great torrents of water, which as they swept onward covered the land with clay and pebbles. At last the ice came to a great swamp, overgrown with tamarack and balsam. It melted here, and all the rocks and stones and dirt it had carried--little Favosites and all--were dumped into one great heap.
It was a very long time after, and man had been created, and America had been discovered, and a great many things had happened, when one day a farmer living in Wisconsin was plowing up his clover field to sow his winter wheat. He picked up in the furrow a curious little bit of "petrified honeycomb," a good deal worn and dirty, still showing plainly the cells and the beebread. He gave it to one of his boys to take to his teacher to hear what he would say about it. And this is what he said.