been for the Great Plague.
When I was a boy, there were men alive who remembered the coming of the
first aeroplanes, and now I have lived to see the last of them, and that
sixty years ago."

The old man babbled on, unheeded by the boys, who were long accustomed
to his garrulousness, and whose vocabularies, besides, lacked the
greater portion of the words he used. It was noticeable that in these
rambling soliloquies his English seemed to recrudesce into better
construction and phraseology. But when he talked directly with the boys
it lapsed, largely, into their own uncouth and simpler forms.

"But there weren't many crabs in those days," the old man wandered on.
"They were fished out, and they were great delicacies. The open season
was only a month long, too. And now crabs are accessible the whole year
around. Think of it--catching all the crabs you want, any time you want,
in the surf of the Cliff House beach!"

A sudden commotion among the goats brought the boys to their feet. The
dogs about the fire rushed to join their snarling fellow who guarded the
goats, while the goats themselves stampeded in the direction of their
human protectors. A half dozen forms, lean and gray, glided about on the
sand hillocks and faced the bristling dogs. Edwin arched an arrow that
fell short. But Hare-Lip, with a sling such as David carried into battle
against Goliath, hurled a stone through the air that whistled from the
speed of its flight. It fell squarely among the wolves and caused them
to slink away toward the dark depths of the eucalyptus forest.

[Illustration: With a sling such as David carried 036]

The boys laughed and lay down again in the sand, while Granser sighed
ponderously. He had eaten too much, and, with hands clasped on his
paunch, the fingers interlaced, he resumed his maunderings.

"'The fleeting systems lapse like foam,'" he mumbled what was evidently
a quotation. "That's it--foam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the
planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals,
destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation.
And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again,
sweeping his handiwork away--the weeds and the forest inundated his
fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are
wolves on the Cliff House beach." He was appalled by the thought. "Where
four million people disported themselves, the wild wolves roam to-day,
an