soon to be revealed. So I
kept very quiet, watching the ocean out of the corners of my eyes.

XX

"Dinner was ended. Daisy Holroyd lighted her father's pipe for him,
and insisted on my smoking as much as I pleased. Then she sat down,
and folded her hands like a good little girl, waiting for her father
to make the revelation which I felt in my bones must be something out
of the ordinary.

"The professor smoked for a while, gazing meditatively at his
daughter; then, fixing his gray eyes on me, he said:

"'Have you ever heard of the kree--that Australian bird, half parrot,
half hawk, that destroys so many sheep in New South Wales?'

"I nodded.

"'The kree kills a sheep by alighting on its back and tearing away the
flesh with its hooked beak until a vital part is reached. You know
that? Well, it has been discovered that the kree had prehistoric
prototypes. These birds were enormous creatures, who preyed upon
mammoths and mastodons, and even upon the great saurians. It has been
conclusively proved that a few saurians have been killed by the
ancestors of the kree, but the favorite food of these birds was
undoubtedly the thermosaurus. It is believed that the birds attacked
the eyes of the thermosaurus, and when, as was its habit, the mammoth
creature turned on its back to claw them, they fell upon the thinner
scales of its stomach armor and finally killed it. This, of course, is
a theory, but we have almost absolute proofs of its correctness. Now,
these two birds are known among scientists as the ekaf-bird and the
ool-yllik. The names are Australian, in which country most of their
remains have been unearthed. They lived during the Carboniferous
period. Now, it is not generally known, but the fact is, that in 1801
Captain Ransom, of the British exploring vessel _Gull_, purchased from
the natives of Tasmania the skin of an ekaf-bird that could not have
been killed more than twenty-four hours previous to its sale. I saw
this skin in the British Museum. It was labelled, "Unknown bird,
probably extinct." It took me exactly a week to satisfy myself that it
was actually the skin of an ekaf-bird. But that is not all, Dick,'
continued the professor, excitedly. 'In 1854 Admiral Stuart, of our
own navy, saw the carcass of a strange, gigantic bird floating along
the southern coast of Australia. Sharks were after it, and before a
boat could be lowered these miserable fish got it. But the good old
admiral secured a few feat