arn-yard like a
feathered Napoleon Bonaparte, and acting altogether as though she were
the winner of a Twentieth Century Marathon race that it dawned on me
that the creature was a hen, and could never be anything else than a
hen. Mother wished me to call her an omelette, the feminine form of an
om, as she expressed it, but I had already named the rooster, and the
bird seemed so exactly like a rooster that I declined to make any
changes."

"I don't see," put in Uncle Zib at this point, "where you got the word
hen from. That is the wonder of it to my mind."

"Oh," laughed Adam, "that was easy, my dear Zib. I got it from an
inspection of the egg."

"The egg?" demanded Uncle Zib.

"Certainly," replied Adam. "You see the minute I picked up the egg and
looked at it closely, I saw that it was a hen's egg, and there you
are."

After all it seemed very simple.

I have spoken of his abhorrence of dress. He carried this to an
extreme degree and to the end of his life predicted dire things from
the tendency of his descendants toward sartorial display. I shall
never forget the lucid fashion in which he presented the situation to
my father once while we were camping out one night on Mount Ararat,
after a day's hunting. He was seated on a woody knoll skinning a
pterodactyl for our supper.

"I tell you, Enoch," he said, "and if you don't mark my words you'll
wish you had, these new fangled notions that are coming along, and
affecting the whole of modern society in respect to what you are
pleased to call dress, are going to result sooner or later in trouble.
I can clearly see even if you cannot, that the new ideas as to clothes
are breeders of extravagance. As things were in my young days anybody
who felt the need of a new costume of one kind or another had only to go
out into the woods and pick it. If your great-great-great-grandmother or
I, for instance, wanted a new Spring suit we'd go hand in hand together
to the orchard, and in the course of a half hour's steady work would fit
ourselves out with a wardrobe that would have made this Queen of Sheba
that the prophets are foretelling, look like thirty clam-shells; and
what is more, a Spring costume was indeed a Spring costume and nothing
else, for it was made of the freshest of the vernal leaves, beautiful in
their early greens, and decorated here and there with a bit of a blossom
that gave the whole a most fetching appearance. And so it was with the
other seasons. For summer