The Autobiography of Methuselah

nd for himself and his son, Prince Ptutt, brought about a very serious condition of af

sses, eighteen pterodactyls, three brace of dodo, and a domesticated diplodocus, and then assured us that he didn't know what could be the matter with his aim that he had missed so many. The next day he rose early, and while the rest of his suite were sleeping went out unattended, returning before breakfast was over with a tally-card showing a killing of thirteen dinosaurs, twenty-seven megatheriums, and about six tons of chlamy-dophori, not to mention a mammoth jack-rabbit that some idiot had told him was the only specimen in the world of the monodelphian mollycoddle. The situation became very embarrassing to us because we were on excellent terms with King Ptush and his subjects, and we did not wish to do anything to offend either of them, but here was a case where in the interests of our own fauna something had to be done. Going on at the rate in which he had begun it was easy to see that unless somebody got out an injunction restraining him from shooting between meals it would not be many days before there wasn't a prehistoric beast left in the whole country. It was a mighty ticklish position for a

TR

r on the earth or flying, never pausing in his lecture, but nevertheless bringing to an untimely end thirty-eight griffins, seven paralellopipedon, a gumshurhynicus, forty google-eyed plutocratid?, and a herd of June-bugs grazing in a neighboring pasture-the latter wholly domesticated, by the way, and used by their owner as spile-drivers for a dike he was building in apprehension of Noah's predicted flood. It was then that I began to get some insight into the character of this wonderful person, for as I sat there listening to his discourse, delivered at the rate of five hundred words a minute, and apparently covering seven or eight subjects not necessarily corollary or collateral to each other, at once, and watched him simultaneously bringing down with unerring aim this tremendous bag of game, something of the man's intrinsic nature was revealed to me. His strength, of which we had heard much from travelers in his own land, lay in an almost scientific lack of concentratio

cended from his improvised platf

as he took my hand and shook it until my a

alk of other things, his scientific lack of concentration of which I have already spoken enabling him with much grace to be reminded of an experience in the Transvaal by a chance allusion of my own to the peculiar habits of the Antillean Sardine. In the meanwhile the work of slaughter was going on apace, and whole species were gradually becoming extinct. Exactly five weeks after my arrival the last Diplodocus in the world breathed its last. Two days later the world's visible supply of Pterodactyls passed into the realms of the annihilated. The Dodo, t

n inside room. I have been through the country with a fine-tooth comb, and as far as I can find out there isn't a prehistoric beast left in creation.

oa

the list of my posterity, so I threw the brick upon which the letter was engraved into a neighboring fish-pond, and resolved to get rid of His Majesty by strategy. For three nights I pondered over my plan of operations, and then the great method came to me like the dawning of the sun after a night of abysmal darkness

uff half of these beasts," he remarked proudl

he mud," I suggested,

h the idea, and later

gave orders for their immersion in a Triassic mud-puddle of h

of Your Majesty's prowess waste his time on such insignificant creatures as these, when the whole country is ringing

the alert

st becoming so deep that he put four pairs of eyeglass

in the history of our mammals. It is a combination of the Castorid?, the Chinchillid?, the Dodg

h of disappointment, a

oldly, removing the three extra pairs of spectacle

y for thousands of years, and is as fresh and green in spirit as on the day it was born? Suppose I were to tell you that so great is its strength that I have myself seen a whole herd of aboriginal elephants lying asleep upon its broad back? Wh

he hammer aside, as he ranged the extra

old me anything of the kind I should say that you are what posterity will

vits to prove it, Y

have never heard of

one's hunting preserves, or the marvelous fish in one's lakes, or the birds of wondrous plumage that dwell i

rtops a pyramid

ate of its height is sixteen thousa

ied. "Why, he must be

l that summer and winter the top

. He rose up immediately from hi

er the biggest game that history records. Colonel Methuselah has just told me of a quarry

. "There never was a better-and it is only

t the prospect, but suddenly a loo

shall we bring him down-with

Grandfather Adam a

aug

tly up to him while he sleeps. Surround him in the silence of some black night, and build a barbed-wire fence around hi

friends," he added, drawing himself up to the full of his soldierly height, "we

rat," I

rrival, and, followed by his entourage, was off on the greatest hunt of his life. What happened subsequentl

had been killed off, root, stock and branch, by our honored guest, and poor Noah was reduced to the necessity of drumming up trade among such

, flood or no flood, for any creature that has successfully withstood a campaign against it