Page:A Few Hours in a Far Off Age.djvu/63

64 in consequence of growing intelligence, and some by Parliamentary measures."

Among many articles, the use of which is unknown to my memory, are rings for ears, nose jewels, boots, and stays. By their side a fossil skeleton, with its ribs cruelly bent and displaced.

The elder lady turns to her niece, saying:—

"Here, Syra, are the barbaric implements used by our progenitresses in their ignorance of physiology and crude notions of beauty. Doubtless you will think your pretty apology for hasty expression of erroneous judgment was scarcely due when I tell you the first examination of these bones misled all the naturalists of the day; for, after many meetings and learned discussions, it was concluded that they must have belonged to an extinct variety of ape, until one doctress Verax, in her travels, met with more of those fossil bones, and at last, after several years' careful study and research, satisfactorily proved them human, and the new shape to have been caused by some barbaric distortionary process, all of which was subsequently verified by our valuable records. An authority, for what I endeavour to impart to my dear girls, so incontrovertible that I cannot help feeling a little surprise at their doubts."

To which Syra answers, in a gentle but determined voice:

"I was very wrong, dear aunt, to have uttered any word which might have sounded like doubt in your extensive knowledge, and the more so that I thereby led Consuelo into the same shallow judgment. It is all too clearly true (looking sadly at the models before her). Pierced their flesh to hang therein toys of ornamented metal or stones! Human kind must, indeed, have been low! Deformed the beautifully designed body in ignorant vanity that they could