Page:Anna Chapin--Half a dozen boys.djvu/323

Rh “Master Frederic Allen will talk to us next.” And then she gave an anxious glance  at the boy, to see how he would bear this  ordeal.

It seemed impossible that this could be the same Fred who, less than a year ago, had been  shutting himself up, away from all his friends,  and brooding sadly over his blindness, because  it had spoiled his life. With only a slight touch of shyness, he stood there so easily, with  one hand resting on the back of the chair in  which Bessie was sitting, and his whole face  bright with the laugh he had just been enjoying  over Bert’s remarkable moral.

“I am going to try to tell you a little bit about that fossil over there,” he began, while Bess  silently pointed to a superb fossil fish that lay  on a side table. “It came from high up in the Rocky Mountains, and people used to wonder  how it could get there, so high above water,  but now they know. You see, the earth used to be just a great ball of melted rock, whirling  around in the air, and growing cool over the  outside. But as it grew cool and hard, deeper and deeper down, the core seemed to shrink.