Chapter 1
_ CHAPTER I
The professor crossed one long, lean leg over the other, and punched down the ashes in his pipe-bowl with the square tip of his middle finger. The thermometer on the shady veranda marked eighty-seven degrees of heat, and nature wooed the soul to languor and revery； but nothing could abate the energy of this bony sage.
"They talk about their Atlantises,--their submerged continents!" he exclaimed, with a sniff through his wide, hairy nostrils. "Why, Trednoke, do you realize that we are living literally at the bottom of a Mesozoic--at any rate, Cenozoic--sea?"
The gentleman thus indignantly addressed contemplated his questioner with the serenity of one conscious of freedom from geologic responsibility. He was a man of about the professor‘s age,--say, sixty years,--but not like him in appearance. His figure was stately and massive,--that of one who in his youth must have possessed vast physical strength, rigidly developed and disciplined. Well set upon his b

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