Father and mother did not marry until their home had been established, but they lost no time when they got started, for, thirteen years gave them a brood of eight children.

Father was a shrewd dealer in land and cattle, through which he gained enough to purchase about 350 acres of wild land and built a house and barn, while mother, as was customary for New England women, braided palm leaf hats for the slaves of the Southern planters, until she had saved enough to furnish the house. Then they got married.

Our living room was the big kitchen, where we warmed ourselves by the old-fashioned fireplace while the pots and kettles hung on the crane before us. Beside it was a brick oven, where mother baked the good things, especially on Thanksgiving Day, when we did not fill up with old common potatoes.

The parlor, which we were seldom allowed to enter, was to a little boy dazzling. Looking-glass, with gilded frame, paper of many colors, and high-shining brass andirons in the fireplace.

Sunday morning we all gathered there for family worship and one morning father gave us a lesson on "Inspiration," which has nerved me up to fight infidelity all my days.

He had quite a collection of books and one day he brought home a book on geology, from which, after studying it evenings, he declared that the creation of the world in science and the Bible exactly agreed.

That lesson and the surroundings on that sunny Sabath morning is one of the old landmarks in my memory to which I often return in moments of reflection.

"Now children," he began, "no one knows who wrote the first chapter of Genesis, which appears to have no connection with the other chapters. It may have been written by Moses, his sister, Miriam, or some other person along about that time, say four or five thousand years ago. The strange thing about it is that, according to their new geology, the writer revealed the secrets of that which transpired millions of years ago.

"People had supposed, until about one hundred years ago, that the first chapter of Genesis was a fable, or fairy tale, but now geology proves it to have been a true history of what the writer knew nothing about.

"It must have been that an angel who had lived all through the time the world was being made, sat right beside or in some way influenced the author to write the wonderful story of the creation. This is what I call real inspiration, don't you?

"Some folks think, and I would not wonder if it might be true, that fiction is a faint glimmer of inspiration, and that composers are often led along by the spirit of some person who once lived in this world. Let this be as it may, I wish one of you children might become a novelist, but you never will, you will be farmers just like all us New England mountaineers.

"Learned men have discovered, by digging in the rocky surface of the earth, that under certain conditions, oysters or other animals, will turn to stone. They call them fossils. Scientists have also learned that each kind, wherever found, represents the age in which the animal lived. So, the fossil, you see, is an animal which died and turned to stone, perhaps millions of years ago.

"By investigation they find that one kind of rock, called azoic, contains no fossils, so they know there was a day or age when there was no life in this world, and this is the first day in the Bible, which I have been reading to you.

FIRST DAY

"They find by the conglomerate condition of the azoic rock that after the gaseous confusion of the elements had subsided, it sort of settled into one boiling mass of mixed elements. Then the heavier elements, gold, mercury, lead and the like, condensed and formed a center of attraction, while the more rare elements, such as oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, formed a floating band around it, then, as the Bible states, darkness must have been upon the face of the deep until the lighter elements rarefied, when the sun would feebly penetrate in the daytime and the rotation of the world would make it correspond to the first day and night of the Bible.

SECOND DAY

"This day, in which the firmament was formed, is wonderful in that it was preparation for the day when the land should appear, as it would need rain to make the vegetation grow. Man's highest imagination cannot grasp or conceive the wonders of this strange scheme. It really meant condensing part of the water to become liquid, or seas, and raising part to become clouds, or rain, as we now find them. So again the two accounts agree as to the second day.

THIRD DAY

"Seas and land appear. This Bible account exactly agrees with the carboniferous and crustacean births which followed on through the ages, when vegetation grew in such abundance that its decay, when submerged by eruptions, laid the foundations for our coal and oil fields.

FOURTH DAY

"While the former days occupied millions of years each, this day was not a duration of time, not even one moment. It was simply an illustration of the then present conditions. Had we been on earth at that time we would have seen all the heavenly bodies and their movements just as this Bible account describes, and as we see them now.

FIFTH DAY

"As the fourth Bible day did not include time to produce geological changes, the two ages divonian, or fish, and amphibious, or reptilian, ages exactly fit in to make up the fifth day.

"Could we have visited the earth when it first became solid with the sea floating over it, we would have seen at the bottom of the sea animals of the oyster family beginning to live in their shells, which later they took up and carried around on their backs, and now we call them turtles. We know they were there, for they are still sleeping in their little stone coffins on mountain tops, which God raised up when He made dry land. God called them all moving creatures, which have life, which, of course, included fish and frogs.

"Now hark, I will read the twentieth verse over again. There now, you see God did not make the birds up in the mountains and tell them to fly. He made them in the water, I guess He fixed legs where the fins were, so they could hop and crawl, and then fixed wings where the legs were, so they could fly, and this exactly corresponds to the reptilian age in geology. That transformation must have made even God stop and think, for it took millions of years. Many kinds came out of the water, so you see we have many kinds of birds on the land. Some of them were awfully large. One, geologists call the Pterodactyl, had a mouth and teeth like a horse, tail like a fish or snake, and wings which he could spread more than twenty-five feet. I imagine it flew from shore to shore catching turtles for breakfast, who were out on the sand laying eggs as big as our old peck measure.

SIXTH DAY

"God made cattle and all other big walking things, and all the creeping things.

"The family of largest animals are called Dinosaur. Their fossil bones are found in the Rocky Mountains. They must have lived there on the plains before the upheavel of the mountains. Some of them were about one hundred feet long and twenty-five feet high. In New Jersey, geologists have dug up the fossil bones of an animal they call the Iguanodon, a sort of frog with a snake tail; when he sat up his head was about thirty feet high. Had he lived on men he would have eaten three for dinner. It seems that when those animals raised up on all four, like elephants, they lost their fish-like tails, except to use as fly whiskers. Those animals lived all through what is called the mammalian age in geology, or the sixth day in the Bible.

"Now, children, this twenty-fifth verse ends up the creation of the world and all its animals. Then God called a halt and said, 'Let us make something special.' What was it?" "Man, man," we said. "What was man to be like?" "Just like God himself."

"Is God an animal?"

"No."

"What is He?"

"Nobody knows."

"Think again, what did I read last Sunday about Christ at Jacob's well?"

"Oh, yes, God is a spirit."

"Then is man a spirit or an animal?"

"Both," I said.

"How so, Merrick?"

"Why, God made she-male man and he-male man of dirt, so they could have a lot of children. Then the image man, we cannot see, who was to do the thinking, was to have dominion, that means it was to boss themselves and everything else around. That is the man that goes to Heaven when he dies."

"How is that, Luna, for a boy of eight years old?" he said to mother.

"You are all right, Merrick," she said, drawing me to her for a kiss. "Now, you must try to govern yourself and not be so stubborn, even if you do think you are in the right. Let wisdom instead of spunk be your guide, and then the angels will be with you in your dreams and our pretty school-ma'am will not have to switch you so often."

"Pretty school-ma'am, eh! Why, she walks just exactly like a cow."