I devoutly did wish to make home that night, for the spot we were on was barren of those little conveniences I am accustomed to. Moreover, the air was keen and a hunger, all day in the building, called for strong meats. So I not too reluctantly passed on from this scenic miniature of parlour dimensions--and from the study of a curious boulder thereby which had intrigued me not a little.
Now we were home and relaxed by the Arrowhead fireside, after a moving repast of baked young sage hens. The already superior dynamics of the meal, moreover, had been appreciably heightened by a bottle of Uncle Henry's homemade grape wine, which he warmly recommends for colds or parties, or anything like that. It had proved to be a wine of almost a too-recent _crû_. Ma Pettengill said that if Uncle Henry was aiming to put it on the market in quantity production he had ought to name it the Stingaree brand, because it was sure some stuff, making for malevolence even to the lengths of matricide, if that's what killing your mother is called. She said, even at a Polish wedding down across the tracks of a big city, it would have the ambulances and patrol wagons clanging up a good half hour quicker than usual.
Be that as it may, or is, when I had expected sleep to steal swiftly to the mending of the day's ravages I merely found myself wakeful and wondering. This stuff of Uncle Henry's is an able ferment. I wondered about a lot of things. And at the same time I wondered interminably about that remarkable boulder at the side of the Tom Thumb Grand Cañon. I was even wakeful enough and discursive enough--my hostess had taken but one glass from the bottle--to wonder delightedly about all rocks and stones, and geology, and that sort of thing. It was almost scientific, the way I wondered, as I sat there idly toying with my half-filled glass.
Take this particular boulder, for example. It had once been mere star dust, hadn't it? Some time ago, I mean, or thereabouts. But it had been star dust; and then, next thing it knew, it got to be a kind of cosmic stew, such as leisurely foreigners patch out highways with, and looking no more like a granite boulder than anything.
Then something happened, like someone letting the furnace fire go out the night of the big freeze; and this stuff I'm talking about grew cold and discouraged, and quit flat, apparently not caring a hoot what shape it would be found in years and years later, the result being that it was found merely in the general shape of rocks or boulders--to use the more scientific term--which is practically no shape at all, as you might say, being quite any shape that happens, or the shape of rocks and boulders as they may be seen on almost every hand by those of us who have learned to see in the true sense of the word.