His Puritan conscience
impressed him with the sacredness of work. He settled down to the fact
of the rainstorm with a pleasant recognition of its inevitability, and
a resolve to improve his time.
To that end, after breakfast, he drew on a pair of fleece-lined
slippers, donned a sweater, occupied two chairs in the well-known
fashion, and attacked with energy the pages of Le Conte's _Geology_.
This book, as you very well know, discourses at first with great
interest concerning erosions. Among other things it convinces you that
a current of water, being doubled in swiftness, can transport a mass
sixty-four times as heavy as when it ran half as fast. This astounding
proposition is abstrusely proved. As Bennington had resolved not to
make his reading mere recreation, he drew diagrams conscientiously
until he understood it. Then he passed on to an earnest consideration
of why the revolution of the globe and the resistance of continents
cause oceanic currents of a particular direction and velocity. Besides
this, there was much easier reading concerning alluvial deposits. So
interested did he grow that Old Mizzou, coming in, muddy-hoofed and
glistening from a round of the stock, found him quite unapproachable on
the subject of cribbage.
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