Researching the Countryside

He finds it unexpectedly gratifying that teachers regard him as a bright student. But his success is credited mostly to the good foundation he got with the monks.

There's a long wide hallway down one side of the school building, with big windows on one side, and classrooms on the other. Between the doors, all along the wall, are large pictures of prehistoric animals. They are arranged in order of development, from the earliest and simplest types, like the Silurian trilobites, to the more advanced, like the modern horse.

Jack studies these very lifelike and detailed pictures for long periods of time, and he gets to know the names of the more interesting ones. Like the brutish Pithecanthropus, an advanced ape or early man.

He feels drawn to them; they seem hauntingly familiar, as if he had seen them before.

And he can't help wondering. If true man came so much later, how do people know? How do we know how hairy they were, and what color? Who was there to see what these beings looked like? Are fossils so detailed and so well preserved?

He has little to do with other children. There is no precedent; he has no idea about relating to others in a group. Luckily his sisters, especially Addie, seem to mediate for him, even protect him. No one is going to give Jack a hard time while she's around! More than once, pigtails flying, she chases kids away, who were teasing him for being a foreigner.