Chapter 21

He had a great many curious ways, but the funniest of all was what he did with the bits of lime. He kept taking them in and tried to wall himself up inside with them, as a person would stone a well or as though a man should swallow pebbles and stow them away in his feet and all around under the skin, till he had filled himself full.

But little Favosites became lonesome all alone on the bottom of that old ocean, among so many outlandish neighbors; and so, one night, when he was fast asleep, and dreaming as only a coral animal can dream, there sprouted out of his side, where his sixth rib would have been if he had had so many, another little Favosites, who very soon began to eat worms and wall himself up as if for dear life. Then, from these two another and another little bud came out, and another and another little Favosites was formed, and they all kept growing up higher and higher, and cramming themselves fuller and fuller of limestone, till at last there were so many of them, and they were so crowded together, that there wasn't room for them to grow round; so they had to grow six-sided, like the cells in a honeycomb.

Once in a while, some one in the company would get mad because the others got all of the lime, or would feel uneasy at sitting still so long and swallowing stones, and would secede from the little union, without as much as saying "Good-bye," and would sail around like the old Medusa, and would lay more eggs, which would hatch out into more Favosites.

Well, the old ones died or swam away or were walled up, and new ones filled their places, and the colony thrived for a long time, and had accumulated quite a stock of lime. But, one day, there came a freshet in the Menomonee River, and piles of dirt and sand and ground-up iron ore were brought down, and all the little Favosites' mouths were filled with it. They didn't like the taste of iron, so they all died; but we know that their house was not spoiled, for we have it here. So the rock-house they were making was tumbled about in the dirt, and the rolling pebbles knocked the corners off, and the mud worked its way into the cracks and destroyed its beautiful whiteness.

There it lay for ages, till the earth gave a great, long heave, that raised the rest of Wisconsin out of the ocean, and the mud around our Favosites' house packed and dried into hard rock and closed it in; and so it became part of the dry land. There it lay, imbedded in the rock for centuries and centuries.

Then, the time of the first fishes came, and the other animals looked on them in awe and wonder as the Indians eyed Columbus. They were like the gar-pike in our Western rivers, only much larger,--as big as a stove-pipe,--and with a crust as hard as a turtle's shell. Then there came sharks, of strange forms, savage and ferocious, with teeth like bowie-knives. But the time of the old fishes came and went, and many more times came and went, but still Favosites lay in the ground.

Then came the long, hot, wet summer, when the mists hung over the earth so thick that you might almost have cut them into chunks with a knife, like a loaf of gingerbread; and great ferns and rushes, big as an oak and tall as a steeple, grew over the land. Huge reptiles with jaws like a front door, and teeth like cross-cut saws, and little reptiles with wings like bats, crawled and swam and flew.

But the ferns died, and the reptiles died, and the rush-trees fell into the swamps, and the Mississippi, now become quite a river, covered them up, and they were packed away under great layers of clay and sand, till at last they were turned into coal, and wept bitter tears of petroleum. But all the while Favosites lay in the rock at Oconto.

Then the mists cleared up and the sun shone and the grass began to grow, and strange animals began to come and feed upon it. They were funny little zebra horses, no bigger than a Newfoundland dog, and great hairy elephants, and hogs with noses so long they could sit on their hind legs and root, and lots of still stranger creatures that no man ever saw alive. But still Favosites lay in the ground.

So the long, long summer passed by, and the autumn, and the Indian summer; and at last the great winter came, and it snowed and snowed, and it was so cold that the snow wasn't off by the Fourth of July; and then it snowed and snowed till the snow never went off at all; and then it got so cold that it snowed all the time, till the snow covered all the animals, and then the trees, and then the mountains. Then it would thaw a little, and streams of water would run over the snow; then it would freeze again, and pack it into solid ice. Still it went on, snowing and thawing and freezing till the ice was a mile deep over Wisconsin, and the whole United States was one great skating rink.

So it kept on for about a million years, until once when the spring came and the south winds blew, it began to thaw up. Then the ice came sliding down from the mountains and hills, tearing up rocks little and big, from the size of a chip to the size of a meeting house, crushing forests as you would crush an egg-shell, and wiping out rivers as you would wipe out a chalk-mark. So it came pushing, thundering, grinding along slowly enough, but with tremendous force, this mile-deep glacier, like an immense plow drawn by a million oxen.

So the ice plowed across Oconto County, and little Favosites was rooted out from the quiet place where he had lain so long; but, by good fortune, he happened to slip into a crevice in the ice, where he wasn't much crowded, else he would have been ground to powder, as most of his relatives were, and I shouldn't have had this story to tell.

Well, the ice slid along, melting all the while, and making great torrents of water which, as they swept onward, covered land with clay and pebbles, till at last it came to a great swamp, overgrown with tamarac and cedar. Here it stopped and melted, and all the rocks and stones and dirt it had carried with it, little Favosites and all, were dumped into one great heap.

Ages after, a farmer in Grand Chote, Michigan, plowing up his clover field, to sow for winter wheat, picked up a curious bit of "petrified honeycomb," and gave it to the schoolboys to take to their teacher, to hear what he would say about it. And now you have read what he said.

HOW THE STONE-AGE CHILDREN PLAYED

By Charles C. Abbott

Not long since I wandered along a pretty brook that rippled through a narrow valley. I was on the lookout for whatever birds might be wandering that way, but saw nothing of special interest. So, to while away the time, I commenced geologizing; and, as I plodded along my lonely way, I saw everywhere traces of an older time, when the sparkling rivulet that now only harbors pretty salamanders was a deep creek, tenanted by many of our larger fishes.

How fast the earth from the valley's slopes may have been loosened by frost and washed by freshets, and carried down to fill up the old bed of the stream, we will not stop to enquire; for older traces of this older time were also met with here. As I turned over the loose earth by the brook-side, and gathered here and there a pretty pebble, I chanced upon a little arrow-point.

Whoever has made a collection, be it of postage stamps or birds' eggs, knows full well how securing one coveted specimen but increases eagerness for others; and so it was with me that pleasant afternoon. Just one pretty arrow-point cured me of my laziness, banished every trace of fatigue, and filled me with the interest of eager search; and I dug and sifted and washed the sandy soil for yards along the brook-side, until I had gathered at least a score of curious relics of the long-departed red men, or rather of the games and sports and pastimes of the red men's hardy and active children.

For centuries before Columbus discovered San Salvador, the red men (or Indians as they are usually called) roamed over all the great continent of North America, and, having no knowledge of iron as a metal, they were forced to make of stone or bone all their weapons, hunting and household implements. From this fact they are called, when referring to those early times, a stone-age people, and so, of course, the boys and girls of that period were stone-age children.

But it is not to be supposed that because the children of savages they were altogether unlike the youngsters of to-day. In one respect, at least, they were quite the same--they were very fond of play.

Their play, however, was not like the games of to-day. We might, perhaps, call the principal game of the boys "Playing Man," for the little stone implements that were their toys were only miniatures of the great stone axes and long spear-points of their fathers.

In one particular these old-time children were really in advance of the youngsters of to-day; they not only did, in play, what their parents did in earnest, but they realized, in part, the results of their playful labor. A good old Moravian missionary who labored hard to convert these Indians to Christianity, says: "Little boys are frequently seen wading in shallow brooks, shooting small fishes with their bows and arrows." Going-a-fishing, then, as now, was good fun; but to shoot fishes with a bow and arrow is not an easy thing to do, and this is one way these stone-age children played, and played to better advantage than most of my young-readers can. Among the stone-age children's toys that I gathered that afternoon was a very pretty stone hatchet, very carefully shaped, and still quite sharp. It has been worked out from a porphyry pebble, and in every way, except size, is the same as hundreds that are still to be found lying about the fields.

No red man would ever deign to use such an insignificant looking axe, and so we must suppose it to have been a toy hatchet for some little fellow that chopped away at saplings, or, perhaps knocked over some poor squirrel or rabbit; for our good old Moravian friend, the missionary, also tells us that "the boys learn to climb trees when very young, both to catch birds and to exercise their sight, which by this method is rendered so quick that in hunting they see objects at an amazing distance." Their play, then, became an excellent schooling for them; and if they did nothing but play it was not a loss of time.

Several little arrow-points I also found in the valley. The axe was not far away, and both it and they may have belonged to the same bold and active young hunter. All of these arrow-points are very neatly made.

The same missionary tells us that these young red men of the forest "exercise themselves very early with bows and arrows, and in shooting at a mark. As they grow up they acquire a remarkable dexterity in shooting birds, squirrels, and small game."

Every boy remembers his first pen-knife, and, whether it had one or three blades, was proud enough of it; but how different the fortune of the stone-age children, in this matter of a pocket-knife, which was doubtless a piece of flint chipped into a shape that might be used as a knife.

I have found scores of such knives in the fields that extend along the little valley, and a few came to light in my search that afternoon in the brook-side sands and gravel. So, if this chipped flint is a knife, then, as in modern times, the children were whittlers.

Of course, our boys nowadays would be puzzled to cut a willow whistle or mend the baby's go-cart with such a knife as this; but still, it will not do to despise stone cutlery. There is a big canoe in one of the Government buildings that is sixty feet long. That boat was made in quite recent times, and only stone knives and hatchets were used in the process.

I found, too, in that afternoon walk, some curiously shaped splinters of jasper, which at first did not seem very well adapted to any purpose; and yet, although mere fragments, they had every appearance of having been purposely shaped, and not of accidental resemblances to a hook or sickle blade. When I got home I read that perfect specimens, mine being certain pieces of the same form, had been found off in Norway; and Professor Nilsson, who has carefully studied the whole subject, says they are fish-hooks made of flint, the largest being bone. Hooks of exactly the same pattern as these really have been found within half a mile of the little valley I worked in that afternoon.

The fish-hooks found in Norway have been thought to be best adapted for, and really used in, capturing cod-fish in salt water and perch and pike in inland lakes. The broken hooks I found were fully as large; and so the little brook that now ripples down the valley, when a large stream, must have had a good many big fishes in it, or the stone-age fishermen would not have brought their fishing-hooks, and have lost them, along this remnant of a larger stream.

But it must not be supposed that only children in this by-gone era did the fishing for their tribe. Just as the men captured the larger game, so they took the bigger fishes; but it is scarcely probable that the boys who waded the little brooks with bows and arrows would remain content with that, and, long before they were men, doubtless they were adepts in catching the more valuable fishes that abounded, in Indian times, in all our rivers.

So, fishing, I think, was another way in which the stone-age children played.

THE MIST

By Carl Ewald

The sun had just gone down.

The frog was croaking his "good-night," which lasted so long that there seemed no end to it. The bee was creeping into its hive, and little children were crying because they had to go to bed. The flower was closing up its petals and bowing its head; the bird was tucking its bill under its wing; and the stag was laying himself down to rest in the tall, soft grass in the glade of the wood.

From the village church the bells were ringing for sunset, and when that was over the old clerk went home. On his way he had a little chat or two with the people who were out for an evening stroll, or were standing before their gate and smoking a pipe till they bade him good-night and shut the door.

Then it grew quite quiet, and the darkness fell. There was a light in the parson's house, and there was one also in the doctor's. But the farmers' houses were dark, because in summer-time the farmers get up so early that they must go early to bed.

And then the stars began to twinkle, and the moon crept higher and higher up the sky. Down in the village a dog was barking. But it must have been barking in a dream, for there was nothing to bark at.

"Is there anybody there?" asked the Mist.

But nobody answered, for nobody was there. So the Mist issued forth in her bright, airy robes. She went dancing over the meadows, up and down, to and fro. Then she lay quite still for a moment, and then she took to dancing again. Out over the lake she skipped and deep into the wood, where she threw her long, damp arms round the trunks of the trees.

"Who are you, my friend?" asked the Night-Violet [Footnote: An inconspicuous flower which in Denmark is very fragrant in the evening, the "night-smelling rocket" (_Hesperis triatto_).], who stood there giving forth fragrance just to please herself.

The Mist did not answer, but went on dancing.

"I asked you who you were," said the Night-Violet. "And as you don't answer me, I conclude that you are a rude person."

"I will now conclude _you_" said the Mist. And then she spread herself round the Night-Violet, so that her petals were dashed with wet.

"Oh, oh!" cried the Night-Violet. "Keep your fingers to yourself, my friend. I have a feeling as if I had been dipped in the pond. You have no reason for getting so angry just because I asked you who you are."

The Mist let go of her again. "Who am I?" she said. "You could not understand even if I told you."

"Try," said the Night-Violet.

"I am the dewdrop on the flower, the cloud in the sky, and the mist on the meadow," said the Mist.

"I beg your pardon," said the Night-Violet. "Would you mind saying that again? The dewdrop I know. It settles every morning on my leaves, and I don't think it is at all like you."

"No; but it is I all the same," said the Mist mournfully. "But no one knows me. I must live my life under many shapes. One time I am dew, and another time I am rain; and yet another time I babble as a clear, cool streamlet through the wood. But when I dance on the meadows in the evening, men say that it is the marsh-lady brewing."

"It is a strange story," said the Night-Violet. "Do you mind telling it to me? The night is long, and I sometimes get a little bored by it."

"It is a sad story," answered the Mist. "But you may have it and welcome." But when she was about to lie down the Night-Violet shook with terror in all her petals.

"Be so kind as to keep at a little distance," she said, "at least till you have properly introduced yourself. I have never cared to be on familiar terms with people I don't know."

So the Mist lay down a little way off and began her story:--"I was born deep down in the earth--far deeper than your roots go. There I and my sisters--for we are a large family, you must understand--came into the world as waves of a hidden spring, pure and clear as crystal; and for a long time we had to stay in our hiding-place. But one day we suddenly leapt from a hillside into the full light of the sun. You can well imagine how delightful it was to come tumbling down through the wood. We hopped over stones and rippled against the bank. Pretty little fishes gambolled amongst us, and the trees bent over so that their beautiful green was reflected in our waters. If a leaf fell, we cradled it and fondled it and carried it out with us into the wide world. Ah, that was delightful! It was indeed the happiest time of my life."

"But when are you going to tell me how you came to turn into mist?" asked the Night-Violet impatiently. "I know all about the underground spring. When the air is quite still, I can hear it murmur from where I stand."

The Mist lifted herself a little and took a turn round the meadow. Then she came back, and went on with her story:--"It is the worst of this world that one is never contented with what one has. So it was with us. We kept running on and on, till at last we ran into a great lake, where water-lilies rocked on the water and dragon-flies hummed on their great stiff wings. Up on the surface the lake was clear as a mirror. But whether we wished it or not, we had to run right down by the bottom, where it was dark and gruesome. And this I could not endure. I longed for the sunbeams. I knew them so well from the time I used to run in the brook. There they used to peep down through the leaves and pass over me in fleeting gleams. I longed so much to see them again that I stole up to the surface, and lay down in the sunshine all amongst the white water-lilies and their great green leaves. But, ugh! how the sun burnt me there on the lake I It was scarcely bearable. Bitterly did I regret that I had not stopped down below."

"I can't say this part of your story is very amusing," said the Night-Violet. "Isn't the Mist soon coming?"

"Here it is!" said the Mist, and dropped down once more on the flower, so that it nearly had the breath squeezed out of it.

"Ough! ough!" shrieked the Night-Violet. "Upon my word, you are the most ill-natured person I have ever known. Move off, and go on with your story, since it must be so."

"In the evening, when the sun had set, I suddenly became wonderfully light," said the Mist. "I don't know how it came about, but I thought I could rise up from the lake and fly; and before I knew anything about it, I was drifting over the water, far away from the dragon-flies and the water-lilies. The evening breeze bore me away. I flew high up into the air, and there I met many of my sisters, who had been just as eager for novelty as myself, and had had the same fate. We drifted across the sky, for, you see, we had become clouds."

"I am not sure I do see," said the Night-Violet. "The thing sounds incredible."

"But it is true all the same," answered the Mist "And let me tell you what happened then. The wind carried us for a long way through the air. But all at once it would not do so any more, and let us drop. Down we fell on to the earth as a splashing shower of rain. The flowers all shut up in a hurry, and the birds crept under cover--except, of course, the ducks and the geese, for, you know, the wetter it is the more they like it. Yes--and the farmer too! He wanted rain so much for his crops, he stood there hugely delighted, and did not in the least mind getting wet. But otherwise we really did make quite a sensation."

"Oh! so you are the rain as well?" said the Night-Violet. "I must say you have plenty to do."

"Yes, I'm never idle," said the Mist.

"All the same, I have not yet heard how you became mist," said the Night-Violet. "Only, _please_ don't get into a passion again. You know you promised to tell me without my asking you, and I would sooner hear the whole story over again than shiver once more in your horrid, clammy arms."

The Mist lay silent and sobbed for a few moments. Then she went on with her story:--"After I had fallen on the earth as rain, I sank down into the black soil, and was already congratulating myself on soon getting back to my birthplace, the deep underground spring. There, at any rate, one enjoyed peace and had no cares. But, as I was sinking into the ground, the tree roots sucked me up, and I had to wander about for a whole day in the boughs and leaves. They treated me as a beast of burden, I assure you. All the food that the leaves and flowers needed I had to carry up to them from the roots. It was not till the evening that I managed to get away. When the sun had gone down the flowers and trees all heaved a deep sigh, and I and my sisters flew off in that sigh in the form of bright airy Mists. To-night we dance on the meadow. But when the sun rises in the morning we shall turn into those pretty transparent dewdrops which hang from your petals. When you shake us off we shall sink deeper and deeper till we reach the spring we came from--that is, if some root or other does not snap us up on the way. And so the journey goes on. Down the brook, out into the lake, up into the air, down again to the earth--"

"Stop!" said the Night-Violet. "If I listen to you any more, I shall become quite sea-sick."

Now the frog began to stir. He stretched his legs, and went down to the ditch to take his morning bath. The birds began to twitter in the wood, and the bellow of the stag echoed amongst the trees. It was on the point of dawn, and here came the Sun peeping up over the hill.

"Hullo, what is that?" he said. "What a strange sight! One can't see one's hand before one's face. Wind of the morning! up with you, you sluggard, and drive the foul Mists away."

The Morning Wind came over the meadow, and away went the Mists. And at the very same moment the first rays of the Sun fell right on the Night-Violet.

"Heyday!" said the flower. "We have got the Sun already, so I had better make haste and shut up. Where in the world has the Mist gone to?"

"I am still here," said the Dewdrop that hung on its stalk.

But the Night-Violet shook herself peevishly. "You may stuff children with that nonsense," she said. "As for me, I don't believe a word of your whole story. It is as weak as water."

Then the Sun laughed and said, "You are quite right _there_!"

THE ANEMONES

By Carl Ewald

"Peeweet! peeweet!" cried the Plover, as he flew over the bog in the wood. "My Lady Spring is coming! I can tell it from the feeling in my legs and wings."

When the new Grass that lay below in the earth heard that, it pushed up at once and peeped out merrily from among the old yellow Grass of last year. For the Grass is always in a great hurry.