gravel bed, which he began to cut down and cart off to sell. He dug away at the hill for months and got far below the top of the ground. Then one day his spade struck something hard; he dug it out and saw that it was a very large bone.

"That is a queer bone," he said to himself. "I wonder to what animal it belonged. It is too big to have been the bone of horse or a cow. It is big enough to have belonged to an elephant. Well, no matter what it came from," he said, throwing it aside, "it is neither sand nor gravel, so it is nothing to me."

As he dug on, he threw out some rudely shaped stones. "These are queer, too," he said, "but they will not sell for gravel." And away went the stones from his shovel.

That evening a learned man from Paris, the most beautiful city of France, was walking beside the river and looking at the sunset clouds in sky and water.

There in the pit lay the big bones. He saw them. Forgotten were clouds and sky! He knew that he was looking at the bones of some animal long since gone from the earth! For years after that, he watched the work in the gravel pits and carried away any bones and shaped stones that were dug out. He studied them and found that some of the bones were those of the mammoth, and that there were bones of the rhinoceros, too.

At last he showed the bones and the stones to the

learned men in Paris, and said, "These stones are very old; they are as old as the ground in which they lay. They were shaped by men.

who knew very little and had very little, and who used them for weapons. Near

the stone weapons

were

these bones of the mammoth

and the rhinoceros. So those animals lived at the time the men did, and in this country."

The learned men listened, but did not believe what he said.

A few years after that, however-about twenty years-other shaped stones were found on the banks of the river that flows by the great city of London, in England, across the narrow water from France. And

in Denmark, another country near

France, still more shaped stones were found, and, with them, bones of the reindeer.

Then the learned men had to believe that men who shaped stones once lived in England and France and Denmark; and that at the same time lived the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the

reindeer; and that the men had very little and knew very little, and made the shaped stones for

weapons.

Soon after this, chipped stones were found all the world over. More than that, there were people living who still were chipping them. The Eskimos, who live in the frozen north of our own country, make their weapons of stone.

So you see that by the Age of Stone is meant a time when the metals, tin and copper and iron, were not known; and when stone, horn, bone, shell, and wood were used for tools and weapons. The cave men were in the Stone Age long ago. The Eskimos are in the Stone Age now. And the American red men, though they were still in the Stone Age, were beginning to learn the use of one metal, copper.

And the people of the shell mounds-how do we know about them? In Denmark to-day you may see shell mounds. They are the old hunting and fishing villages. They are of different sizes; some are a quarter of a mile long and half as wide. They are built up of things that the hunters and fishermen threw away: oyster and mussel and periwinkle shells; bones of the wolf, the hyena, the dog; of wild duck, swan, and grouse; of cod, herring, flounder, and other deepsea fish. Many of the bones had been split open for the purpose of extracting the marrow. Besides bones, there are also pieces of burnt wood; and there is a sea plant, which may have given salt.

The stone tools and weapons found in the heaps are axes, knives, hammers, awls, lance heads, and sling

stones-all of rude make. There are also bits of rude pottery, which show that these men knew a little more than the cave men; they knew how to bake clay. They were ahead of the cave men also in having one tamed animal, the dog. No bones were found of any tamed animal except the dog, and this seems to show that it was the earliest animal tamed by man.

Mounds like those in Denmark are found in many other countries: in our own land where the red men lived; in Africa, the land of the black man; and in Asia, where the brown man lives. Wherever man has led a wandering life, eating fish and leaving their bones behind him, these heaps are found; and they are always by the sea or by a river.

-MARGARET A. MCINTYRE.

mămʼmŏth: an animal similar to the elephant, but much larger. It lived on the earth thousands of years ago.-cave men: at the time that mammoths lived on the earth, men lived in caves and had only stone implements. They wore the skins of animals and spent most of their time hunting.

THE COMING OF ARTHUR

Long years ago, there ruled over Britain a king called Uther Pendragon. A mighty prince was he, and feared by all men; yet, when he sought the love of the fair Igraine of Cornwall, she would have naught to do with him, so that, from grief and disappointment, Uther fell sick, and at last seemed likely to die.

Now in those days, there lived a famous magician named Merlin, so powerful that he could change his form at will, or even make himself invisible; nor was there any place so distant but that he could reach it at once, merely by wishing himself there. One day, suddenly, he stood at Uther's bedside, and said:

"Sir King, I know thy grief, and am ready to help thee. Only promise to give me, at his birth, the son that shall be born to thee, and thou shalt have thy heart's desire."

To this the king agreed joyfully, and Merlin kept his word: for he gave Uther the appearance of one whom Igraine had loved dearly, and so she took him willingly for her husband.

When the time had come that a child should be born to the King and Queen, Merlin appeared before Uther to remind him of his promise; and Uther swore it should be as he had said. Three days later, a prince was born and, with pomp and ceremony, was christened by the name of Arthur; but immediately