vessels, and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming
river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant water
came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it
and spear it as it went down to its resting-place amidst the distant
hills. Then he was roused to convey to his brother that once indeed he
had done so--at least that some one had done so--he mixed that perhaps
with another dream almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had been
beset; and therewith began fiction--pointing a way to achievement--and
the august prophetic procession of tales.

For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations that
life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the ripening of that
phase of human life, from the first clumsy eolith of rudely chipped
flint to the first implements of polished stone, was two or three
thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations. So slowly,
by human standards, did humanity gather itself together out of the dim
intimations of the beast. And that first glimmering of speculation, that
first story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushed
under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous
listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most
marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the mammoths,
and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch the sun.

Section 2

That dream was but a moment in a man's life, whose proper business it
seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget after the manner
of all that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts. About him, hidden
from him by the thinnest of veils, were the untouched sources of Power,
whose magnitude we scarcely do more than suspect even to-day, Power that