moment. Even the child mumbled heartily, though not yet very strongly, at
the delicious meat of the little horse, and, the meal ended, the two lay
down upon a mass of leaves which made their bed, and the child lay
snuggled and warm within reach of them. The aristocracy of the time had
gone to sleep.

There was silence in the cave, but, outside, the world was not so still.
The night was not always one of silence in the cave man's time. The hours
of darkness were those when the creature which walked upon two legs was
no longer gliding through the forest with ready club or spear, and when
those creatures which used four legs instead of two, especially the
defenseless, felt more at ease than in the daytime. The grass-eating
animals emerged from the forest into the plateaus and upon the low plains
along the river side and the flesh-eaters began again their hunting. It
was a time of wild life, and of wild death, for out of the abundance much
was taken; there were nightly tragedies, and the beasts of prey were as
glutted as the urus or the elk which fed on the sweet grasses. It was but
a matter of difference in diet and in the manner of doing away with one
life which must be sacrificed to support another. There was liveliness at
night with the queer thing, man, out of the way, and brutes and beasts of
many sorts, taking their chances together, were happier with him absent.
They could not understand him, and liked him not, though the great-clawed
and sharp-toothed ones had a vast desire to eat him. He was a disturbing
element in the community of the plain and forest.

And, while all this play of life and death went on outside, the three
people, the man, woman and child, in the cave slept as soundly as sleep
the drunken or the just. They were full-fed and warm and safe. No beast
of a size greater than that of a lank wolf or sinewy wildcat could enter
the cave through the narrow entrance between the heaped-up rocks, and of