prosperous enough, or safe enough, to be polygamous, and, so far as the
area of the Thames valley or even the entire "Paris basin," as it is
called, was concerned, monogamy held its own very fairly, from the
shell-beds of the earliest kitchen-middens to the time of the bronze ax
and the dawn of what we now call civilization.

There were now five members in this family of the period, One-Ear,
Red-Spot, Ab, Bark and Beech-Leaf, the two last named being Ab's younger
brother and little more than baby sister. The names given them had come
in the same accidental way as had the name of Ab. The brother, when very
small, had imitated in babyish way the barking of some wolfish creature
outside which had haunted the cave's vicinity at night time, and so the
name of Bark, bestowed accidentally by Ab himself, had become the
youngster's title for life. As to Beech-Leaf, she had gained her name in
another way. She was a fat and joyous little specimen of a cave baby and
not much addicted to lying as dormant as babies sometimes do. The
bearskin upon which her mother laid her had not infrequently proven too
limited an area for her exploits and she would roll from it into the
great bed of beech leaves upon which it was placed, and become fairly
lost in the brown mass. So often had this hilarious young lady to be
disinterred from the beech leaf bed, that the name given her came
naturally, through association of ideas. Between the birth of Ab and that
of his younger brother an interval of five years had taken place, the
birth of the sister occurring three or four years later. So it came that
Ab, in the absence of his father and mother, was distinctly the head of
the family, admonitory to his brother, with ideas as to the physical
discipline requisite on occasion, and, in a rude way, fond of and
protective toward the baby sister.

There was a certain regularity in the daily program of the household,