was visible. It was so blocked with stones as to leave barely room for
the entrance of a human being. The little couch of beech leaves already
referred to was not many yards from the cave.

On the leafy bed rolled about and kicked up his short legs in glee a
little brown babe. It was evident that he could not walk yet and his lack
of length and width and thickness indicated what might be a babe not more
than a year of age, but, despite his apparent youth, this man-child
seemed content thus left alone, while his grip on the twigs which had
fallen into his bed was strong, as he was strong, and he was breaking
them delightedly. Not only was the hair upon his head at least twice as
long as that of the average year-old child of today, but there were downy
indications upon his arms and legs, and his general aspect was a swart
and rugged one. He was about as far from a weakly child in appearance as
could be well imagined and he was about as jolly a looking baby, too, as
one could wish to see. He was laughing and cooing as he kicked about
among the beech leaves and looked upward at the blue sky. His dress has
not yet been alluded to and an apology for the negligence may be found in
the fact that he had no dress. He wore nothing. He was a baby of the time
of the cave men; of the closing period of the age of chipped stone
instruments; the epoch of mild climate; the ending of one great animal
group and the beginning of another; the time when the mammoth, the
rhinoceros, the great cave tiger and cave bear, the huge elk, reindeer
and aurochs and urus and hosts of little horses, fed or gamboled in the
same forests and plains, with much discretion as to relative distances
from each other.

It was some time ago, no matter how many thousands of years, when the
child--they called him Ab--lay there, naked, upon his bed of beech
leaves. It may be said, too, that there existed for him every chance for