up the valley, and here he found chipped flints of primeval man, a
polished celt, a scrap of Samian ware, and in a niche at the side
sealed up with stalactite, a tiny earthenware pitcher 2-1/2 inches
high, a leaden spindle-whorl, some shells, and a toy sheep-bell. Here a
little shepherdess during the stormy times, when the Routiers ravaged
the country, had her refuge while she watched her flock of goats, and
here made her doll's house.

The stalactite cavern of Han in the Ardennes is visited yearly by
crowds. You may see highly coloured illustrations of its interior
illumined by Bengal lights in all the Belgian and many of the French
railway stations. What is now a peepshow was in past ages a habitation
and a home. In it the soil in successive layers has revealed objects
belonging to successive periods in the history of mankind. Its floor
has been in fact a Book of the Revelation of the Past, whose seals have
been opened, and it has disclosed page by page the history of humanity,
from the present, read backwards to the beginning.

At the bottom of all the deposits were discovered the remains of the
very earliest inhabitants, with their hearths about which they sat in
nudity and split bones to extract the marrow, trimmed flints, worked
horn, necklaces of pierced wolf and bears' teeth; then potsherds formed
by hand long before the invention of the wheel; higher up were the arms
and utensils of the bronze age, and the weights of nets. Above these
came the remains of the iron age and wheel-turned crocks. A still
higher stratum surrendered a weight of a scale stamped with an effigy
of the crusading king, S. Louis (1226-1270), and finally francs bearing
the profile of a king, the reverse in every moral characteristic of
Louis the Saint--that of Leopold of Congo notoriety.