w, I asked, knowing a craftsman's craft is often nearest to his
heart, how was it such things as that he chipped came to be thought of
by him and his? Whereon the woodman, having spit out the raisin-stones
and wiped his fingers on his fur, said in substance that the first
weapon was fashioned when the earliest ape hurled the first stone in
wrath.

"But, chum," I said, taking up his half-finished spear and touching the
razor-fine edge with admiring caution, "from hurling the crude pebble
to fashioning such as this is a long stride. Who first edged and
pointed the primitive malice? What man with the soul of a thousand
unborn fighters in him notched and sharpened your natural rock?"

Whereon the chipper grinned, and answered that, when the woodmen had
found stones that would crack skulls, it came upon them presently that
they would crack nuts as well. And cracking nuts between two stones
one day a flint shattered, and there on the grass was the golden secret
of the edge--the thing that has made man what he is.

"Yet again, good fellow," I queried, "even this happy chance only gives
us a weapon, sharp, no doubt, and calculated to do a hundred services
for any ten the original pebble could have done, but still unhandled,
small in force, imperfect--now tell me, which of your amiable ancestors
first put a handle to the fashioned flint, and how he thought of it?"

The workman had done his flake by now, and wrapping it in a bit of
skin, put it carefully in his belt before turning to answer my question.

"Who made the first handle for the first flint, you of the many
questions? She did--she, the Mother," he suddenly cried, patting the
earth with his brown hand, and working himself up as he spoke, "made it
in her heart for us her first-born. See, here is such as the first
handled weapon that ever came out of darkness," and he snatched from
the ground, where it had lain hidden under his fox-skin cloak, a heavy
club. I saw in an instant how it was. The club had been a sapling, and
the sapling's roots had grown about and circled with a splendid grip a
lump of native flint. A woodman had pulled the sapling, found the
flint, and fashioned the two in a moment of happy inspiration, the one
to an axe-head and the other to a handle, as they lay Nature-welded!

"This, I say, is the first--the first!" screamed the old fellow as
though I were contradicting him, thumping the ground with his weapon,
and working himself up to a fury as