ars to do. There are little
rough markings, too, upon some of them, which, if you look at through a
magnifying glass, are iron, crystallised into the shape of little sea-
weeds and trees--another sign that they are very very old. And what is
more, near the place where these flint flakes come from there are no
flints in the ground for hundreds of miles; so that men must have brought
them there ages and ages since. And to tell you plainly, these are
scrapers such as the Esquimaux in North America still use to scrape the
flesh off bones, and to clean the insides of skins.

But did these people (savages perhaps) live when the country was icy
cold? Look at the bits of bone. They have been split, you see,
lengthways; that, I suppose, was to suck the marrow out of them, as
savages do still. But to what animal do the bones belong? That is the
question, and one which I could not have answered you, if wiser men than
I am could not have told me.

They are the bones of reindeer--such reindeer as are now found only in
Lapland and the half-frozen parts of North America, close to the Arctic
circle, where they have six months day and six months night. You have
read of Laplanders, and how they drive reindeer in their sledges, and
live upon reindeer milk; and you have read of Esquimaux, who hunt seals
and walrus, and live in houses of ice, lighted by lamps fed with the same
blubber on which they feed themselves. I need not tell you about them.

Now comes the question--Whence did these flints and bones come? They
came out of a cave in Dordogne, in the heart of sunny France,--far away
to the south, where it is hotter every summer than it was here even this
summer, from among woods of box and evergreen oak, and vineyards of rich
red wine. In that warm land once lived savages, who hunted amid ice and
snow the reindeer, and with the reindeer animals stranger still.

And now I will tell you a fairy tale: to make you understand it at all I
must put it in the shape of a tale. I call it a fairy tale, because it
is so strange; indeed I think I ought to call it the fairy tale of all
fairy tales, for by the time we get to the end of it I think it will
explain to you how our forefathers got to believe in fairies, and trolls,
and elves, and scratlings, and all strange little people who were said to
haunt the mountains and the caves.

Well, once upon a time, so long ago that no man can tell when, the land
was so much higher, that betwee