s, but of course the thought of the charm was more
comfortable than anything else. They sat down on the sand in the shadow
of the hedged-round place in the middle of the village, and now for the
first time they were able to look about them and to see something more
than a crowd of eager, curious faces.

They here noticed that the women wore necklaces made of beads of
different coloured stone, and from these hung pendants of odd, strange
shapes, and some of them had bracelets of ivory and flint.

'I say,' said Robert, 'what a lot we could teach them if we stayed
here!'

'I expect they could teach us something too,' said Cyril. 'Did you
notice that flint bracelet the woman had that Anthea gave the collar to?
That must have taken some making. Look here, they'll get suspicious if
we talk among ourselves, and I do want to know about how they do things.
Let's get the girl to show us round, and we can be thinking about how to
get the Amulet at the same time. Only mind, we must keep together.'

Anthea beckoned to the girl, who was standing a little way off looking
wistfully at them, and she came gladly.

'Tell us how you make the bracelets, the stone ones,' said Cyril.

'With other stones,' said the girl; 'the men make them; we have men of
special skill in such work.'

'Haven't you any iron tools?'

'Iron,' said the girl, 'I don't know what you mean.' It was the first
word she had not understood.

'Are all your tools of flint?' asked Cyril. 'Of course,' said the girl,
opening her eyes wide.

I wish I had time to tell you of that talk. The English children wanted
to hear all about this new place, but they also wanted to tell of their
own country. It was like when you come back from your holidays and you
want to hear and to tell everything at the same time. As the talk went
on there were more and more words that the girl could not understand,
and the children soon gave up the attempt to explain to her what their
own country was like, when they began to see how very few of the things
they had always thought they could not do without were really not at all
necessary to life.

The girl showed them how the huts were made--indeed, as one was being
made that very day she took them to look at it. The way of building was
very different from ours. The men stuck long pieces of wood into a piece
of ground the size of the hut they wanted to make. These were about
eight inches apart; then they put in another row about eight inche