d, and scolded down at the
bristling, tooth-gnashing circle that had gathered beneath. I, too,
trembling, peered down at the angry beasts and did my best to imitate my
mother's cries.

From the distance came similar cries, only pitched deeper, into a sort
of roaring bass. These grew momentarily louder, and soon I saw him
approaching, my father--at least, by all the evidence of the times, I am
driven to conclude that he was my father.

He was not an extremely prepossessing father, as fathers go. He seemed
half man, and half ape, and yet not ape, and not yet man. I fail to
describe him. There is nothing like him to-day on the earth, under the
earth, nor in the earth. He was a large man in his day, and he must have
weighed all of a hundred and thirty pounds. His face was broad and flat,
and the eyebrows over-hung the eyes. The eyes themselves were small,
deep-set, and close together. He had practically no nose at all. It was
squat and broad, apparently with-out any bridge, while the nostrils were
like two holes in the face, opening outward instead of down.

The forehead slanted back from the eyes, and the hair began right at the
eyes and ran up over the head. The head itself was preposterously small
and was supported on an equally preposterous, thick, short neck.

There was an elemental economy about his body--as was there about all
our bodies. The chest was deep, it is true, cavernously deep; but
there were no full-swelling muscles, no wide-spreading shoulders,
no clean-limbed straightness, no generous symmetry of outline. It
represented strength, that body of my father's, strength without beauty;
ferocious, primordial strength, made to clutch and gripe and rend and
destroy.

His hips were thin; and the legs, lean and hairy, were crooked and
stringy-muscled. In fact, my father's legs were more like arms. They
were twisted and gnarly, and with scarcely the semblance of the full
meaty calf such as graces your leg and mine. I remember he could not
walk on the flat of his foot. This was because it was a prehensile foot,
more like a hand than a foot. The great toe, instead of being in line
with the other toes, opposed them, like a thumb, and its opposition to
the other toes was what enabled him to get a grip with his foot. This
was why he could not walk on the flat of his foot.

But his appearance was no more unusual than the manner of his coming,
there to my mother and me as we perched above the angry wild pigs. He
cam