The Story of Ab | Page 2

BUT SHE MADE NO ANSWER. SHE BUT FISHED AWAY DEMURELY"
"AB STOOD THERE WEAPONLESS, A CREATURE WANDERING OF MIND"
"WITH A GREAT LEAP HE WENT AT AND THROUGH THE CURLING CREST OF THE YELLOW FLAME!"
"THE GIRL COWERED BEHIND A REFUGE OF LEAVES AND BRANCHES"
"UPON THE STRONG SHAFT OF ASH THE MONSTER WAS IMPALED"

THE STORY OF AB.
CHAPTER I.
THE BABE IN THE WOODS.
Drifted beech leaves had made a soft, clean bed in a little hollow in a wood. The wood was beside a river, the trend of which was toward the east. There was an almost precipitous slope, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet from the wood, downward to the river. The wood itself, a sort of peninsula, was mall in extent and partly isolated from the greater forest back of it by a slight clearing. Just below the wood, or, in fact, almost in it and near the crest of the rugged bank, the mouth of a small cave was visible. It was so blocked with stones as to leave barely room for the entrance of a human being. The little couch of beech leaves already referred to was not many yards from the cave.
On the leafy bed rolled about and kicked up his short legs in glee a little brown babe. It was evident that he could not walk yet and his lack of length and width and thickness indicated what might be a babe not more than a year of age, but, despite his apparent youth, this man-child seemed content thus left alone, while his grip on the twigs which had fallen into his bed was strong, as he was strong, and he was breaking them delightedly. Not only was the hair upon his head at least twice as long as that of the average year-old child of today, but there were downy indications upon his arms and legs, and his general aspect was a swart and rugged one. He was about as far from a weakly child in appearance as could be well imagined and he was about as jolly a looking baby, too, as one could wish to see. He was laughing and cooing as he kicked about among the beech leaves and looked upward at the blue sky. His dress has not yet been alluded to and an apology for the negligence may be found in the fact that he had no dress. He wore nothing. He was a baby of the time of the cave men; of the closing period of the age of chipped stone instruments; the epoch of mild climate; the ending of one great animal group and the beginning of another; the time when the mammoth, the rhinoceros, the great cave tiger and cave bear, the huge elk, reindeer and aurochs and urus and hosts of little horses, fed or gamboled in the same forests and plains, with much discretion as to relative distances from each other.
It was some time ago, no matter how many thousands of years, when the child--they called him Ab--lay there, naked, upon his bed of beech leaves. It may be said, too, that there existed for him every chance for a lively and interesting existence. There was prospect that he would be engaged in running away from something or running after something during most of his life. Times were not dull for humanity in the age of stone. The children had no lack of things to interest, if not always to amuse, them, and neither had the men and women. And this is the truthful story of the boy Ab and his playmates and of what happened when he grew to be a man.
It is well to speak here of the river. The stream has been already mentioned as flowing to the eastward. It did not flow in that direction regularly; its course was twisted and diverted, and there were bays and inlets and rapids between precipices, and islands and wooded peninsulas, and then the river merged into a lake of miles in extent, the waters converging into the river again. So it was that the banks in one place might form a height and in another merge evenly into a densely wooded forest or a wide plain. It was so, too, that these conditions might exist opposite each other. Thus the woodland might face the plain, or the precipice some vast extending marsh.
To speak further of this river it may be mentioned, incidentally, that to-day its upper reaches still exist and that the relatively small stream remaining is called the Thames. Beside and across it lies the greatest city in the world and its mouth is upon what is called the English Channel. At the time when the baby, Ab, slept that afternoon in his nest in the beech leaves this river was not called the Thames, it