The Story of Ab | Page 3

was only called the Running Water, to distinguish it from the waters of the coast. It did not empty into the British Channel, for the simple and sufficient reason that there was no such channel at the time. Where now exists that famous passage which makes islands of Great Britain, where, tossed upon the choppy waves, the travelers of the world are seasick, where Drake and Howard chased the Great Armada to the Northern seas and where, to-day, the ships of the nations are steered toward a social and commercial center, was then good, solid earth crowned with great forests, and the present little tail end of a river was part of a great affluent of the Rhine, the German river famous still, but then with a size and sweep worth talking of. Then the Thames and the Elbe and Weser, into which tumbled a thousand smaller streams, all went to feed what is now the Rhine, and that then tremendous river held its course through dense forests and deep gorges until it reached broad plains, where the North Sea is to-day, and blended finally with the Northern Ocean.
The trees which stood upon the bank of the great river, or which could be seen in the far distance beyond the marsh or plain, were not all the same as now exist. There was still a distinctive presence of the towering conifers, something such as are represented in the redwood forests of California to-day, or, in other forms, in some Australian woods. There was a suggestion of the fernlike but gigantic age of growth of the distant past, the past when the earth's surface was yet warm and its air misty, and there was an exuberance of all plant and forest growth, something compared with which the growth in the same latitude, just now, would make, it may be, but a stunted showing. It is wonderful, though, the close resemblance between most of the trees of the cave man's age, so many tens of thousands of years ago, and the trees most common to the temperate zone to-day. The peat bogs and the caverns and the strata of deposits in a host of places tell truthfully what trees grew in this distant time. Already the oak and beech and walnut and butternut and hazel reared their graceful forms aloft, and the ground beneath their spreading branches was strewn with the store of nuts which gave a portion of food for many of the beasts and for man as well. The ash and the yew were there, tough and springy of fiber and destined in the far future to become famous in song and story, because they would furnish the wood from which was made the weapon of the bowman. The maple was there with all its symmetry. There was the elm, the dogged and beautiful tree-thing of to-day, which so clings to life and nourishes in the midst of unwholesome city surroundings and makes the human hive so much the better. There were the pines, the sycamore, the foxwood and dogwood, and lime and laurel and poplar and elder and willow, and the cherry and crab apple and others of the fruit-bearing kind, since so developed that they are great factors in man's subsistence now. It was a time of plenty which was riotous. There remained, too, a vestige of the animal as well as of the vegetable life of the remoter ages. There were strange and dangerous creatures which came sometimes up the river from its inlet into the ocean. Such events had been matters of interest, not to say of anxiety, to Ab's ancestors.
The baby lying there among the beech leaves tired, finally, of its cooing and twig-snapping and slept the sleep of dreamless early childhood. He slept happily and noiselessly, but when he at last awoke his demeanor showed a change. He had nothing to distract him, unless it might be the breaking of twigs again. He had no toys, and, being hungry, he began to yell. So far as can be learned from early data, babies, when hungry, have always yelled. And, of old, as to-day, when a baby yelled, the woman who had borne it was likely to appear at once upon the scene. Ab's mother came running lightly from the river bank toward where the youngster lay. She was worthy of attention as she ran, and this is but a bungling attempt at a description of her and of her dress.
It should be explained here, with much care and caution, that the mother of Ab moved in the best and most exclusive circles of the time. She belonged to the aristocracy and, it may be added, regarding this fine lady personally, that she had the weakness of paying much attention to her dress. She was