The Story of Ab | Page 3

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 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