At first there would be no professional story-tellers. But it would not be long before, by the camp fire, in the desert tents, and in the huts at night, wherever simple men were together relating the experiences of vigorous days, there would be found some one whose adventures were always the pleasantest to hear, whose deeds were the most marvellous, whose realistic details the most varied. Probably it would also be found that this same man could also give the neatest point to the tales of wisdom that were the children of the Warning Example. Men would begin to quote his stories, and gradually the discrepancy between his life and the life that he lived as he recounted it to his nightly audiences would grow too great to be ignored. His adventures would become too tremendous for himself, and, to save his modesty and preserve his credit, he would father them upon some dead chief, a strong man who had done things that others had not, and, being dead, was unable to contradict with his stone axe his too enthusiastic biographer. Such a man, like many a modern story-teller, would likely use his hold over the imagination of his fellows to become the medicine man of his tribe, the depositary of their traditions, their sage as well as their entertainer. He would create gods besides rebuilding men, and while his people were sheltering in the huts and listening atremble to the dying rolls of the thunder, would describe how his hero, the dead chief of long ago, was even now wrestling with the Thunder God and getting his knee upon that mighty throat. In the beginning man was a very little thing in the face of a stupendous Universe. Story-telling raised him higher and higher until at last heaven and earth were hidden by the gigantic figure of a man. In the Arthur legend, in the legend of Charlemagne, in the Sagas, we can watch men becoming heroes, and heroes supernatural. Then story-telling, having done so much, was to set to work in the opposite direction, and we shall see the figures of men gradually shrinking into their true proportions through each successive phase of the art, until, now that we have examples of all stages permanently before us, we manufacture gods, heroes, men, and creatures less than men, with almost equal profusion. [In early story-telling heroes are more than life size.]