Our arrows were excellent, not rude chipped things such as our ancestors had known, but smoothed and polished and keen-edged and deadly when launched by a strong arm from a strong bow. A task it was to make an arrow such as one of ours, for there was first the rude chipping and then the weary polishing of the flint by rubbing it upon wetted sandstone. Few of us had patience for all this, and old Fang, who lived alone in a cave in a thicket close beside a little waterfall of the brook running down to the river, was arrow-maker for most of us. We paid him for the arrows by bringing him meat and skins and all the means for living, and his wicked eyes would gleam when we brought them to him. He was a misshapen creature, with one leg so distorted that it made him half a cripple, teeth which protruded viciously, and eyes like those of the snakes which sunned themselves upon the clogged driftwood beside the river banks. A great archer he was, but he seldom hunted, for he could but limp, with his twisted leg. At last came a time when he never went abroad at all. It came curiously and in a wicked way. The fall in the little brook which ran beside the cave of Fang was but three or four yards in height, but the water dropped sheerly and strongly and had worn a little hollow in the stone beneath, a broad bowl a yard across, in which, in a miniature whirlpool, the waters swirled round and round as if aboil. One day a hunter who had brought to Fang some arrow-heads to be polished, accidentally dropped one of them in the water as he leaped the brook above the falls and, counting it lost, paid no attention to it. The keen eye of the arrow-maker had seen the thing and, knowing that the arrow-head could be easily recovered, he said nothing. He would get it for himself. The old man, busied at his work, forgot the arrow-head for a month, then one day he remembered and found it at last amid the swirling pebbles and looked upon it in astonishment as he drew it forth. Not with all his labour of rubbing the flint heads upon coarse sandstone could he polish an arrow like to this, The sand and pebbles in the foaming bowl had done the work far better than could he. An idea came to him. The pool should be his and his alone, and the water and the little pebbles should do his polishing. So he put chipped arrow-heads into the bowl and, after that, the hunters for a time wondered more than ever at the perfection of his work.