“Why, the ornament,” said Uncle John. “When we pay that visit to the British Museum, you will see that the pottery of the old time always had ornament on it--or very nearly always. And I suppose you found it hard to make a bigger one? I daresay anybody would until he had had a great deal of practice. Even the old people that we have been reading about, who were so clever at making pots, had to build up their big ones on a wicker frame. “There is something very interesting about the wicker-work frames, and you ought to remember it. It is this--baskets were made before pottery. In the very early days, before people could make pottery at all, they had, at any rate, rude sorts of baskets. And, I daresay, they sometimes tried to warm their food in baskets beside the fire. No doubt the baskets often caught fire and the food was spoiled. Then some woman who had her wits about her thought of daubing the basket with clay to make it resist the fire. The next thing was to plaster the clay inside the basket instead of outside, and next to burn the wicker off altogether; and so, in course of time, they learned how to make vessels of clay without any framework at all, except for the very large ones.” That evening they spent some time making their bows. David was making his out of the stem of an ash sapling that the gamekeeper had given him; but Joe had got a branch of real yew for his and was whittling it down with great care. Dick’s father had sent him a set from London--a bow made of hickory with a stout gut bowstring, half a dozen arrows, and a bracer to wear on his left wrist as a protection from the string when shooting. It was very useful to have these to copy from; but Dick was not content to have only a ready-made bow, and he also got a good ash stick and set to work to make one for himself. _Chapter the Twenty-third_ _THE STORY OF TIG: How Tig made Friends with the Lake People_ THE men of Garff’s village were masters of all the land round about. They had the ground that they had cleared of trees for growing corn, and the open spaces on the hills where their cattle fed: and beyond, they had their hunting-grounds in the forests and over the moors, for miles and miles around. It was not often that any of them travelled beyond the bounds of their own ground, unless they were making a journey, such as Garff and his party undertook when they went to buy flints from Goba, the spearmaker.