"Wait," said Mother Nature. "They will surprise you. That log, drifting in the river, was their first boat, and that raft, which is a little better, is their second. Some day, my children will take a log, and burn it out with fire, and make a canoe. And others will make strong frameworks of wood, or the bones of the whale, or twisted reeds, and cover these frameworks with the bark of trees, or skins, or pitch that they will find in the earth, and make canoes, and kyaks, and coracles. And later on, they will cover the frames of their boats with planks of wood, and put sails on them, and make ships that will carry them to the ends of the Earth. And they will even make ships of iron, and put great engines in them, and laugh at the storms of the Ocean, and conquer them, because they have brains with which to understand my laws." "It sounds like a fairy tale," said the Sun. "It is," said Mother Nature. "The most wonderful fairy tale in the world, because it is true." CHAPTER XI TOR-AD THE POTTER TOR-AD lived many hundreds of years after Tul and Ni-Va made the first boat. He was not called Tor-Ad at first, but just Tor, which in the language of the cave people meant a Turtle. They called him this because he was very slow and lazy, and liked to lie half asleep in the sun while the other boys made spears, or practised throwing them at a mark, to make themselves more skilful in hunting. Tor did not care for throwing spears. He preferred to sit among the rocks and dream. Sometimes he would sit still for hours, scratching little lines on the flat stones with a sharp piece of flint. [Illustration: THE FIRST ARTIST Tor made large drawings on the walls of the caves that looked like bears, and mammoths, and wild boars.] Long before that, some of the hunters, in making handles for their knives out of bone, or wood, had carved these handles into rude shapes, that looked something like an animal, or a man, but Tor had never seen any drawings, because none had been made. Sometimes he would find a flat piece of rock with weather marks, or cracks on it that reminded him of things he had seen—fish, or the heads of bears, or men. He would look at these for a long time, and try to copy them with his sharp bit of flint, but it was very hard for him to make anything that looked like the objects he saw about him. Still, Tor kept on trying, while the other boys laughed at him, because he would not go with them to swim, or hunt, or look for fish in the shallow pools at the head of the great marsh, but Tor did not mind, for he was happy scratching on his rocks in the sun.