THE Stone Age on earth lasted for a very long time; much longer than you would think, as you read this story. From the time when Ra made his first stone-pointed spear many, many thousands of years had passed, and still men knew nothing of the use of metals. In some parts of the earth, as the tribes migrated, and spread to new countries, stone weapons and tools were used for thousands of years longer; in fact, they are still used, even to-day, by certain savage tribes. But in other parts of the earth, men discovered metals, and how to use them, and soon the age of bronze began. In Nature's great storehouse metals are found in two different ways. Some of them, such as gold, tin, and copper, occur free, that is, they are found in the rocks in solid veins. When these rocks are broken up by the action of the weather, or by swift-flowing streams, the bits of metal, being very heavy, fall to the bottom, and are found in lumps, or nuggets in the sand and earth along the shores. Other metals, such as iron, are usually found in nature in the shape of ores, and can only be gotten out of these ores by smelting, that is, by heating the ores in a hot fire. Early man, of course, found the free metals first, and it was a very long time before he learned how to smelt ores, and make iron, and steel. The ancient Egyptians carved their wonderful statues, their huge obelisks, with tools of copper, hardening the soft metal in some way, so that it would cut the toughest stone. The secret of hardening and tempering copper in this way has been lost, and the most skilful metal workers to-day do not know how to do it. When Man first discovered gold, the only use he made of it was for ornaments, just as Modor twisted the golden bracelet about his arm. Tin, too, although harder than gold, was of little use to him. Even copper, the hardest of the three, was too soft in its natural state to be used for anything but knives, or swords, and even these were not so good as those made of very hard stone. But when it was found that copper and tin, melted together, would form what is known as bronze, hard, tough and strong, a new era or age began, known as the Age of Bronze. It was long after Modor found the lump of gold, however, that the use of bronze began. The island men kept watch from their village on the cliffs for many years, expecting each day to see a fleet of canoes come across the water from the far-off mainland, but as time passed they forgot about their enemies, and went on fishing and hunting and building boats in peace. Then, one day, when the sea was quiet and smooth, a watcher on the cliffs saw a boat far off on the horizon, and as it came closer, others appeared behind it until there were forty or more in sight. He gave the alarm, and soon the smoke went up from the signal fires, calling all the fishing and hunting parties home as quickly as possible.