Whoever has made a collection, be it of postage stamps or birds' eggs, knows full well how securing one coveted specimen but increases eagerness for others; and so it was with me that pleasant afternoon. Just one pretty arrow-point cured me of my laziness, banished every trace of fatigue, and filled me with the interest of eager search; and I dug and sifted and washed the sandy soil for yards along the brook-side, until I had gathered at least a score of curious relics of the long-departed red men, or rather of the games and sports and pastimes of the red men's hardy and active children. For centuries before Columbus discovered San Salvador, the red men (or Indians as they are usually called) roamed over all the great continent of North America, and, having no knowledge of iron as a metal, they were forced to make of stone or bone all their weapons, hunting and household implements. From this fact they are called, when referring to those early times, a stone-age people, and so, of course, the boys and girls of that period were stone-age children. But it is not to be supposed that because the children of savages they were altogether unlike the youngsters of to-day. In one respect, at least, they were quite the same--they were very fond of play. Their play, however, was not like the games of to-day. We might, perhaps, call the principal game of the boys "Playing Man," for the little stone implements that were their toys were only miniatures of the great stone axes and long spear-points of their fathers. In one particular these old-time children were really in advance of the youngsters of to-day; they not only did, in play, what their parents did in earnest, but they realized, in part, the results of their playful labor. A good old Moravian missionary who labored hard to convert these Indians to Christianity, says: "Little boys are frequently seen wading in shallow brooks, shooting small fishes with their bows and arrows." Going-a-fishing, then, as now, was good fun; but to shoot fishes with a bow and arrow is not an easy thing to do, and this is one way these stone-age children played, and played to better advantage than most of my young-readers can. Among the stone-age children's toys that I gathered that afternoon was a very pretty stone hatchet, very carefully shaped, and still quite sharp. It has been worked out from a porphyry pebble, and in every way, except size, is the same as hundreds that are still to be found lying about the fields.