"This ancestor of mine," said the Student, "was a very strong man. If he had not been, someone else would have killed him first, and he would not have been my ancestor; the other man would have been someone else's ancestor, so to speak. Being a very strong man, he naturally killed the bear. He must have, or he would not have lived to be my ancestor. In those days everyone lived in caves, and he lived in a cave too; and he always killed the other man, sometimes fairly, sometimes, I regret to say, otherwise. He courted my ancestress by knocking her down from behind with the blunt end of a stone ax, a method which I do not defend; but when her senses returned she told him he had acted like a man, and they became a most devoted couple. This was partly due, no doubt, to the fact that he never saw the meaning of the things she said; she took good care that he shouldn't, for though slow of wit he was handy with his ax. Their life I think must have been very happy till one day he found a red stone which he could heat and shape with his ax, and he hammered out that copper bracelet you're wearing; and then came the deluge, for metal meant magic then, as you know. Next day my ancestress found him conversing with the local vulture; within a week he was giving exhibitions in the other caves with the vulture's assistance; in a month he had become the tribal god; and about two years after, owing to the persistent failure of some of his magic to come off, he was, for a brief moment, the tribal banquet. Now you know what comes of talking to shore larks." "Daddy," she said, "you can't know if that's true or not, can you?" "It may not all be what _you_ call true," said the Student, "but it's true in quite a lot of ways. It's true psychologically, and anthropologically, and palaeethnologically; and that does to start with. And I certainly _had_ ancestors. And there _is_ a bracelet. And you _were_ talking strange words about a shore lark. And you must really take care, my dear daughter; for you _ought_ now to become a tribal priestess, and be hurled from a high place into the sea the first season that the herring fail." CHAPTER III THE HAUNTED CAVE