thers and sisters, were named Serpents, were
taught to believe that the serpent was the first ancestor of their race,
and that they must never injure any creeping thing. When they were still
very young, the figure of the serpent was tattooed over their legs and
breasts, so that every member of primitive society who met them had the
advantage of knowing their crest and highly respectable family name.

The birth of Why-Why was a season of discomfort and privation. The hill
tribe which lived on the summit of the hill now known as the Tete du
Chien had long been aware that an addition to the population of the cave
was expected. They had therefore prepared, according to the invariable
etiquette of these early times, to come down on the cave people, maltreat
the ladies, steal all the property they could lay hands on, and break
whatever proved too heavy to carry. Good manners, of course, forbade the
cave people to resist this visit, but etiquette permitted (and in New
Caledonia still permits) the group to bury and hide its portable
possessions. Canoes had been brought into the little creek beneath the
cave, to convey the women and children into a safe retreat, and the men
were just beginning to hide the spears, bone daggers, flint fish-hooks,
mats, shell razors, nets, and so forth, when Why-Why gave an early proof
of his precocity by entering the world some time before his arrival was
expected.

Instantly all was confusion. The infant, his mother and the other non-
combatants of the tribe, were bundled into canoes and paddled, through a
tempestuous sea, to the site of the modern Bordighiera. The men who were
not with the canoes fled into the depths of the Gorge Saint Louis, which
now severs France from Italy. The hill tribe came down at the double,
and in a twinkling had "made hay" (to borrow a modern agricultural
expression) of all the personal property of the cave dwellers. They tore
the nets (the use of which they did not understand), they broke the shell
razors, they pouched the opulent store of flint arrowheads and bone
daggers, and they tortured to death the pigs, which the cave people had
just begun to try to domesticate. After performing these rites, which
were perfectly legal--indeed, it would have been gross rudeness to
neglect them--the hill people withdrew to their wind-swept home on the
Tete du Chien.

Philosophers who believe in the force of early impressions will be
tempted to maintain that Why-Why's