asts
of the forest, the Prehistoric Man and his prehistoric wife lived a long
time in a little peace and more happiness than you might at first think
possible_.

_They taught their children all the clever things they had thought out,
and these children, when they grew up, taught them to their children,
and this went on for hundreds and thousands of years. Each generation
learned new things and taught them to the next, until now we have houses
and churches and villages and cities dotted over the whole earth, and
there are roads going from everywhere to everywhere else. There are
railroads and steam-cars and telegraph and telephone lines, and
printing-presses, so that to-day everybody knows more about the very
ends of the earth than Prehistoric Man could possibly know about what
was happening fifty miles away from him_.

_And all these things we have to-day because the Prehistoric Man and the
Prehistoric Woman did their part bravely and well when the earth was
young_.

_This is a story about that far-off time. If you don't believe it's
true, every word of it, just get out your atlas and find the places on
the map. They are every one of them there_.

CHAPTER ONE.

GRANNIE AND THE TWINS.

One bright morning of early spring, long ages ago, the sun peered
through the trees on the edge of a vast forest, and sent a shaft of
yellow sunlight right into the mouth of a great, dark cave. In front of
the cave a bright fire was burning, and on a rock beside it sat an old
woman. In her lap was a piece of birch-bark, and on the bark was a heap
of acorns. She was roasting them in the ashes and eating them. At her
right hand, within easy reach, there was a pile of broken sticks and
tree-branches, and every now and then the old woman put on fresh wood
and stirred the coals to keep the fire bright.

A little path ran from the front of the cave where the old woman sat
down the sloping hillside to a blue river, and the morning sun shining
across it made a bridge of dazzling light from shore to shore.

Beyond the river there were green fields and forests, and beyond the
forests high hills over which the sun climbed every morning. What lay
beyond those far blue hills neither the old woman nor any of the clan of
the Black Bear had the slightest idea.

Everything seemed quiet and peaceful on that spring morning so long ago.
The trees were beginning to turn green and little plants were already
pushing their way through the