o be slowly and painfully invented.

We tried to freight sound with the vague thoughts that flitted like
shadows through our consciousness. The Hairless One began to chatter
loudly. By his noises he expressed anger against Red-Eye and desire to
hurt Red-Eye. Thus far he got, and thus far we understood. But when he
tried to express the cooperative impulse that stirred within him,
his noises became gibberish. Then Big-Face, with brow-bristling and
chest-pounding, began to chatter. One after another of us joined in the
orgy of rage, until even old Marrow-Bone was mumbling and spluttering
with his cracked voice and withered lips. Some one seized a stick and
began pounding a log. In a moment he had struck a rhythm. Unconsciously,
our yells and exclamations yielded to this rhythm. It had a soothing
effect upon us; and before we knew it, our rage forgotten, we were in
the full swing of a hee-hee council.

These hee-hee councils splendidly illustrate the inconsecutiveness and
inconsequentiality of the Folk. Here were we, drawn together by mutual
rage and the impulse toward cooperation, led off into forgetfulness by
the establishment of a rude rhythm. We were sociable and gregarious, and
these singing and laughing councils satisfied us. In ways the hee-hee
council was an adumbration of the councils of primitive man, and of the
great national assemblies and international conventions of latter-day
man. But we Folk of the Younger World lacked speech, and whenever we
were so drawn together we precipitated babel, out of which arose a
unanimity of rhythm that contained within itself the essentials of art
yet to come. It was art nascent.

There was nothing long-continued about these rhythms that we struck. A
rhythm was soon lost, and pandemonium reigned until we could find the
rhythm again or start a new one. Sometimes half a dozen rhythms would
be swinging simultaneously, each rhythm backed by a group that strove
ardently to drown out the other rhythms.

In the intervals of pandemonium, each chattered, cut up, hooted,
screeched, and danced, himself sufficient unto himself, filled with
his own ideas and volitions to the exclusion of all others, a veritable
centre of the universe, divorced for the time being from any unanimity
with the other universe-centres leaping and yelling around him. Then
would come the rhythm--a clapping of hands; the beating of a stick upon
a log; the example of one that leaped with repetitions; or the chanti