FOUND my friend the inspector in his office in the Copenhagen Museum of Natural History, sorting with patient care a handful of bones that lay in a pile on his table. They were of all kinds and sizes-pieces of deer horn, broken vertebræ, and chips of just plain bonea pile of rubbish fit only for the scrapheap; so I thought, and said so. He shot a sidelong glance at me out of a pair of smiling eyes.

"Do you think so? And yet they have strange stories to tell sometimes. Once a black mark on a broken tooth prevented the identification of a hodcarrier's skull as that of a king of the twelfth century whose grave was sought there. The microscope and the chemist's test showed the stain to have been made by tobacco in a clay pipe, which put it some centuries ahead and a long way down in the social scale. Another time it was the middle joint of a royal toe that played a part in solving the puzzle of a tomb that had stumped the antiquarians. Not that a royal toe differs materially from any other, but it had been a mystery, nevertheless. But these are not the real stories my scrap-heap, as you call it, tells. You are a hunter; would you like to hear one of an old hunt that I remember well?" I nodded eagerly. The inspector pushed his spectacles up on his forehead and gazed dreamily past me into the long ago, as he began:

"I can see him now as he came out of

his hut that autumn morning, clad in rough skins, with his strong bow in his hand and half a dozen clumsy arrows thrown over his shoulder. His hair and beard were tangled and long, the whole aspect of the man was savage and cruel. A savage indeed he was, merciless as the dark forest with its wild denizens that hemmed him in, ancestor of yours and mine though he may have been, likely I am telling you a story that happened three or maybe four thousand years ago. A romance? Not at all. Attend him on his hunt that day with me and you shall judge for yourself.

was.

over.

There, in the edge of a copse which the first rays of the sun were touching, stood his quarry, a huge horned beast, the aurochs of the stone age. The man's eyes shone at the sight. Flat upon the ground, he took long and deliberate aim from his cover. The arrow sped from the bow with a sharp twang, instantly followed by a roar of pain and fury. The wounded beast leaped high in the air. Another arrow and still another sought their mark with unerring aim and were buried in the shaggy flank of the aurochs. In another moment the forest had swallowed it up. The brush in its wake was swept as if by a hurricane, and a mighty crashing that died slowly in the distance told of the direction the bull had taken.

The hunter slung his bow across his shoulder and started after it. We will hasten ahead over the track of the wounded bull, whose course after thirty centuries lies before us like an open book, and as easy to read. At full speed it ran, goaded by pain and fear of the unseen but not unknown enemy-for, as we shall see, it had met him before. The shafts of the arrows were broken and twisted off as it ran, but the goads burrowed in its flesh and urged it on and on. Perhaps it lay down to nurse its wounds, weak from the loss of blood, until roused by the approach of stealthy feet, when it started up once more and ran while its strength held out. The sun was high when it came to a little lake in the depth of the woods, far from any

enemy.

"The aurochs was thirsty, very thirsty. The cool shade by the water beckoned it. Far or near there was no sound to make it afraid. With a deep sigh of contentment it waded in and stood knee-deep in the brown water, cooling its heaving flanks and drinking deep, deep. It had never been so thirsty since-since it was a nursling calf and its mother had wandered away from it in the forest. It was good to be here, with the white pond-lilies floating upon their broad leaves, with the flaming yellow of the birch and the russet beech mirrored in the pool. If only that wicked sting in its side

"What was that? A twig that snapped? The aurochs raised its head to listen with

a weary effort. so heavy. A queer, weak feeling took it in the knees, and the huge beast trembled on its legs as hot pains shot through its chest. What had gone wrong with the sun that just now shone so brightly, and why was the water turning so red? The last drop of its life-blood was ebbing from the gaping wound. The knees of the great bull gave way, and with the image of the peaceful pond and the yellow birch bending over it on its failing sight, it sank slowly under. The last tell-tale ripple in the water had died away when a savage bearded face was pushed through the undergrowth and the hunter's cruel eyes scanned the clearing. But the deep kept its secret.

It had become all at once

"The sunny October days passed, and were followed by harsh winter storms. The body of the aurochs, that had floated hither and thither in the pond while the sun warmed it, lay on the bottom, frozen solid in the ice. In the spring the pondlilies grew over it; their long stalks twined themselves about the white bones.

son followed season, and the skeleton settled deeper in the mud. Birch and beech and poplar shed their leaves upon the pond in autumn. The trees lived their lives and died, and the storms laid them low.

Their trunks and branches rotted slowly on the pond. Rushes and reeds grew among them, and by and by moss, layer after layer. As the centuries rolled by, the placid forest lake became a swamp. The hunter with his bow and arrows was gone, as was the aurochs. Others came and passed; some that carried weapons of bronze; lastly, men with iron swords and axes. The land resounded to the war-cries of the wild vikings. In their turn they too slept in their cairns and were forgotten.

"From the south came men and preached the peace of the White Christ, preached it with fire and sword. Wars ravaged the land. King fought with king, neighbor with neighbor. The land was laid waste, the forest vanished, the desolate moor moved in. When at last a better day dawned, the face of the country had changed. Where the still forest lake had been was a peat bog in which the plover piped its lonely lay. The bog belonged to Farmer Jens Peder Jensen.

lage near by you will find on the map as Vig.

"One May day in the year 1905 Farmer Jensen went out with his men to dig peat in the bog. When they reached the sandy bottom of the old lake, they found there the skeleton of the aurochs. It was complete except for the under jaw, that had dropped off as the carcass floated about under the warm sun in the long ago. That was found a score of feet away. They sent word to the museum of the big bones they had dug up, and I went down to look at them. Beside the skeleton they had picked up three arrow-heads, two whole and one broken, the clumsy make of which referred them at once to the earliest stone age, before the men of that day had acquired much skill in fashioning their weapons of flint. In the layers that had formed above it I identified easily the remains of birch, beech, and poplar, the roots of the white pond-lily and of the buckbean. Directly over the bones the interwoven roots of the common reed of our ditches formed an impenetrable mat; that was when the pond grew over. In the layers above this were the traces of a cranberry bog, then pine cones, and hundreds of hazel-nuts gnawed by mice that had had their winter stores there. Farthest up trunks and leaves of a deciduous forest growth that had covered the land perhaps in the day of the Crusaders, and then the mold of the present day.

"Remembering the arrow-heads, we looked the skeleton over carefully in the museum. The hunter's aim had been good. Two wounds made by flint arrows were found, one that had long been healed; that was from its first encounter with him; from the other the aurochs had evidently died. This last was in the seventh rib, and had been made by an arrow shot broadside and at close quarters. It had gone through the rib; the point was broken off and stuck yet in the bone. It had evidently pierced the lung and killed the bull. The old wound was in the ninth rib, and here also pieces of the flint remained in the bone. But the arrow had not penetrated it; the wound had healed and the bone grown almost over the splinters. So it was years after when the aurochs met the hunter the second time.

But though he killed it, his luck deserted him, after all, and he went home empty-handed once more."

The spectacles dropped back upon the inspector's nose and he looked at me with twinkling eyes. "Well," he said, "you have heard my hunting story. I grant you it is pretty old. But do you think the testimony many a jury has to listen to in cases that happened but yesterday is any clearer or more convincing than that which the peat-bog furnished in support of what you call my romance? Go over to the National Museum, if you want local color, and see the skeleton for yourself."

M

CHAPTER IV

Y aunt had her wish. During the remainder of that school year, from March to June, no demand came from the school authorities for my attendance at the public school. "Aren't we lucky that you don't have to go? ?" smiled my aunt. "That will give you such a chance to help out." Following the closing of the schools for the summer vacation, my aunt breathed even more freely. Well," she sighed, "here is a few more weeks when we don't have to worry about truant officers !"

66

Besides my coal-picking, I had also to carry my uncle's dinner to the mill. Acquaintance with a cotton-mill aroused in me a strong desire to don overalls and spend my time there. It was so warm in the mule-room! The clanking and shine of the polished machinery fascinated me. The mill-boys were so mannish; they went along with such a swagger, and they always had money-or seemed to have. Then, of course, when you work in the mill, your aunt sends you a little better dinner: a whole meat pie for your self, or half a pound of steak with a lot of its gravy dripping over a heap of mashed potatoes with butter in them! Then there are apple dumplings-three for yourself, if you only ask for them and a pint of tea with a lot of sugar in it! All this if you only work in the mill.

Think, too, of earning, say, two or three dollars every week and bringing it home in an envelope and throwing it down on the table, saying: "Here you are, aunt; just fork over my spending-money. I want to go to the theater this afternoon; they're playing Michael Strogoff,' and they've got specialties between the acts." And, besides all this fun, just think, if you work in the mill, you don't have to chop wood, or go out in the mud after coal and get chilly; you don't have to run errands after ten cents' worth of bits of meat, or after jelly rolls at inconvenient

hours. You come home at six at night, and your work's done. You come home at twelve on Saturday, and you're all through till Monday morning. You can lounge on the sofa with a library book, and your aunt won't slap your face and say: "Get up there, you good-for-nothing, and go down and get me up those clothes off the line before it rains!" Gee! it's fine to be in the mill, you bet! So I thought.

Consequently I was glad when Aunt Millie said to her husband, one night: "If you have any little things for Al to do when he brings your dinner, just make use of him till one o'clock. I should think that there would be cleaning, oiling, and such things, which you could leave till dinner, that he could do." With this concession I was delighted. I wanted to buy a pair of overalls right away to keep the cotton from getting on my clothes, but Aunt Millie said that what I had would do.

The watchman let me into the mill at half-past eleven, so I was able to work for my uncle one hour and a half a day, and in that time, week after week, to become very skillful in the performance of various mill chores. I learned to put bobbins in the frames, to piece broken threads from the spindles, to start and stop the mules, to clean rollers, to change rollers, to oil spindles, wheels, and pulleys. And I enjoyed every minute of it, too. My uncle would have me sit down with him and eat my share of his apple dumpling, which my aunt had made extra large purposely, and drink of the tea and eat a luscious wedge of his meat pie with lots of gravy in it. "You're ready for the mill, Al," said my uncle one day. "Can't I come in, then ?" I asked. No, you've simply got to have more schooling, you know. You're only a kid yet, just eleven, and it wouldn't do to put you in so young. You wait your time. You can't get too much learning."

Meanwhile, the beer-drinking custom, which my aunt had. conservatively fol