story can have started “Once upon a time,” and everything must have been quite different.
About then,—only of course they didn’t know it was then—a Prehistoric Mother said one morning to her Prehistoric Little Daughter:—
“Now, Vertebrata, get your practising done and then you may go to play.” (It wasn’t a piano and it wasn’t an organ, but it was a lovely, reedy, blow-on-it thing, like a pastoral pipe, and little girls always sat about on rocks in the landscape, as soon as they had had their breakfasts, and practised.)
So Vertebrata took her reed pipes and sat on a rock in the landscape and practised—all of what we now know (but she did not know) would be five minutes. Then she came in the cave, and tossed the pipes on her bed of skins, and then remembered and hung them in their place above the fireplace, and turned toward the doorway. But her mother, who was roasting flesh at the fire, called her back.
“Vertebrata,” she said, “did I not tell you to practise?”
“I did practise,” said Vertebrata.
“Then practise and practise,” said her mother,
