not knowing how else to tell her to do her whole hour. Her mother didn’t know hours, but she knew by the feel of her feelings when Vertebrata had done enough.
So Vertebrata sat on a rock and did five minutes more, and came and threw her pipes on her bed of skins, and remembered and hung them up, and then turned toward the door of the cave. But her mother looked up from the flesh-pot and called her back again.
“Vertebrata,” she said, “do you want mother to have to speak to you again?”
“No, indeed, muvver,” said her little daughter.
“Then practise and practise and practise,” said her mother. “If you can’t play when you grow up, what will people think?”
So Vertebrata went back to her landscape rock, and this thing was repeated until Vertebrata had practised what we now know (but she did not know) to have been a whole hour. And you can easily see that in order to bring this about, what her mother must have said to her the last time of all was this:—
“I want you to practise and practise and practise and practise and practise and practise and practise and practise and practise and prac-
