fast before she tried it, and then she ran and brought her pipes and sat down beside the circle. And her father did not go to his hunting, or her mother to her cooking and cave-tidying, but they both sat there with Vertebrata, hearing her pipe and watching the shadow finger move, and waiting till her mother should feel the feeling of enough.
Now! Since the world began, the Hours, Minutes, and Seconds had been hanging over it, waiting patiently until people should understand about them. But nobody before had ever, ever thought about them, and Vertebrata and her mother and her father were the very first ones who had even begun to understand.
So it chanced that in the second that Vertebrata began to pipe and the bone was laid on the circle, that Second (deep in the air and yet as near as time is to us) knew that it was being marked off at last on the soft circle of the earth, and so did the next Second, and the next, and the next, and the next, until sixty of them knew—and there was the first Minute, measured in the circle before the cave. And other Minutes knew what was happening, and they all came hurrying likewise, and they filled the air with ex-
