placed the first of the present family of man upon the earth?  Were those European barbarians of the Drift Period a primeval race, destroyed before the creation of our own race, and lower and more barbarian than the lowest of the present inhabitants of the world? or, as seems more probable, were these mysterious beings—­the hunters of the mammoth and the aurochs—­the earliest progenitors of our own family, the childish fathers of the human race?

The subject hardly yet admits of an exact and scientific answer.  We can merely here suggest the probability of a vast antiquity to human beings, and of the existence of the FOSSIL or PRE-ADAMITIC MAN.

* * * * *

LIFE IN THE OPEN AIR.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “CECIL DREEME” AND “JOHN BRENT.”

KATAHDIN AND THE PENOBSCOT.

CHAPTER X.

RIPOGENUS.

Ripogenus is a tarn, a lovely oval tarn, within a rim of forest and hill; and there behold, O gioja! at its eastern end, stooping forward and filling the sphere, was Katahdin, large and alone.

But we must hasten, for day wanes, and we must see and sketch this cloudless summit from terra firma.  A mile and half-way down the lake, we landed at the foot of a grassy hill-side, where once had been a lumberman’s station and hay-farm.  It was abandoned now, and lonely in that deeper sense in which widowhood is lonelier than celibacy, a home deserted lonelier than a desert.  Tumble-down was the never-painted house; ditto its three barns.  But, besides a camp, there were two things to be had here,—­one certain, one possible, probable even.  The view, that was an inevitable certainty; Iglesias would bag that as his share of the plunder of Ripogenus.  For my bagging, bears, perchance, awaited.  The trappers had seen a bear near the barns.  Cancut, in his previous visit, had seen a disappearance of bear.  No sooner had the birch’s bow touched lightly upon the shore than we seized our respective weapons,—­Iglesias his peaceful and creative sketch-book, I my warlike and destructive gun,—­and dashed up the hill-side.

I made for the barns to catch Bruin napping or lolling in the old hay.  I entertain a vendetta toward the ursine family.  I had a duello, pistol against claw, with one of them in the mountains of Oregon, and have nothing to show to point the moral and adorn the tale.  My antagonist of that hand-to-hand fight received two shots, and then dodged into cover and was lost in the twilight.  Soon or late in my life, I hoped that I should avenge this evasion.  Ripogenus would, perhaps, give what the Nachchese Pass had taken away.

Vain hope!  I was not to be an ursicide.  I begin to fear that I shall slay no other than my proper personal bearishness.  I did my duty for another result at Ripogenus.  I bolted audaciously into every barn.  I made incursions into the woods around.  I found the mark of the beast, not the beast.  He had not long ago decamped, and was now, perhaps, sucking the meditative paw hard-by in an arbor of his bear-garden.