It was extraordinarily difficult, for Ug had not had a very good education.  All he knew he had picked up in the give and take of tribal life.  For this reason he felt it would be better to keep the thing short.  But it was hard to condense all he felt into a brief note.  For a long time he thought in vain, then one night, as he tossed sleeplessly on his bed of rocks, he came to a decision.  He would just ideograph, “Dear Wug, I love you.  Yours faithfully, Ug.  P.S.  R.S.V.P.,” and leave it at that.  So in the morning he got to work, and by the end of the week the ideograph was completed.  It consisted of a rising sun, two cave-bears, a walrus, seventeen shin-bones of the lesser rib-nosed baboon, a brontosaurus, three sand-eels, and a pterodactyl devouring a mangold-wurzel.  It was an uncommonly neat piece of work, he considered, for one who had never attended an art-school.  He was pleased with it.  It would, he flattered himself, be a queer sort of girl who could stand out against that.  For the first time for weeks he slept soundly and peacefully.

Next day his valet brought him with his morning beverage a piece of flat rock.  On it was carved a simple human thigh-bone.  He uttered a loud cry.  She had rejected him.  The parcel-post, an hour later, brought him his own ideograph, returned without a word.

Ug’s greatest friend in the tribe was Jug, son of Mug, a youth of extraordinary tact and intelligence.  To him Ug took his trouble.

Jug heard his story, and asked to see exactly what he had ideographed.

“You must have expressed yourself badly,” he said.

“On the contrary,” replied Ug, with some pique, “my proposal was brief, but it was a model of what that sort of proposal should be.  Here it is.  Read it for yourself.”

Jug read it.  Then he looked at his friend, concerned.

“But, my dear old man, what on earth did you mean by saying she has red hair and that you hate the sight of her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, this ichthyosaurus.”

“That’s not an ichthyosaurus.  It’s a brontosaurus.”

“It’s not a bit like a brontosaurns.  And it is rather like an ichthyosaurus.  Where you went wrong was in not taking a few simple lessons in this sort of thing first.”

“If you ask me,” said Ug disgustedly, “this picture-writing is silly rot.  To-morrow I start an Alphabet.”
       * * * * *
But on the morrow he was otherwise employed.  He was standing, concealed behind a rock, at the mouth of the cave of Wug, daughter of Glug.  There was a dreamy look in his eyes, and his fingers were clasped like steel bands round the handle of one of the most business-like clubs the Stone Age had ever seen.  Orthodoxy had found another disciple.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  SCENE—­An Army Boxing Competition.

Civilian.  “RATHER A FEARFUL MAN, THAT?”