hammer, strike off flake after flake, perhaps 1,500 in a morning; and finally will work these up into sharp-edged squares to serve as gun-flints for the trade with native Africa.  Alas! the palmy days of knapping gun-flints for the British Army will never return to Brandon.  Still, there must have been trade depression in those parts at any time from the bronze-age up to the times of Brown Bess; for the strike-a-lights, still to be got at a penny each, can have barely kept the wolf from the door.  And Mr. Snare is not merely an artisan but an artist.  He has chipped out a flint ring, a feat which taxed the powers of the clever neolithic knappers of pre-dynastic Egypt; whilst with one of his own flint fishhooks he has taken a fine trout from the Little Ouse that runs by the town.

Thus there are things in old England that are older even than some of our friends wot.  In that one county of Suffolk, for instance, the good flint—­so rich in colour as it is, and so responsive to the hammer, at any rate if you get down to the lower layers or “sases,” for instance, the floorstone, or the black smooth-stone that is generally below water-level—­has served the needs of all the palaeolithic periods, and of the neolithic age as well, and likewise of the modern Englishmen who fought with flintlocks at Waterloo, or still more recently took out tinder-boxes with them to the war in South Africa.  And what does this stand for in terms of the antiquity of man?  Thousands of years?  We do not know exactly; but say rather hundreds of thousands of years.

CHAPTER III RACE

There is a story about the British sailor who was asked to state what he understood by a Dago.  “Dagoes,” he replied, “is anything wot isn’t our sort of chaps.”  In exactly the same way would an ancient Greek have explained what he meant by a “barbarian.”  When it takes this wholesale form we speak, not without reason, of race-prejudice.  We may well wonder in the meantime how far this prejudice answers to something real.  Race would certainly seem to be a fact that stares one in the face.

Stroll down any London street:  you cannot go wrong about that Hindu student with features rather like ours but of a darker shade.  The short dapper man with eyes a little aslant is no less unmistakably a Japanese.  It takes but a slightly more practised eye to pick out the German waiter, the French chauffeur, and the Italian vendor of ices.  Lastly, when you have made yourself really good at the game, you will be scarcely more likely to confuse a small dark Welshman with a broad florid Yorkshireman than a retriever with a mastiff.