The First Days of Man, as Narrated Quite Simply for Young Readers

by Frederic Arnold Kummer

"Tell the Wind to blow a great storm, and wash some of your fish up into the salt marshes. And after that, have your waves build a wall of sand along the edge of the marshes, so that the fish and the water you have washed in cannot get out again."

"I will do it," said the Ocean, "but I do not see any sense in it."

"You will, when I have finished," Mother Nature said.

So the Ocean spoke to the Wind, and told him to blow his hardest, and the Wind howled and shrieked with joy and drove the waves before him, and they danced and rolled up into the great wide marshes and carried thousands and thousands of fish with them. Then other waves came, carrying sand, and with the sand they built a wall all along the edge of the marshes, so that the water in the marshes could not get out again, but stayed there, spread out like a great shallow inland sea.

Then Mother Nature said to the Sun:

"Sun, dry up the marshes, and see what happens."

So the Sun blazed down on the marshes and began to dry them up. It took him thousands of years to do it, for they were very large, but he did not mind that, for he had nothing to do but shine.

The fish that had been carried into the marshes had a great time, at first, swimming about in the shallow water quite as much at home as they had been in the Ocean. But after a while, as the marshes began to dry up, some of the fish got caught in the mud on the edges, and they couldn't breathe, with their heads out of water, so they flopped their fins in the mud, and tried to breathe the air, and at last, by pushing with their fins, they managed to get back into the deeper water again. Every time this happened, their fins got a little tougher and stronger, from pushing themselves along in the mud, and their lungs got a little more used to breathing air, instead of water, and by the time thousands of years had gone by, and the water in the marshes was nearly all dried up, the great-great-great-grandchildren of the first fish had got so used to breathing air that they did not mind it a bit, and their fins had got so used to rubbing along on the mud that they weren't fins any longer, but had changed to short, strong little webbed feet.