"These are for killing buffalo and other big game."
And there were stone axes and hammers. Lastly, the doctor showed him something that looked like a little, very old hatchet. The boy turned it over and over and looked at it. It was all weather stained, and reddish-brown and green.
[Illustration: A stone ax]
"This is not stone," the boy said at last.
"No," said the doctor, "that is a copper hatchet. I was very glad to get that because there are not many of them found now. You know that when Columbus came to our country, red men lived all over the land. They were in what we call the Stone Age; that is, they made their tools and weapons of stone. But there are great lumps of copper beside one of our lakes here. Now copper, you know, is a rather soft metal, and the red men about here learned to pound it into shape for weapons. They called both their stone hatchets and copper hatchets 'tomahawks.'
"Red men never learned to melt iron and make tools of it as we do, though there was plenty of iron in the mountains among which many tribes lived. The red men never got beyond the Stone Age and into the Iron Age as white men did."
"Where did you get all these beautiful stone things?" the boy asked after a while, looking at them with longing eyes.
"I have been years in getting them together," the doctor said. "Many of them I found myself, on my walks through the country. Others I bought from the people who found them."