"You must love them very much," said the boy.
"I do," said his friend, "and some day I shall give them all to a museum where they will be kept for people to see."
CHAPTER XVI
HOW STONE WEAPONS OF THE CAVE MEN WERE FIRST FOUND
If you should cross the broad ocean that lies toward the rising sun, you would come to a beautiful country called France. Here grow the olive, the orange, and the grape; and the mulberry, on which the silk worm feeds. But it is not with these that we have to do to-day, but with some strange old things that once lay buried far below the soil in which they grow.
About seventy years ago, a man in that country who sold sand and gravel found that his own gravel pits were worked out. He went to the banks of a river—the river Somme—near by and found a good gravel bed, which he began to cut down and cart off to sell. He dug away at the hill for months and got far below the top of the ground. Then one day his spade struck something hard; he dug it out and saw that it was a very large bone.
"That is a queer bone," he said to himself. "I wonder what animal it belonged to. It is too big to have been the bone of a horse or a cow. It is big enough to have belonged to an elephant. Well, no matter what it came from," he said, throwing it aside, "it is neither sand nor gravel, so it is nothing to me."
As he dug on, he threw out some rudely shaped stones.
"These are queer, too," he said, "but they will not sell for gravel." And away went the stones from his shovel.