Days Before history. H. R. Hall

      IN a book of this kind nothing more will be expected than an outline sketch of some phases of the life lived by the prehistoric dwellers in our land. The known facts are few; yet there must have been, even in those far-away times, well-defined differences of habit and custom due to local circumstances; so that details more or less true of one tribe or group would possibly be quite untrue of others.

      But, for all that, there are various conclusions upon which the learned may be considered to be in agreement; and, working from these and from the descriptions of primitive life in our own times, there is brought within our reach the possibility of constructing a picture of man in early Britain which, without leaving the lines of reasonable conjecture, need be neither meagre nor misleading.

      An attempt has been made here to introduce only descriptions which can in some degree be vouched for; and as much of such authenticated detail as possible has been included. Some licence has been taken in bringing together events which in nature were, no doubt, separated by long intervals of time and space; in suggesting, for instance, that a man of the newer stone age might have heard some vague tradition of the makers of the old stone weapons, and yet, in his lifetime, have witnessed the incoming of the first weapons of bronze: yet, for the sake of picturesqueness, such licence may be considered to be not only permissible but, in a book with the purpose of this, actually desirable.

      When first it was suggested to the writer that he should undertake this task, there was only one detail of the necessary equipment which he could feel to be his own—a childhood’s interest in the subject, never forgotten. There was the recollection of a chapter in an old lesson-book, much pored over, with its two or three simple woodcuts showing the skin-clad “ancient Briton” hollowing out his log canoe, or shooting at the deer in the forest. There was the memory of a reputed “British village,” with its pits and mounds, situated on a distant hill in the neighbourhood of his old home, often talked about, but too remote to be visited. There were recollections of a village philosopher, an amateur bird-stuffer and collector of fossils and antiquities, who carried in his purse and would show a treasure beyond gold, a barbed flint arrow-head. One he was who did not resent the companionship of an inquisitive little boy, but took him fishing and taught him something of the old country lore.

      The road into fairyland lay open before that boy in his childhood. With home-made bow and arrows he stalked the deer on the open hill-side, or, armed with the deadly besom-stake for spear, tracked the wild boar to his lair among the whins. A running stream bounding the distant fields was for him a river to be forded with caution; the woodland pool was a forest lake, deep