At the time when the baby, Ab, slept that afternoon in his nest
in the beech leaves this river was not called the Thames, it was only
called the Running Water, to distinguish it from the waters of the coast.
It did not empty into the British Channel, for the simple and sufficient
reason that there was no such channel at the time. Where now exists that
famous passage which makes islands of Great Britain, where, tossed upon
the choppy waves, the travelers of the world are seasick, where Drake and
Howard chased the Great Armada to the Northern seas and where, to-day,
the ships of the nations are steered toward a social and commercial
center, was then good, solid earth crowned with great forests, and the
present little tail end of a river was part of a great affluent of the
Rhine, the German river famous still, but then with a size and sweep
worth talking of. Then the Thames and the Elbe and Weser, into which
tumbled a thousand smaller streams, all went to feed what is now the
Rhine, and that then tremendous river held its course through dense
forests and deep gorges until it reached broad plains, where the North
Sea is to-day, and blended finally with the Northern Ocean.
The trees which stood upon the bank of the great river, or which could be
seen in the far distance beyond the marsh or plain, were not all the same
as now exist.
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