near that island-enough to guide almost a blind man. What more do you want? An active volcano to steer by!" These last words he roared out exultingly, then jumped up and glared. The door to the left of the bar had swung open, and Mrs. Schomberg, dressed for duty, stood facing him down the whole length of the room. She clung to the handle for a moment, then came in and glided to her place, where she sat down to stare straight before her, as usual. I TROPICAL nature had been kind to the failure of the commercial enterprise. The desolation of the headquarters of the Tropical Belt Coal Company had been screened from the side of the sea; from the side where prying eyes-if any were sufficiently interested, either in malice or in sorrow-could have noted the decaying bones of that once sanguine enterprise. Heyst had been sitting among the bones buried so kindly in the grass of two wet seasons' growth. The silence of his surroundings, broken only by such sounds as a distant roll of thunder, the lash of rain through the foliage of some big trees, the noise of the wind tossing the leaves of the forest, and of the short seas breaking against the shore, favoured rather than hindered his solitary meditation. A meditation is always in a white man, at least— more or less an interrogative exercise. Heyst medi tated in simple terms on the mystery of his actions; and he answered himself with the honest reflection: "There must be a lot of the original Adam in me, after all." He reflected, too, with the sense of making a dis covery, that this primeval ancestor is not easily suppressed. The oldest voice in the world is just the one that never ceases to speak. If anybody could have silenced its imperative echoes, it should have been Heyst's father, with his contemptuous, inflexible negation of all effort; but apparently he could not. There was in the son a lot of that first ancestor who, as soon |