was discovered with consumption, John arranged affairs so that he could devote himself to her, and it fell in with their mutual dreams to play at gipsying. For two years they moved over the prairies in a "schooner," and during this time John came into pleasant contact with the Pawnees, by whom he swore stoutly to his dying day. "Play fair with an Indian," he held, "and you can trust him with anything, anywhere. It's wrong treatment that 's made sly devils of 'em."

With the redskins this born outdoors man hunted and trapped racoons and other prairie game, and in beehunting proved of keener sight than the aborigines in following to its honey store the flight of a homing worker. Later, when the Indians were camping near the farm, John branded his stock, and, unlike some of his neighbors, never lost a single head to any marauder. Play the game squarely, was his philosophy, and you stand to win.

Early in the seventies John London found himself bereft of his mate, and with an exceptionally large family to consider. One of the sons, Charles, had been injured playing our national game, a ball catching him in the chest, and his father conceived a plan whereby he might leave the remaining youngest folk-three of the eleven had died-temporarily with the older sisters and willing neighbors, while he struck out farther West in the hope of benefiting the ailing boy. All was satisfactorily worked out, when John weakened to the wailing of Eliza and Ida, hardly more than babies. At the last moment a rearrangement was effected that included the pair, as well

as two friends, Mr. and Mrs. Chase, who, in return for their expenses to California, were to assume the care of Charles and his two little sisters.

And John never again saw Iowa. Charles grew rapidly worse, and died eleven days after he looked upon his first ocean. The widower disposed of the farm, and with the proceeds established himself in a contracting business in San Francisco. Meantime he placed Eliza and Ida in the Protestant Orphan Asylum on Haight Street, paying for their living and tuition. Eliza London has always averred that the period spent in the quaint, moss-grown stone home was the happiest of her life, and with the tenaciousness of a devoted nature she had soon fastened her shy affection upon one of the teachers. Next she came to nourish a fond hope that her beloved papa would share her own adoration for "teacher," and bring to his girls a new mother. But she was doomed to secret sorrow and tears, for papa, although never blind to a pretty face and womanly traits, was even then under the influence of a wholly different person.

Many a smart beau of that winsome light-opera star of the long ago, Kate Castleton, will smile with awakened memories to learn that a sweet friendship existed between the lovable young singer and the big, quiet, long-bearded man from the Middle West who had such a way with him. But it was not she, and another ardent desire of the wee Eliza, who still wore a ring her idol had sent her, went glimmering with the first; for the lady of her father's second choice in life was not beautiful. And Eliza, who did not consider lovely her own small, expressive face, with its deep-blue, black-lashed London eyes, worshiped beauty, and little

ness in herself or those about her.

Now, the widower, ever alert to new impressions from the world's limitless abundance, had strayed from his more or less strict Methodist outlook and observances and had become enamoured of the doctrines of a spiritualistic cult. Among the devout sisters of this group of seekers after truth he met Flora Wellman, a tiny, fair woman in her early thirties, hailing from Massillon, Ohio. Once more in the London fashion John wasted no moment in binding to him his desire.

The next visiting day at the orphanage, on which he had planned to escort his betrothed to meet his daughters, found him ill; and when the unsuspecting Eliza and Ida were bidden to the stiff reception-room, imagine their astonishment to see an unknown woman, hardly above their own height, and with short-cropped hair, rise and announce that she was to be their new mother.

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In Jack London's heritage through his mother, again the blood of Great Britain predominates, for Flora Wellman's ancestry leads back to England and Wales, and includes strains of French and Dutch.

Flora, born August 17, 1843, was the youngest child of Marshall Wellman. Her mother, Eleanor Garrett Jones, had married Marshall in 1832. Her father, a devout circuit-rider of Welsh extraction, called "Priest" Jones, well beloved and valued adviser to the country-side, had been a pioneer settler and upbuilder of Ohio when that State was thought of as the whole West. He passed away an honored member of Wooster's society, full of

a comfortable fortune to his heirs.

The little girl was nurtured in an atmosphere of luxury and culture; and that no due family observance might be neglected, Marshall Wellman even summoned a portrait-painter from New York, who immortalized all the members of the household on his canvases.

"Few mothers of great men have been happy women," some one has written, and Flora Wellman seems to have been no exception. Capacity for happiness may have been a part of her heritage, but fate was extraordinarily cruel. Somewhere around her thirteenth year, I have it from her, she fell victim to a fever that physically stunted her, and probably accounted for her short, sparse hair and for certain melancholic tendencies. "I cannot remember the day when my mother was not old," Jack London more than once declared, while relatives, and friends of long standing, have asserted in her advanced years, "She has always been very much as you see her now." It would seem that the fever almost entirely robbed the unfortunate young soul of youth and gladness. Her eyes were ever fixed upon decline and dissolution, or peering into the hereafter of her spiritualistic faith.

Jack London was born in San Francisco, California, on January 12, 1876. He weighed nine pounds, which was one tenth of his mother's weight. She called him John Griffith, the middle name being in memory of Griffith Everhard, a favorite nephew. The Londons having no formal church affiliations, the infant was never chris- · tened, and answered to "Johnny" until the day when deliberately he selected, and made splendidly his own, the terse

British name that has girdled the world wherever books, adventure, and abundant life are known.

The house in which he first made himself audible was at Third and Bryant streets, occupied by the Slocums, friends of Flora, the master of the home being a prosperous member of a well-known printing establishment. Contrary to the more or less general belief that Jack London was born in a shanty on a sand-lot, the dwelling was a large and not inelegant one, for this had been a fashionable neighborhood in the changing fortunes of the gay Western metropolis, and had not yet lapsed into the subsequent "south of Market" social disfavor.

Unluckily, Flora was unable long to nourish her lusty babe, and he speedily grew thin and blue. John London looked about and discovered among the men working for him one whose wife had lost her latest born and who was willing to become wet-nurse to the white child. Mrs. Prentiss was a full-blooded negress, and proud of it. Now she became "Mammy Jenny" to an appreciative foster-son whose faithful and affectionate care she was until his death; since then I have as naturally assumed the trust, over and above the provisions of his last will and testament.

It was a veritable cherub that the black woman undertook to mother in her essential capacity, white as snow, exquisitely modeled, with dimpled hands and feet surprisingly small for his firm, plump torso. He soon became pink-cheeked, with eyes of violet, his seraphic face haloed in white-gold ringlets too fragile-fine to seem real to the worshiping African, the devotion of whose bereaved heart was instant and abiding toward the "teenty, help

less angel." In the Cloudesley Johns correspondence I find this from Jack: "Hair was black when I was born, then came out during an infantile sickness and returned positively whiteso white that my negress nurse called me 'cotton ball.""

Later, to an epidemic of diptheria was due the exodus of the Londons from San Francisco. The baby fell a victim, followed by his shadow, Eliza, agonizing doubly on his account; while the terrified mother turned to and heroically nursed the two, as when a girl she had with deathly fear courageously brought through smallpox her sister Mary's son, Harry Everhard. To this day Eliza holds that a certain mortuary suggestion from her stepmother whipped her to consciousness and a winning fight for life. Both she and Johnny were lying in what the doctor pronounced a condition bordering upon dissolution. The exhausted, but thrifty, Flora asked him if it would be feasible to bury them in the same coffin, when the aroused girl opened her horrified eyes and feebly, but unmistakably, protested.

The physician, having proved a poor judge of their resistance, dropped back upon the time-honored recommendation of a sojourn in the country, and the first lap toward this end was merely to the large San Francisco suburb of Oakland, to the east, across the bay, that wide expanse of capricious waters that set in Jack London's eyes the far look of the Argonaut. Thus Oakland, in the County of Alameda, for him came to be the center to which he always referred as his home town, from which he fared forth to the adventures in which he recaptured the spirit of romance for a growingly blasé civilization.

HE falls of Fautaua, famed in Tahitian legend, are exquisite in beauty and surrounding, and so near Papeete that I walked to them and back in a day. Yet hardly any one goes there. For those who have visited them they remain a shrine of loveliness, wondrous in form and unsurpassed in color. Before the genius of Tahiti was smothered in the black and white of modernism, the falls, and the valley in which they are, were the haunt of lovers who sought seclusion for their pledgings.

A princess accompanied me to them. She was not a daughter of a king or queen, but she was near to royalty, and she herself as aristocratic in carriage and manner as was Oberea, who loved Captain Cook. I danced with her at a dinner given by a consul, and when I spoke to her of Loti's visit to Fautaua with Rarahu, she said in French:

"Why do you not go there yourself with a Rarahu? Loti is old and an admiral, and writes now of Egypt and Turkey and places soiled by crowds of people; but Rarahu is still here and young. Shall I find her for you?"

I looked at her and boldly said: "I am a stranger in your island, as was Loti when he met Rarahu. Will you not yourself show me Fautaua?"

She gave a shrill cry of delight, and in the frank, sweet way of the Tahitian girl replied:

"We will run away to-morrow morn

ing. Wear little, for it will be warm, and bring no food."

"I will obey you literally," I said, "and you must find manna or charm ravens to bring us sustenance."

I had coffee opposite the marketplace in the shop of Wing Luey, and chatted a few moments with Prince Hineo, the son of the Princesse de Joinville, who would have been king had the French not ended the Kingdom of Tahiti. No matter what time Hineo lay down at night, he was up at dawn for the market and his early roll and coffee and his converse with the sellers and the buyers. There once a day for an hour the native in Papeete touched the country folk, and renewed the ancient custom of gossip in the cool of the morning.

The princess-in English her familiar Tahitian name, Noanoa Tiare, meant Fragrance of the Jasmine-was in the Parc du Bougainville, by the bust of the first French circumnavigator.

"Ia ora nat," she greeted, me. "Are you ready for adventure?"

She handed me a small, soft package, with a caution to keep it safe and dry. I put it in my inside pocket.

The light of the sun hardly touched the lagoon, and Moorea was still shrouded in the shadows of the expiring night. As we walked down the beach, the day was opening with the "morning bank," the masses of white clouds that gather upon the horizon