had been taught to detest. Or, wrapped about the loins in a pareu, he would recline on a couch smoking perpetually and absorbing the beauty around him that those same bourgeois could not really see. An excellent Catholic lady of Papeete still remembers being warned as a child to go nowhere near the studio of Gauguin. But M. Teissier himself, with that charm and candor which is still his to-day, loved the essential man; and there were others. Three of them, and the homely touch arrests one, used to walk once a week and seek out a friend who could make supremely that omelette baveuse which in this strange land reminded them of Brittany and of France.

Nor did he starve. One does not even to-day starve in Tahiti. There are no slums in the tropics where there are no cities. Cocoanuts, bananas, fish, and a shelter-even twenty years ago these could be had almost for nothing in the islands. Besides, M. Daniel de Montfried was his great and indefatigable friend in Paris. He acted as the painter's agent, and if the prices he obtained for his works were small compared with their value now, a few hundred francs out here went far. Doubtless he was often temporarily embarrassed and in debt, but what artist is not? Doubtless he worried himself from time to time, but what artist troubles over such matters for more than an occasional half-hour?

Moreover, M. Teissier insists that

he was not permanently unhappy. It is true that he was grievously ill and grew worse, and that often he was in extreme pain; but even from the Marquesas, when he was at death's door, comes the testimony, "il oubliait sa douleur pour parler de l'Art." And if sick in body, disappointment and sorrow also entered deeply into his soul. Nevertheless, Paul Gauguin was just in time. He had that consolation. Let that be understood. He sensed rather than saw, perhaps, but still he sensed, "l'homme primitif suprême." He was able to fulfil his own formula: "Glorifier l'homme en lui asservissant la nature par l'Art." In the Marquesas especially he got down among the dying members of an expiring race in time to leave as a legacy to us a just appreciation of their spirit. And he must have known that he alone could do it. His sacrifice had not been in vain. The world may perhaps know another Gauguin, but if so, he will have been born for Polynesia too late.

Yet there was enough of sacrifice. No man, however devoted even to the supreme mistresses, Art or Religion, ever wholly forgets his own blood and his native land. Nor did Paul Gauguin, whose art was his religion. They found among his few possessions at his death a faded photograph of his children; and the last picture that he painted among the vivid hues and under the blazing sun of the Marquesas was of the roofs of a Breton village huddling under snow.

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"They pine because they breathe their own breath over and over again. We should come home often from far adventures and perils and discoveries." Wherefore, agreeing with him, six of us middle-aged adventurers, on a day in October all frost and gold, escaped from the city and set forth for Fourways Lodge, hidden in the heart of the Barrens. As we crossed the Camden ferry the sky was all smoke and gold, and, beyond, our road led through woods aflame with frost-fire. The black-jack oaks were a blaze of copperred, the post-oaks, ox-blood, while the leaves of the willow-oaks drifted down in sheaves of russet arrowheads. Even the fleshy leaves of the common pokeberry were carmine-lake above and Tyrian rose beneath. In the sandy fields there were green-white, brownyellow masses of fragrant everlasting, thickets of bottle-green bay-bushes, and everywhere fierce steel-sharp clotburs, like the many-pointed colters scattered over Flodden Field. Once a painted-lady alighted on a spray of sunshine-yellow asters and waved her wings of velvety black, tipped with white and barred with burnt orange. At times they would close, and she would change into a gray withered leaf, only to be flaunting her beauty

them, and danced away through the air over a marsh which sprawled across the farm-lands. Now and again the little wanton stopped at the pink lanterns that the rose-mallows still swung against jade-green rushes or lingered before the frosted white of the silver-rod or the dull amethyst of the climbing boneset. Only before one flower she made no pause. Midnight blue, a spray of closed gentian thrust itself up from the yellowing grass. Closed, lonely, lovely flowers unvisited by butterfly, bee, or the dim moths of the dark, not even to the sun himself would they open.

Beyond the woodlands we came to Mantua Creek, guarded by Mantua Oak, which stands on a little knoll overlooking the stream. There are three great white oaks in New Jersey; namely, Basking-Ridge Oak, Salem Oak, and Mantua Oak, and the greatest of these is Mantua. A few years ago Tatem Oak was a fourth, but men burning brush in the field in which it stood, with rare intelligence, allowed the flames to spread to the tree, and destroyed in a few hours a monument which it had taken half a thousand years to build.

Stopping at the creek, we measured the old monarch. Five feet from the

ground its gnarled trunk was over twenty feet in circumference. Although not a tall tree, it had a spread of a hundred and fifteen feet, while its huge squat girth gave it an appearance of incredible age. As a matter of fact, it was well over four hundred years old. We found this out by measuring the interval between the bud-scars on the end twigs of its first branch, which gave the distance which that bough grew in a year, and then dividing the total length of the branch by that as a unit. It was a large tree before Nova Cæsarea, as New Jersey was first christened, was ever visited by a white man, and a sizable sapling when Columbus discovered the New World.

Golden

shaped leaves and flat blossoms with a perfume like sandalwood.

The sun had gone when at last we reached Fourways, and the west was all flame-red, amber, and lune-green, with a shoal of tiny violet clouds drifting across the afterglow. The lodge itself, built of imperishable white-cedar logs, stood on the bank of Great Egg Harbor River, whose surface showed like black panne velvet, stained here and there a violet-crimson by the sunset, while along its banks rows of black-green pines were etched sharply against a sky of pale gold. Little by little the light faded, and as we entered the woods in which the lodge lay hidden, stars were tangled here and there in the black boughs, and the light of the rising moon lay across the shadows like a pool of dream. As the dark strode through the twisted trees, the soft air suddenly tingled with frost, and inside the lodge we welcomed the crackle of the fire in the vast, half-moon fireplace built of red, brown, and orange sandstone dug up in lumps from just under the white sand which carpets the Barrens.

In the grass beyond the oak we found that little orchid, the lady's tresses, or wild hyacinth (Gyrostachis cernua), with its faint scent of bitter almonds and woven stalk of waxenwhite flowers growing out of a palegreen sheath. Near it, on dryer ground, the withered grass was rosy with purple gerardia, whose stems, like square green wires, were crowned by exquisite flowers, each with five lovely crumpled petals, which flared like tiny trumpets and were of a pale-rose color, deepening to a more vivid tint within their curved depths. Across the cup of each stretched a faint fine fleece, as if a strand of gossamer had floated between the curved lips. Beyond the gerardia grew a mass of sabbattia, that pink cousin of the gentian, with heart

point of sound pricked through the stillness, came the hoot of a great horned owl, with its doubled second note, as he hunted here and there for rabbits among the scrub-oaks.

Suddenly the stillness was broken by a perfectly appalling scream. Although I recognized what it was, my muscles jerked and twitched at the sound, and when it was repeated, my companion, even though a veteran naturalist, gripped me so tightly that his finger-prints showed black on my arm the next morning. It was the scream of a fox, probably the most sinister, unearthly wild-animal note that can be heard in North America. The howl of the wolf and the screech of the wildcat, or bay lynx, are all weird sounds, to say nothing of the frightful shriek which the horned owl sometimes gives, but none of them begins to be as fearful as the scream of a dog-fox. Usually he barks like a dog that is just learning how, and the vixen squalls and squawks like a heron; but none of these sounds can ever be confounded with his scream, as rare and dreadful as that screech of the wounded horse which frightened even Hawkeye and Chingachgook.

A fox-scream is not usually heard more than a few times in a lifetime. My first experience with the sound was on Cream Hill, up in Cornwall, Connecticut, one dark night when I was a boy-it was several years ago. I was passing the Half Moon Lot, whose thirty acres include a number of foxdens, and just as I reached Boundary Elm, a vast tree which marked the corners of four farms, I heard a fearful scream in the darkness close at hand which I instantly recognized as the screech of a black panther. Not having with me a rifle, a tomahawk, or

even the long, keen hunting-knife with which all the heroes of Harry Castleman and Mayne Reid, my authorities on panthers, black and blond, were always armed, I was somewhat at a disadvantage. In fact, a hurried examination of my pockets showed no more deadly weapon than a slate pencil. However, I did not lose my presence of mind. Realizing instantly that flight was what the emergency required, I flew. At least I do not remember touching the ground until I crossed the bridge over the brook at the foot of the hill half a mile away. At the time I felt that it was a very narrow escape and that I probably owed my life to the cool daring with which I had met the situation. In later years, however, since I learned that my black panther was really a red fox, I have had my doubts.

The next time I

Silrod heard that sound

was again in Corn

wall, thirty years

later, one frosty evening in the fall of 1919. Although I was indoors at the time, the scream brought me to my feet with every muscle tense before I recognized what it was that I had heard.

It was bedtime when at last the botanist and I came back to the lodge and crept into our bunks to sleep as only those can who breathe all night long the clean, far

air of the Barrens, blown over miles and millions of scented pines. Outside our window a single white treecricket, last of a lost army, sang to us in high triads, like the tinkling of clear crystals, and I fell asleep with the icy sweetness of

2

his notes throbbing in

my ears. The next morning the artist rose betimes and tried to persuade the botanist to get up by the direct method of poking him with a long stick through the open window. He found that eminent scientist ware and waking, and was driven back with great slaughter by a well directed pitcher of water.

After an icy dip in the stream, we adjourned to the breakfast-table, where we absorbed huge quantities of eggs and bacon, buttered toast, waffles with honey, and steaming coffee, which our host, who had a pretty taste in cookery, had prepared.

Then came one of those treasuredays of life whose memories sift through the years like many-colored jewels. Around sudden curves, through twisted channels, and down gleaming vistas the botanist and I canoed across the Whirl Hole and along Great Egg Harbor River, whose banks were a blaze of color. The blueberries were waves of wine, while the leaves of the Southern smilax, which is unarmed, and whose berries are coral-red instead of blue, had been stained scarlet by the frost, the only leaf in the woods to attain that color.

The leaves of the post-oaks, whose rounded lobes made a Druid cross, were honey-yellow, and those of the Spanish oaks floated raspberry-red against the cobalt water. The claretcolored sour-gums, or pepperidges, as we call them in Connecticut, were covered with blue berries and made feeding-stations for hungry robins, cardinals, blue-jays, and goldfinches, which fluttered among their stiff, rightangled branches. Once a flock of redbreasted nuthatches passed us, traveling through the tops of the trees like monkeys and chattering to one another, "Eh, eh, eh," as they fed on tiny insects hidden in the bark. Their alarm-note sounded much like the "zee-zee" of one of the hot-weather locusts that drones through blazing August days. At times a pair would bicker with sudden little scolding notes, and, dropping their wings, would peck at each other furiously, only to stop a moment later and go on feeding with the rest. Once we came across a red-bellied terrapin on the bank, the size of a large soup-plate, with a dingy brown back blotched with red. The botanist nearly caught it. He said afterward that I splashed with my paddle, while I was equally positive that the terrapin escaped because of his senile slowness. At any rate, this I know: the red-belly remained in his river.

Beyond the terrapin, a red-squirrel suddenly dashed through the boughs of a Spanish oak that hung far out over the river and nearly touched the twigs of a tree on the opposite bank. The arched branches were evidently one of his suspension-bridges, for he leaped six feet through the air and, hooking his little bent fore paws across a limb, swung like a pendulum above the