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considered other possible attractiveness 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

good works, and incidentally leaving 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.

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"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 christened, 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 be came 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." 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.

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I Walk With a Princess

By FREDERICK O'BRIEN

Drawing, from photograph, by W. Fletcher-White

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

before the trade-wind begins its diurnal sweep, to shift and mold them all the hours till sunset.

Fragrance of the Jasmine was in a long and clinging tunic of pale blue, with low, white shoes disclosing stockings also of blue, and wore a hat of pandanus weave. She carried nothing, nor had I anything in my hands, and we were to be gone all day. I regretted that I had not lingered longer with Prince Hinoe over the rolls and coffee.

We fared past the merchants' stores, the Cercle Bougainville, and the steamship wharf, and over the Pont de l'Est, or Eastern bridge, to Patutoa. The princess pointed out to me many wretched straw houses, crowded in a hopeless way. They were like a refugee camp after a disaster, impermanent, uncomfortable, barely hold ing on to the swampy earth. One knew the occupants to be far from their own Lares and Penates.

"Those are the habitations of people of other islands," she said. "The people of the Paumotus, the Australs, and of Easter Island settled there. They were brought here by odious labor contractors, and died of homesickness. Those men murdered hundreds of them to gain un peu d'argent, a handful of gold. Eh b'en, those who did it have suffered. They have faded away, and most of their evil money, too. Aue!"

The church of the curious Josephite religion was near by, and in the mission house attached to it I saw the American preachers of the sect.

"What do they preach?" I asked Noanoa Tiare.

"Those missionaries, the Tonito? Oh, they speak evil of the Mormons. I do not know how they speak of

God." She laughed. "I am not interested in religions,” she explained. "They are so difficult to understand. Our own old gods seem easier to know about."

We had arrived at the part of the beach into which the broad avenue of Fautaua debouched.

The road was beside the stream of Fautaua, and arching it were magnificent dark-green trees, like the locust-trees of Malta. This avenue was in the middle of the island, and looking through the climbing bow of branches I saw Maiauo, the lofty needles of rock which rise black-green from the mountain plateau and form a tiara, Le Diadème, of the French. A quarter of an hour's stroll brought us to a natural basin into which the stream fell. It was of it that Julien Viaud, shortly after he had been christened Loti, wrote:

The pool had numerous visitors every day; beautiful young women of Papeete spent the warm tropical days here, chatting, singing and sleeping, or even diving and swimming like agile gold fish. They went here clad in their muslin tunics, and wore them moist upon their bodies while they slept, looking like the naiads of the past.

We were already warm from walking, and I, in my pareu and light coat of pongee silk, looked longingly at the water sparkling in the sun; but the princess took me by the hand and led

me on.

"It were better to go directly up the valley and out of the heat," she advised. "We shall have many pools to bathe in."

It was at the next that I took from my pocket "Rarahu, ou le mariage de Loti," a thin, poorly printed book in pink paper covers that I had possessed

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