reasoning hatred of those sudden blasts that shrieked in our rigging wires with a kind of malevolent merriment. Already we were losing altitude. I followed the pilot's eager gaze out into the distance, longing for the sight of water and landing space. Beneath was still that torn and inhospitable country. And now the foliage of the individual trees stood out more distinctly as we sank slowly under insufficient power. A little ahead of us the shadow of our plane sped over the tree-tops, and even as I watched I could see we were settling nearer and nearer. Of what would happen when we met that shadow I refused to think. Would that river never come? Then at the same instant we both saw it-a dark ribbon beyond the tree-tops. But already the plane was dangerously low. By now both of us were sitting on the edges of our seats leaning intently forward, hoping and fearing. Williams's hands were knotted and white with the intensity of his grasp on the wheel-my own clutched the fuselage in a kind of death grip. At last, a full minute before I myself could say with certainty we would make the river, Williams nodded reassurance.

He touched the quiet waters in a perfect landing and cut the switch. He grinned back at me. "And they talk about the care-free life of the young aviator," he commented, while I tried to roll a cigarette and spilled half my tobacco in

the fuselage. "Still longing to see the other side of that mountain range?"

"I am, but I'm going to see it from a safe and sane four-cylinder mule. You can scuttle this neurotic sewing-machine any time you like."

A half-hour's work put the motor in working order, but we clung very closely to water all the way back to Frontera.

So my air exploration came to a close, and the following morning Williams ferried me to Salto, the limit of safe aerial navigation. There we parted-Williams to return north to the land of ear-muffs and synthetic gin; before me stretched long days of exploration aboard an unromantic but relatively dependable mule. For it was written that before I should see the Gulf again I was to travel far back into that unknown country, sleep in the shadow of ancient Maya temples, swim unnamed streams, and at the trail's end find groves of giant mahogany worth a prince's ransom. And at last I was to come down this self-same river laden with specimens of strange woods and careful estimates of timber so magnificent in quality, so limitless in extent, that the forester might well believe himself in Paradise. But in all those days that followed not once did I see anything onehalf so alluring as the grin on Williams's face when he turned and nodded reassurance on that last wild flight into the unknown.

H

OLLAND PORTER came down the stone stairs of his villa with square shoulders, but slowly. In his alert carriage was indicated the gayness of the Florentine April, its untiring, always fresh optimism. Ever since he had lived in Florence, each April he felt that fifteen or twenty years were going to slough off his shoulders like the dead skin of a snake. In the reflectiveness of his step was the afterthought that would come from his image in the mirror at the landing. The mirror was like the painter in the story who could make true portraits only. Unflattering, it would show him as he really was.

This time it made no exception. The determined, squarish face that it framed was ruddy and the expression youthful, but the cropped mustache had only a few sandy threads left in its whiteness. Except upon the top, the carefully brushed hair was snowy. Though he carried his tall body like a young man, the skin was not entirely smooth.

He looked at the reflection distastefully. "Twenty years," he said to himself. "Fifteen even! God! And to-day I'm sixty. Holland Porter, you're getting old."

With the swift memory of beauty after beauty he had seen here, came also a shudder of futility. After all, he had not really lived life, only tasted it as one breathes in the heavy fragrance of China roses. His existence had been as artificial as flowers painted on majolica, as selfish as the life of a monk.

At the foot of the stairs his housekeeper Giuseppina waited for him. On her head was a bright-green silk scarf.

"Buon giorno, signorino," she greeted him.

"Buon giorno, Giuseppina. I'll have

breakfast on the terrace. Coffee and toast and marmalade. Some strawberries, if you have any."

"Subito, signorino. Subito, subito, subito," she replied. Right away!

His villa, furnished handsomely with the Italian things he loved, stood on the via Vecchia Fiesolana, that steep way that climbs between gray walls from dusty San Domenico up to the tall, bluecrowned forehead of Fiesole. In front of it was a blank, undecorated wall with a gate and a bell-wire. In back of it was a garden.

The garden was not formalized. In it were a couple of almond-trees and some silver-green olives, the home of hamadryads. Irises grew in it, roses, campanulas. There were tall wine-colored snapdragons and orange tawny snapdragons. Close to the wall the blossoms of a Judastree were like crimson blood-drops. From the next place a mimosa reached its yellow-powdered branches. Over the small gray stone table on the terrace, honey-fragrant wistaria, which had burst from the purple cocoons of its buds into lavender loveliness, cast shadows like a mottled leopard's skin.

And below, the hillside dropped steeply like the front side of an advancing breaker. At the foot lay Florence, a toy town, with its two pink domes and its graceful machicolated towers. Here and there you could see the white thread of a road or the steel-colored curve of a river. Florence! Where every single thing was beautiful! The home of his dreams!

Certain aspects he did not like, to be sure. His lady of the Arno was not absolutely flawless. The Pitti gallery was one. It was always filled with common American women admiring its worst pictures and making atrocious comments on them. He did not like the noisy ultra-modern young Italians who were given to imitating with exaggerations the worst quali

ties of the Americans and English. Nor the overdressed fops and the narrowwaisted officers who drank numerous cocktails at the three Anglo-Italian cafés on the via Tornabuoni. Nor the womenoglers of the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. It was the overhanging roof of the Palazzo del Arte della Lana that appealed to him. It was the Ghiberti bronze doors and Cimabue's madonna in the Rucellai chapel that thrilled him to the bone.

He gave his life to them. He came to Florence when he was twenty-nine. A moderate income afforded him all that he needed in those days. Twice it was increased by inheritances. Four times what it was originally, it furnished what he needed still. So he stayed. At first in rooms and now at the villa. At first bewildered and lonely. Now with friends and stability. Secure.

In those days he intended to write, and indeed he did write. Later he gave that up. It seemed so pointless when he could spend the same time reading the much finer stuff that others had written. All that kept him from going soft was the fact that he still played tennis. He did this nearly every week-end. He derived a malicious satisfaction from still being able to beat most of the younger men.

To-day he felt none of this satisfaction. Sixty. He hadn't lived! He had only heard life going by him like the silver of distant trumpets! He was suddenly swept by regret.

When Giuseppina arrived with his breakfast, he put to her a question:

"It's my birthday to-day. How old do you think I am?”

Her teeth flashed. "Perhaps fifty, signorino," she said cautiously. "Sixty!"

"Dio mio! But you look like a boy, signorino. You'll live to be a hundred." She grinned, wrinkling her brown face optimistically. Half forthright honesty like the soil she came from, half inherited sagacity in pleasing the signori who were lords of good and evil-what a peasant she really was!

After she went off, he wondered. Like all persons of an inactive selfishness, he found it hard to think of death as coming to him personally. Somehow he would always live, always delight in things.

Nevertheless, did he want to live to be a hundred? Forty years. Suddenly he was conscious of their monotony. Now if one or two things were different-One or two things. That meant Leonie. She flashed before his eyes.

She was married now and had one daughter, who must be the same age that she had been when he knew her. He wondered if the daughter's hair too was dark and her countenance laughingserious and her eyes of deep violet. He wondered if she too were as cool and as fragrant as a camelia flower. Then he smiled at his sentimentality. Suppose he had married Leonie, as he wanted to. Well, for one thing he would probably be a faded English professor or a tired executive of a publishing-house whose reputation was sounder than its finances, instead of sitting here in this garden.

II

HOLLAND PORTER was not the only person in that distant long ago to be fascinated by the lovely Leonie Winslow. Her father was Professor Horatio Winslow of the Harvard history faculty. Living in Cambridge, she had plenty of opportunity to attract admirers. Holland, however, was apparently the first person to make an admirer of her.

What could be more likely? Tall and poetic-looking, he was known also to be literary. He was not a Harvard man, to be sure, having been graduated from Columbia. Nevertheless, poet and editor in a safe way by his middle twenties, he was offered on the strength of this a connection with a Boston publishing-house. He came to Cambridge to live because he liked the academic atmosphere. He was furnished with a letter to Professor Winslow, whose Bay State shrewdness saw instantly an ideal son-in-law in the moderately successful Apollo with sense enough to accept a fixed salary. Professor Winslow introduced him to his daughter.

Consequently the announcement of their engagement-staidly worded, as befitted those days, when to attend a formal ball without white gloves was more serious than to commit adultery-surprised nobody. It broke many hearts.

Mrs. Winslow: "My dear children, I'm so happy. Oh! Let me kiss you, dear Holland. But my baby daughter old enough to get married! Oh!"

Professor Winslow: "Allow me to congratulate you, Holland. We're very fond of Leonie, but we know you'll be worthy of her. Ha! That is, if anybody will be." Leonie: "Daddy, he's worthy millions and millions of me. You know, dear, I didn't mean to say yes to you. I meant to wait a while. But I'm glad I didn't wait. Really I am." "Leonie!"

The whole world was dancing and flashing before him. He saw goals ahead of him, dreams to attain to, shining castles as lacy-fantastic as frost patterns. Oh, they would assault them, win to them, he and Leonie. And then it all shattered on an absurd lover's quarrel. How silly that quarrel now seemed!

Technically he was in the right and an explanation would have solved everything, but his first words were so rude and angry that she did not give him one. When two days later, appreciating his foolishness, he came back, she demanded an apology. Stupidly he refused one. When two weeks later he was ready to do anything, buy the moon for her, crawl upon his hands and knees across Boston Common, he was greeted with astonishing news. She had run away with Carl Paulin, a man she hardly knew. Holland Porter gave up his position without even a courteous notice. He was on the ocean in a week.

By the time he reached Florence he was as coldly cynical as the March rain that slatted against the black-and-white marbles of the Duomo. Women! A wry, disillusioned face expressed his opinion better than words could. But somehow, though he never married, he changed this attitude. More than one came into his life. The first was the animated Contessa da Ripoli with her lovely brown-golden hair. He met her at one of Colonel Allentown's Sunday teas.

Though Colonel Allentown was charming as usual, they both were bored by the inane conversation. They went into the garden to admire his extraordinary yellow

nary. Faintly tinged with pink, the color of an exquisite evening gown, they clambered up one corner of the villa as thickly as honeysuckle. They might have been a symbol of Italy's rich life.

Then he and she started down a smooth gravel walk on either side of which were neat lemon-trees. Elena da Ripoli pointed up at them.

"The golden apples of the Hesperides," she said. Her richly Italian English was sensuous with vowel sounds.

"And you one of the three beautiful daughters of Atlas guarding them? Only where's the dragon?"

"Why not Romulus?" She indicated Allentown's great wolflike sheep-dog.

"And I'm afraid that if I have to be Hercules I'll show more interest in at least one of the daughters than I will in the apples I'm supposed to get. I'm afraid that I'll spend most of my time trying to persuade one of the daughters to leave her apple-tree."

She laughed. It was known that this comely, rich-voiced lady and her husband, the Count da Ripoli, did not live happily together. She courtesied to him with a mock formality. "Toujours le gallant!"

After they had tired of each other, he met Kitty Hoagland, the pretty, emptyheaded wife of Sir Kenneth Hoagland, a large, red-faced, insolent North-of-Englander. Elena. Kitty. And there were others. The little American school-teacher, for instance. No, certainly, he had not lived entirely aloof.

But in all these affairs was the unreality that attaches to what is simply diversion. They were not living, but only its reflection. In them, as in these later years at the villa, life had gone by him like distant silver trumpets. Leonie Winslow, with her dark hair and camelia-fragrant face, was more vivid than their intensest moments.

After he left her he never saw her again, never really heard from her. Once she wrote him, but he tore up the letter. Afterward he regretted this. Another time he read in the Paris Herald that she was coming to Florence. He left abruptly. He doubted that he could see her dispassionately even now.