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Expurgated of its adjectives, his bitter tale ran that, having been beaten and kicked during all the loading that morning, the animal had suddenly taken fright when the German started up from a log on which he had rested a moment and had run away. For hours he had pursued her, losing sight of her entirely, and tracking her only by the trail of bananas she had dropped at intervals for my benefit. Finally, frightened no doubt at finding herself completely alone in the trackless wilderness, "she come valking pack against me, chust like a vomans, py Gott; rhunned avay, an' den gum schneaking pack pegause she haf to haf der home un' der master. Oh, you-"

Beyond the rancho of Pablo Rojo the pampa gave place to monte, dense jungle and tangled growth some ten feet high, not tall enough to shade us from the blazing afternoon sun, yet high enough to cut us off in the trough-like trail from every breath of breeze until our tongues and throats were parched and as dry as charqui, and the sand burned our feet through our worn shoes. Konanz could only be coaxed along a mile at a time, but the sun was still above the horizon when the endless jungle was broken by the welcome sight of a thatched house set in corn and bananas, before which were working three apparent natives in long-uncut hair and beards, barefoot, in leather jojotas, and with the native dress of two thin and faded cotton garments, topped by sunfaded straw hats of local weave.

But all were Americans, Halsey himself and two of the sons of a couple that had immigrated to Chiquitos from Texas not long after the Civil War. These youths were as truly peons as any of the natives, subject to the same "slavery" of all the region, in that they took an advance in

hiring out, and continued to get themselves deeper and deeper into debt to their employer. One was then "working out" a rifle and the other a saddle-steer. Born in the region, they had all the diffidence of the native peon, spoke English, of the "white trash" sort, only when forced to, lamely and without self-confidence, and ending every sentence with an appeal to their aged and bedraggled old mother, "Ain't thet right, Maw?"

Four days I swung in my hammock under one of the great trees of 'Halsey's estate, reading belated magazines of the light-weight order, the neurotic artificiality of which seemed particularly ridiculous against this background of primitive nature. It was easy to understand how even the white man can drop out of the race here in the perfect tropics and let life drift on without him. Halsey pointed out the beginning of a trail that led come fifteen miles back to the Bolivian cross-country road, and I prepared to push on alone; for the German would go no farther, but planned to explore the country round about until he found a spot worth settling. upon as soon as the fever that now racked his bones daily had left him.

THE faint path through thick prairiegrass and low bush died out even sooner than I had feared. I pushed on in the direction I knew I must go, south and a shade east. A big wooded bluff standing above the jungle landscape like the Irish coast from the sea gave an objective point.

But to keep a due course in the trackless jungle is not so easy as to set it. I was soon among heavier bushes that cut down my progress as a head wind cuts that of a sailing-vessel, then head high in undergrowth that made every step a struggle, then in thick forest, with the densest jungle overrunning everything and snatching, clinging, tearing at me for all the world like living beings determined to stop my advance at any cost. Vines inwrapped my head, chest, waist, and feet at every step, requiring as often a wild struggle to tear my way through; countless thorns and brambles gashed and rended

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"Don Cupertino" (third from left), one of the chief residents and officials of eastern Bolivia, with his family and two servants.

my sweat-rotted clothing; a bush reached forth and snatched a sleeve out of my shirt; wild pineapple-leaves tore at my legs, laying bare my knees through my breeches; the entangled growth poured blinding sweat into my eyes, broke my boot-laces, and treacherously tripped me, so that I fell, smashing headlong into jungle bushes where no one knew what might be sleeping or lurking. Every such plunge left me so breathless from the incessant struggle that I was several minutes gathering strength to crawl to my feet and tear my way onward. The scent of wild animals was pungent, and signs of their passing and lairs were frequent, but not one did I see or hear. Now and then I fell into a short path or the recent sleeping-place of some beast. Half dead with Half dead with thirst, noon found me still fighting nature with might and main and with the growing conviction that I should still be struggling when night came upon me. The blue headland of Ypias had long since been lost to view, and I found I was indeed going around in a circle, like the heroes of fiction, until I drew out my compass and insisted that nature let me through the way it indicated.

The man on the right is a German

At last, when thirst seemed no longer endurable, I broke out into a small space clear of jungle, though the giant grass made the going almost as laborious, and finding a small swamp in its center, I threw myself down to drink half dry the first pool of it. From it radiated in all directions through the tall grass the paths by which the wild animals came down to drink, and every inch of the wet sand was marked with their footprints, as fresh as if they had that moment passed. I recognized those of the deer, the heavy anta, the cat-clawed jaguar, while those of at least a score of smaller species were plainly visible.

To cut short an endless story, I tore on all the blazing afternoon, hunger completely lost beneath the weight of a thirst like a raging furnace within me. Then suddenly, toward sunset, when I had concluded the jungle had no end, I fell out of it into a broad, sandy road, sprawling on hands and knees, for it was worn several feet deep into the sandy soil of the dense. wilderness through which its way had been chopped. It soon brought me to the uninhabited pascana of Ypias.

Luckily the rains had been delayed, or

I might have been held for months in the hilltop hamlet of Santiago until the floods common to the twenty leagues or more west of the Paraguay subsided. As it was we passed day after uninhabited day through the same succession of mud-holes and clouds of jejenes, swinging our hammocks at night in tiny pascanas. I say "we" because I had fallen in with two American surveyors, returning from Santiago, mounted on huge mules, the extra one of which I bestrode. But such a route was harder mule-back than afoot. On the last morning we awoke at two to find the moon brilliant, and pulling on our soggy garments, we pushed eagerly on. On the right the Southern Cross stood forth brightly whenever a fleck of cloud veiled the moon. Away in the forest monkeys wailed their everlasting plaint. Great masses of green vines, covering irregular giant bushes, looked like German castles in the moonlight. The first flush of dawn showed in the V-shaped opening ahead the shoulders of the advance horseman cutting into the paling sky. Then day "came up like thunder" out of the endless wilderness, and somehow it seemed wasteful to keep the moon still burning after the tropical sun had flooded all the scene. Tall, slender palms, all possible forms of trees, festooned and draped with vines in fantastic web and lace effects, stood out against the sky. Masses of pink morningglories soon shrunk under the sun's glare; lively, brown moor-hens, flicking their black tails saucily, foraged about mudholes and flew clumsily, like chickens, with little half-jumps, as we passed. Beyond the pascana Tacuaral, with its myriads of slim tacuara palms, the coun

try that should have been flooded at this season was waterless, though our thirsty animals all but fell down in the enormous sun-dried cart-ruts in the road. Hour after sun-baked hour we jogged on. An occasional hut with a banana-grove appeared in a tiny place shaved out of the hirsute forest; in mid-afternoon we sighted through the heat rays ahead a wide street, with red-tiled buildings and open water beyond, backed far away by more low wooded ridges, and the Port of Suarez and the end of Bolivia was at hand. It was two months to a day since Tommy and I had set out from Cochabamba.

Dawn was just beginning to paint red the humid air between jungle and sky across the lagoon of Cáceres, formed by the river Paraguay, when I descended to its edge and by dint of acrobatic feats of equilibrium managed a bath and left in the mud and slime, like fallen and abandoned heroes of many a campaign, the remnants of my tramping garb. As I climbed the bank new-clad, there persisted the subconscious feeling that I had heartlessly left behind some faithful friend of long standing. The gasolene launch chugged more than two hours across the muddy lagoon until there rose from the jungle, on a bit of knoll, the modern city of Corumbá, in the State of Matto Grosso, Brazil, to the residents of which the appearance of a lone traveler from out the ferocious wilds and haunts of bugres beyond the lagoon that ends their world was little less wonder-provoking than the arrival of one from a distant planet. Here at last was civilization-expensive civilization-and steamers every few days to Asunción and Buenos Aires.

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By VINCENT O'SULLIVAN Author of "The Good Girl," "The Burned House," etc.

Illustrations by W. T. Benda

AST week I chanced to read in a Cin

cinnati paper that Mrs.-well, it does not matter about her present name; she was Olivia Mist when I knew herhad "thrown open the spacious saloons of her large and handsome residence" to an audience who listened while an eminent English author discoursed about Post-impressionism, Cubism, the gasping school in poetry, the Russian novel, with a side glance at Ernest Dowson, Aubrey Beardsley, and others of the eighteen-nineties. I was interested by this announcement, but hardly surprised. Still, I permitted myself a little sardonic smile at Olivia, out there in her "spacious saloons," and this, when you have read my account, you will agree I had a perfect right to do.

I have a passion for places which have a "season" out of the season. There, if anywhere, you touch romance and you see ghosts. You see all the history of a crowd. that has vanished and the fate of a crowd that has not yet arrived. You stroll through the empty casino, and come upon a lady's glove, a faded flower, a torn dance-card, an odd playing-card, a bill of fare, a concert program, left there to be swept away to the dust-heap. Signs and announcements, meant for crowds on the beach or promenade, or on the alley-walk leading to the spring, stare blindly and impotently at the solitary passenger. In front of the theater the placard of a troupe of actors who came and vanished two months ago is lashed by the dreary winter rain. All the places which are so much sought after, which cost immense sums to reach in the season, are now wide open to the pensive stroller. He can now lounge in the paddock of the race-course for hours if he wishes, undisturbed by anything but the wind howling round the grand stand; and on some day when the

caretaker is airing the theater, he can seat himself comfortably in the principal box and watch the ghosts of old actors perform fantastically.

I have always had this passion; I have it now; and if my shade inhabits anywhere, it will doubtless be at some San Sebastian or Trouville or Atlantic Citythough I hope not Atlantic City-out of the season. In the middle of the eighteennineties, when I was still what may be called a youth, this passion of mine already burned with a "hard gem-like flame," and I carefully tended it. So it was that I was led to Mont Dore, in the Puy-de-Dôme, at the end of October, when everybody had gone, and the Hotel Sarciron was on the point of closing. I settled down to stay as long as the hotel people were disposed to keep me to maintain a chef, a head-waiter, a page, and three or four chambermaids all for my benefit.

As a matter of fact, I was very little in the hotel. I went to hotels from a timidity in dealing with life, and a kind of helplessness in solving problems of residence, arising from the tradition that if you arrived at a place where you were unknown, you ought to make at once for the leading hotel. I had been taught that in any place below the leading hotel you were likely to be robbed, or poisoned by bad food, or catch infectious diseases. But there was always some feeling of shame inside me as I entered the safe portals of the large hotel, as if I had condescended to a degrading compromise, because the large hotel somewhat conflicted with the artistic scheme of life then pursued. That postulated the tavern and the café as the only possible habitat for the true artist when on his travels; just as it postulated, as the only possible alternative to the society of

artists, the society of circus-people, and failing them, of tramps and even of criminals. It also postulated a mistress, another piece of artistic baggage in which I was shamefully lacking. Many of the artists I admired resided, from choice rather than from necessity, in some sunless, rat-ridden house in a narrow, smelly street; and after I had climbed innumerable stairs, meeting with a fresh smell on every landing, I used to gaze uneasily at those I had come to visit, apprehensive lest at any moment they should tumble down at my feet, felled by some dread malady arising from unsanitary dwelling. They, on the other hand, I felt, regarded me with some disdain as one who, dwelling amid the gilt and marble of the modern hotel, could not possibly do anything worth while. Remember, I speak of the eighteen-nineties. Nowadays it is the

other way about. But at that time this feeling was very rigid. If poets or painters had relatives-mothers or aunts or suchlike-who lived in opulent conditions, they did their best to conceal them. It almost labeled a man as an amateur at once if it came out that his uncle had a country estate or that his aunt was the wife of a wealthy lawyer.

In the same way there was only one excuse for living in luxurious quarters, and that was to be in debt. There was something daredevil and Balzacian about that which tended to enhance a man's artistic qualities. But at a hotel you cannot very well be in debt; they won't allow it. Very well then.

So I generally shunned the hotel I happened to be staying at except to swallow. occasional sullen meals there and to go to bed. In a city, if any prepossessing lady happened to be stepping out of the hotel. at the same time that I was, I would walk as close to her as I could, so that any of my friends who might be passing would take the impression that I had been in there reveling, and I would thus find grace in their sight. But no prepossessing lady, no lady at all, in fact, seemed to be in the hotel at Mont Dore when I arrived there. And none of my acquaintance, ar

tistic or other, was likely to be in Mont Dore at the end of October.

Nevertheless, I sought out a café in which to spend most of my waking hours. I found one up a little street, paved with cobbles, which ended in a stable for cattle. Grass grew between the cobbles, and the afternoon sun used to fall very sweetly in the quiet place. There were about four tables in the little café, and the floor was sanded. I usually had it entirely to myself; the owners were elsewhere about their business. In fine weather the door stood wide open. Occasionally some farm-hand from the mountains would come in, bid me good day, go to the counter, and after drinking off a glass of wine that he had poured from one of the bottles, put down the price, and go his way. As the sunlight stole across the floor, and touched the old gray cat dozing in a chair and the geraniums in pots in the windows, a tinkle of bells would be heard, and the cows coming down from the mountains would go by, driven by a barefoot girl holding a long stick. Now and then one of the cows would stop and put her moist nose round the door, and give me a halffriendly look from her wide, distrustful eyes. The chickens, too, which on and off all day were seeking treasure between the cobbles, would sometimes venture over the threshold and stroll across the floor. I had orders from the goodwife to drive them out, but it was too much trouble. Oh, place divine! Give me to live, to dream away my days, in that or a like quiet place! Grant me this, and all the fame and notoriety in the world anybody else can have for me.

The sun-shadows would turn yellow and gold, and then die on the floor. The clock in the corner, after incredible wheezing, would clamp out five o'clock. The cat would rise, stretch herself back and forth, and walk off daintily. And I too would put the finishing touches on a poem called, perhaps, "City Fever," and take myself peacefully back to the hotel, pausing now and then to watch the shadows muffling the mountain-tops. But it was another iron rule in my school of art not

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