of over eighteen miles inland, through lakes and rivers and swamps and almost impenetrable woods which made them double on their course until it made their journey twice as long. Late one night they found Lake Cuthbert, and early the next morning before the full light had come, Mr. Chapman ensconced himself behind a blind near the rookery on the island. It was found that there were not only roseate spoonbills in the rookery, but also a colony of egrets, which meant that as soon as the scientists had gone, the guides would return and shoot out the colony for millinery.

It had become light enough for Mr. Chapman to take a photograph and Mr. Fuertes was waiting for a chance to begin his studies, when one of the guides who had gone on two miles beyond the camp shot his gun at a rattlesnake. Immediately all the spoonbills and egrets on the island took wing and flapped over Mr. Fuertes' head and out of sight. They flew directly over him, but he forbore to shoot, for fear that he would frighten them so that they would never return, but his forbearance was useless, for although the party stayed near Lake Cuthbert for some time afterward, never once did they see a spoonbill. They could hear them in the rookery at night, but they apparently went away before daylight, for not once during any of the days that the party stayed did a spoonbill show itself. There is no chance that the birds are there now, either, for soon after that the guides shot out the egrets and their neighbors never returned.

That is simply one of the many disappointments that come to a man who hunts with his eyes and pencil. It takes a skill and patience and caution that a man who hunts the four-footed beasts cannot realize. Sometimes the effort to study the appearance of birds in life from close range is hopeless from the beginning. It is almost impossible to get within five hundred or six hundred yards of the rarer species of the birds of prey to study them, and even shots at them are only chances with good fortune playing a great part in a favorable outcome. A hit may mean nothing, for the bird is likely to fall where it is impossible to recover it.

In 1899, when he was on the Harriman expedition on Hall Island, in the Bering Sea, Mr. Fuertes shot a fulmar that fell

and lodged in a cranny about ten feet down the side of a basalt cliff. Three hundred feet below at the bottom of the basalt slab the Bering Sea roared and growled and threw its waters half way up the side of the cliff. Around Mr. Fuertes' head circled a colony of about fifty guillemots, which he had frightened out of their nests at the top of the cliff. He beat them away with his coat and started down after his fulmar. He had crawled down the straight side of the cliff almost to the bird when the earth started to slip from under his feet and he with it toward the breakers and the rocks below. The earth stopped sliding after it had gone a few feet. But about a wheelbarrow full of it went on and disappeared in the water below. It was some chance rock underneath that kept the whole mass from going on into the waves below and taking Mr. Fuertes with it. He climbed back to the top and started toward camp. He did not even dare look back at the fulmar for fear he would be tempted to go after it, and if the wind has not taken it off, it is still there waiting to be recovered.

The field work is not the only or even the greater part of Mr. Fuertes' work, however, for there is the actual painting of the pictures which, except for the big groups in museums, is done in his studio at Ithaca, N. Y. Here the field notes, the mounted models which he has collected, as well as his sketches of the flora of the habitats of his birds, are placed in order, to be combined with the impressions his brain has taken and worked into a finished picture.

It was in Ithaca that Mr. Fuertes first got his love for the birds which led him to his profession, and, as a boy, he got to know not only the species, but even the individual families of the birds around the Cornell University Campus. He got so that if the family that had had its nest under the eaves of Morrill Hall did not come back in the spring, he tried to find some reason why. He could imitate the calls of the local species, so that he could create quite a fuss in a quiet wood and was able to call many of the winged specimens near enough to him to watch them.

His fondness for the study of birds grew so that in 1897, when he graduated from Cornell, he determined to take up their study ar d reproduction. ard

N

O ONE out of earshot would have guessed that we were the crew of a motor car engaged in a New York-to-Paris Race. From Our leisurely manner, this outof-earshot person would have surmised that we were tourists given over to the eccentricity of patronizing first-class hotels dressed in third-class clothes.

The four of us-George Schuster, driver of the Thomas Flyer; George Miller, its mechanician; Capt. Hans Hansen, Siberian pilot, and I, staff correspondent of the New York Times; the four of us on this afternoon of May 12, 1908, leaned against the bar of the Oriental Hotel in Kobe and sipped refreshment from long glasses as though there were no such thing in the world as three foreign rivals who had stolen a march on us while we were proving the impossibility of automobiling in Alaska, and who were now an unknown number of miles nearer Paris than we.

Just a few words of explanation: With Alaska a proven impossibility, the rules of the race provided for an alternative route beginning at Vladivostok, crossing Manchuria, Siberia, and so on to Paris. Japan was no part of this route. But when we returned from Alaska with the Thomas Flyer, we learned that there would be a long and uncertain wait before the sailing of another vessel direct for Vladivostock.

"The best thing to do," we were advised, "is to load on the S.S. Shawmut which sails in a few days for the Orient. It touches at Yokohama and Kobe, and from either of these ports it's only a short

distance across Japan to Tsuruga. From there a line of steamers runs twice a week to Vladivostok."

We looked at the map. Verily it is but a short distance across the Island Kingdom -a trifle over eighty miles as the crow flies.

Why our unseemly leisure?

Come within earshot; join the group composed of a dozen or more of the town's foreign residents-bankers, shipbrokers, wholesale merchants-who have dropped in to see the American car and its crew, and of whose liquid, oft-replenished hospitality, the latter were now partaking.

"Do you think we can make Tsuruga 'cross country?" was the question put to each newcomer. Some few answered, "Perhaps"; most replied, "I doubt it." In answer to a much-put "why?" we gathered these casual shreds of information: "I've heard that there are a number of precipitous mountain ranges between here and Tsuruga, and I'm uncertain if anything leads over them but trails." "I've heard the roads are very narrow; built only for rikisha and other narrowgauge traffic." "I've heard the bridges are very frail; the heaviest load that they are constructed to carry is pulled by a half-sized bullock on a two-wheeled cart." Everything hearsay! it would seem that no one ever travels across Japan except by railroad.

The stretch of country between Kobe and Tsuruga-only eighty miles as the crow flies-began to look like an insuperable barrier.

Then someone (whose name should not have been forgotten as alas! it has been), bethought himself of Mancini, Charles

Mancini, a Kobe shipbroker who has lived in Japan eleven years, talks Japanese like a native, an amateur sportsman, local champion bicyclist, and owns two of the six automobiles Kobe boasts. These seldom run more than a few miles beyond the city limits, but Mancini has performed the feat of driving from Yokohama to Kobe and from Moji to Kobe.

And then it happened just as it does in a fairy story: Mr. Mancini dropped in to look the American car over. Within ten minutes he had been induced to let a number of business engagements for the following morning go by the board, and guide the Thomas Flyer as far as Kyoto.

The first faint rays of the rising sun were just touching the tops of the mountains that encircle the shoreward side of Kobe, when we rolled out of bed, packed our duffle bags, and carried them down through the deserted halls of the Oriental Hotel. We ate a hasty breakfast which had been ordered the night before, and by six o'clock the car was ready to start.

Besides its load of extra tires, bolts, nuts, chains and spare parts, four large duffle bags, a gun and a rifle, the car

carried six passengers: its crew of four men, Mr. Mancini and a friend whom he had asked the privilege of taking, Mr. Edward H. Moss, of the Kobe Branch of the Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank.

When Miller cranked the car and its engine began to "chug-chug-chug," sleepyeyed faces haloed in rumpled hair, appeared at nearly every window of the hotel and remained there until the car had rounded the corner into the street that runs out through the native quarter. This is a much-traveled highway leading to golf links and race course, and in consequence is of a generous European breadth.

MAKING THE START

The racecourse passed, and it was as though a drop scene had been raised-we were now in real Japan, ourselves supplying the only touch of the exotic. A short run to Sannomiya and we were in a typical village street-a lane about eight feet wide, tiny paper-box houses closely lining each side, low overhanging roof eaves; and in the midst of all a clutter of children, housewives, shopkeepers, merchandise, and horse and bullock carts.

When the automobile suddenly appeared at the entrance of this lane, stopping it up almost as tight as a cork stops a bottle, there was a great scurrying. Those who were in the street ran indoors, the women stopping just long enough to seize their children, the shopkeepers to gather up their merchandise; those who were indoors rushed to the house front to see what manner of strange thing was causing such a commotion; cartmen frantically backed their horse and bullock carts into side alleys; and then as the machine slowly passed, women, children, shopkeepers, cartmen, all flocked from their havens of safety and trailed along behind, their wooden sandals making a clatter that could be heard above the unmuffled chugchugging of the motor.

Here now was our first surprise: the whole village life of Sannomiya had been turned topsy-turvy for ten minutes, and it would doubtless be a good many ten minutes more before it was righted again; yet not a grumble was heard nor a frown seen. Sannomiya only smiled and cheerfully returned the hand-waved salutations of the foreign disturbers.

THE NARROW ROADS

Beyond Sannomiya the road narrows down to what seems to be the standard road width in Japan. This is more than ample for the wheeled traffic of the natives, for like everything else in Japan the vehicles are built on a miniature scale-rikishas and carts, the latter drawn by man, horse or bullock. The roads are hard and well kept. From the natives' view-point, they are almost perfection. But for our automobile? that alas! was another story. There was just room for us to cautiously feel our way along, every now and then coming dangerously near the deep drainage ditches on each side. When we metas we did all too often-rikisha or cart, it simply meant that rikisha or cart had to yield the right-of-way, dropping a wheel into one of the ditches and waiting until the usurping strangers passed by.

Such a disruption of traffic as this caused! Frequently the carts were so heavily laden that the Japs could neither get them off the road nor back upon it again. Often the frightened horses and bullocks were more than their panicky