ain. "The head-hunters are
right. These are the things that women like you to do for them."

Chloe came close to me. There was no one in sight. She looked tip at
me with sea-blue eyes that said things they had never said before.

"You think of me," she said. "You are the man I was describing. You
think of the little things, and they are what make the world worth
living in. The man for me must consider my little wishes, and make me
happy in small ways. He must bring me little red peaches in December
if I wish for them, and then I will love him till June. I will have
no knight in armor slaying his rival or killing dragons for me. You
please me very well, Tommy."

I stooped and kissed her. Then a moisture broke out on my forehead,
and I began to feel weak. I saw the red stains vanish from Chloe's
apron, and the head of Louis Devoe turn to a brown, dried cocoanut.

"There will be cocoanut-pudding for dinner, Tommy, boy," said Chloe,
gayly, "and you must come. I must go in for a little while."

She vanished in a delightful flutter.

Dr. Stamford tramped up hurriedly. He seized my pulse as though it
were his own property that I had escaped with.

"You are the biggest fool outside of any asylum!" he said, angrily.
"Why did you leave your bed? And the idiotic things you've been
doing!--and no wonder, with your pulse going like a sledge-hammer."

"Name some of them," said I.

"Devoe sent for me," said Stamford. "He saw you from his window go to
old Campos' store, chase him up the hill with his own yardstick, and
then come back and make off with his biggest cocoanut."

"It's the little things that count, after all," said I.

"It's your little bed that counts with you just now," said the doctor.
"You come with me at once, or I'll throw up the case. 'You're as
loony as a loon."

So I got no cocoanut-pudding that evening, but I conceived a distrust
as to the value of the method of the head-hunters. Perhaps for many
centuries the maidens of the villages may have been looking wistfully
at the heads in the baskets at the doorways, longing for other and
lesser trophies.

NO STORY

To avoid having this book hurled into corner of the room by the
suspicious reader, I will assert in time that this is not a newspaper
story. You will encounter no shirt-sleeved, omniscient city editor,
no prodigy "cub" reporter just off the farm, no scoop, no story--no
anything.

But if you will concede me the setting of the first sc