answer I passed over, at the moment, thinking I had
misunderstood him; and we arranged that he would come some day to my
office instead, after lunch.

The next that I heard, he had called there at a quarter to five, the
hour at which I always leave. My secretary explained to him that I had
gone.

He looked at my desk, on which lay some unfinished business, and said to
my secretary, "Why?"

The man courteously responded, "Because it is a quarter to five."

The explorer thereat laughed weirdly and went off.

I now perceived I had to deal with a most eccentric character; but that
being a necessary evil in the publishing business, I went to his hotel
at nine o'clock that evening. I found him down in the restaurant eating
oatmeal and succotash, and we then and there had the following
extravagant interview,--which I give without comment.

"The book _I_ mean to write," he said, staring at me, "is a study of
actual religions. Other writers have told the world what men of all
countries suppose their religions to be. I shall tell what they really
are."

I said that our house would prefer an account of his travels; but he
paid no attention.

"Men's real religions," he announced, "are unknown to themselves. You
may have heard of the Waam Islanders," he leisurely continued. "They,
for instance, would tell you that their deity was an idol called Bashwa,
a large crumbling stone thing which stands in a copperwood forest. They
worship this idol most faithfully, on the first of each lunar month. No
Waam Islander would ever acknowledge he had any other God but Bashwa.

"But a stranger soon notices that in every hut and cave in that country,
hanging beside the water-jar, is a long sleeping mat, and on that mat a
rough pattern is drawn, like a face. 'What is that?' I asked them. That?
oh, that's G'il,' they answered in an off-hand careless way, without any
of the reverence they would have used if they had thought G'il a god.
But nevertheless I noted that everywhere, throughout that whole island,
submissive remarks about G'il, were far more numerous than those about
Bashwa. That made me begin collecting those references; and presently I
found that most things of which that tribe approved were spoken of as
being g'il, or very g'il, and things they didn't like were damned as
na-g'il.

"It was a little difficult to understand their exact conception of G'il,
but apparently it typified the hut, or the hut point of view. Marriage
was