ng heat-waves; and I knew how a hermit
crab feels when its home pinches, or is out of gear with the world.
And, too, Nupee was dead, and the jungle to the south seemed to call
less strongly. So I wandered through the old house for the last time,
sniffing the agreeable odor of aged hypo still permeating the dark
room, re-covering the empty stains of skins and traces of maps on the
walls, and re-filling in my mind the vacant shelves. The vampires had
returned to their chosen roost, the martins still swept through the
corridors, and as I went down the hill, a moriche oriole sent a silver
shaft of song after me from the sentinel palm, just as he had greeted
me four years ago.

Then I gathered about me all the strange and unnameable possessions of
a tropical laboratory--and moved. A wren reaches its home after
hundreds of miles of fast aerial travel; a hermit crab achieves a new
lease with a flip of his tail. Between these extremes, and in no less
strange a fashion, I moved. A great barge pushed off from the Penal
Settlement, piled high with my zoological Lares and Penates, and along
each side squatted a line of paddlers,--white-garbed burglars and
murderers, forgers and fighters,--while seated aloft on one of my
ammunition trunks, with a microscope case and a camera close under his
watchful eye, sat Case, King of the Warders, the biggest, blackest,
and kindest-hearted man in the world.

Three miles up river swept my moving-van; and from the distance I
could hear the half-whisper--which was yet a roar--of Case as he
admonished his children. "Mon," he would say to a shirking, shrinking
coolie second-story man, "mon, do you t'ink dis the time to sleep?
What toughts have you in your bosom, dat you delay de Professor's
household?" And then a chanty would rise, the voice of the leader
quavering with that wild rhythm which had come down to him, a vocal
heritage, through centuries of tom-toms and generations of savages
striving for emotional expression. But the words were laughable or
pathetic. I was adjured to

"Blow de mon down with a bottle of rum,
Oh, de mon--mon--blow de mon down."

Or the jungle reechoed the edifying reiteration of

"Sardines--and bread--OH!
Sardines--and bread,
Sardines--and bread--AND!
Sardines--and bread."

The thrill that a whole-lunged chanty gives is difficult to describe.
It arouses some deep emotional response, as surely as a military band,
or the reverberating