e went. I threw it standing
waist-deep in the lagoon, and as soon as he went down I was out of the
water and sawing at his neck with my knife ...

"I don't like to think of that even now. I felt like a murderer while I
did it, though my anger was hot against him. When I stood over him and saw
him bleeding on the white sand, and his beautiful great legs and neck
writhing in his last agony ... Pah!

"With that tragedy loneliness came upon me like a curse. Good Lord! you
can't imagine how I missed that bird. I sat by his corpse and sorrowed
over him, and shivered as I looked round the desolate, silent reef.
I thought of what a jolly little bird he had been when he was hatched, and
of a thousand pleasant tricks he had played before he went wrong.
I thought if I'd only wounded him I might have nursed him round into a
better understanding. If I'd had any means of digging into the coral rock
I'd have buried him. I felt exactly as if he was human. As it was,
I couldn't think of eating him, so I put him in the lagoon, and the little
fishes picked him clean. I didn't even save the feathers. Then one day a
chap cruising about in a yacht had a fancy to see if my atoll still
existed.

"He didn't come a moment too soon, for I was about sick enough of the
desolation of it, and only hesitating whether I should walk out into the
sea and finish up the business that way, or fall back on the green
things...

"I sold the bones to a man named Winslow--a dealer near the British
Museum, and he says he sold them to old Havers. It seems Havers didn't
understand they were extra large, and it was only after his death they
attracted attention. They called 'em AEpyornis--what was it?"

"_AEpyornis vastus_," said I. "It's funny, the very thing was
mentioned to me by a friend of mine. When they found an AEpyornis, with a
thigh a yard long, they thought they had reached the top of the scale, and
called him _AEpyornis maximus_. Then some one turned up another
thigh-bone four feet six or more, and that they called _AEpyornis
Titan_. Then your _vastus_ was found after old Havers died, in his
collection, and then a _vastissimus_ turned up."

"Winslow was telling me as much," said the man with the scar. "If they get
any more AEpyornises, he reckons some scientific swell will go and burst a
blood-vessel. But it was a queer thing to happen to a man; wasn't it--
altogether?"

VII.

THE REMARKABLE CASE OF DAVIDSON'S EYES.

I.

The transi