f the portico, or smashing an
entrance way through the wall with his fist.

He was a type of the true American man, the individual who trusts in
himself; an unpleasant person very often, but the most essentially male
creation in Nature.

Though he could not contemplate Maxine as a wife, he did as a woman. In a
state of savagery he would have carried her off in his arms; surrounded as
he was by the trammels of civilization, he contented himself with
imagining her in that position.

It is quite possible that no other woman would ever inspire the same
passion in him. He knew this, yet he did not grumble; for he was
practical, and his practical nature had a part in his wildest dreams.

Go to New York and look at the twenty-storied, sky-scrapers built by the
Adamses. They look like houses out of a story by Dean Swift. The wildest
dreams of architecture. Yet they don't fall down; they serve their
purpose, for the dreamers who built them were at bottom practical men.

As he paced the deck, smoking and contemplating the moonlit river, Maxine
gave place in his mind to her father.

Berselius up to this had shown himself in no unfavourable light. Up to
this he had been almost companionable.

Almost! They had dined together, paced the deck together, discussed all
sorts of subjects, yet not by the fraction of an inch had he advanced in
his knowledge of the man. A wall of ice divided Berselius from his
fellow-men. Between him and them a great gulf was fixed, a gulf narrow
enough to speak across, but of an impenetrable depth. Berselius was always
so assured, so impassively calm, so authoritative, his conversation so
penetrative, so lit by intuition and acquired knowledge, that Adams
sometimes in his company felt that elation which comes to us when we find
ourselves in the presence of a supreme mind. At other times this
overpowering personality weighed upon him so much that he would leave the
saloon and pace the deck so as to become himself again.

* * * * *

Next morning they left by rail for Leopoldville, where they found waiting
for them the _Leopold_, a shallow-draught steamer of some two hundred
tons.

CHAPTER VII

YANDJALI

The _Leopold_ was officered entirely by Belgians, and it would have been
almost impossible to find a pleasanter set of men. Tilkins, the captain,
especially, won Adams's regard. He was a huge man, with a wife and family
in Antwerp, and he was et