eir impulse was to rush together in a frantic ecstasy.

Michael it was, less travelled in the world than Jerry, by nature not so
self-controlled, who threw the play-acting of dignity to the wind, and,
with shrill whinings of emotion, with body-wrigglings of delight, flashed
out his tongue of love and shouldered his brother roughly in eagerness to
get near to him.

Jerry responded as eagerly with kiss of tongue and contact of shoulder;
then both, springing apart, looked at each other, alert and querying,
almost in half challenge, Jerry's ears pricked into living
interrogations, Michael's one good ear similarly questioning, his
withered ear retaining its permanent queer and crinkly cock in the tip of
it. As one, they sprang away in a wild scurry down the beach, side by
side, laughing to each other and occasionally striking their shoulders
together as they ran.

"No doubt of it," said the Commissioner. "The very way their father and
mother run. I have watched them often."

* * * * *

But, after ten days of comradeship, came the parting. It was Michael's
first visit on the _Ariel_, and he and Jerry had spent a frolicking half-
hour on her white deck amid the sound and commotion of hoisting in boats,
making sail, and heaving out anchor. As the _Ariel_ began to move
through the water and heeled to the filling of her canvas by the brisk
trade-wind, the Commissioner and Captain Kellar shook last farewells and
scrambled down the gang-plank to their waiting whaleboats. At the last
moment Captain Kellar had caught Michael up, tucked him under an arm, and
with him dropped into the, sternsheets of his whaleboat.

Painters were cast off, and in the sternsheets of each boat solitary
white men were standing up, heads bared in graciousness of conduct to the
furnace-stab of the tropic sun, as they waved additional and final
farewells. And Michael, swept by the contagion of excitement, barked and
barked again, as if it were a festival of the gods being celebrated.

"Say good-bye to your brother, Jerry," Villa Kennan prompted in Jerry's
ear, as she held him, his quivering flanks between her two palms, on the
rail where she had lifted him.

And Jerry, not understanding her speech, torn about with conflicting
desires, acknowledged her speech with wriggling body, a quick back-toss
of head, and a red flash of kissing tongue, and, the next moment, his
head over the rail and lowered to see the swiftly diminishing Michael,
was mou