ered if, by any chance, he was as sudden in conceiving
enmity against strangers.

When this man began to talk I perceived in him a certain power.
His voice was a persuasive instrument, upon which he played with
a somewhat specious but effective art. He did not try to make you
forget his ugliness; he flaunted it in your face and made it part of
the charm of his speech. Shutting your eyes, you would have trailed
after this rat-catcher's pipes at least to the walls of Hamelin.
Beyond that you would have had to be more childish to follow. But
let him play his own tune to the words set down, so that if all is
too dull, the art of music may bear the blame.

"Women," said Judson Tate, "are mysterious creatures."

My spirits sank. I was not there to listen to such a world-old
hypothesis--to such a time-worn, long-ago-refuted, bald, feeble,
illogical, vicious, patent sophistry--to an ancient, baseless,
wearisome, ragged, unfounded, insidious, falsehood originated by
women themselves, and by them insinuated, foisted, thrust, spread,
and ingeniously promulgated into the ears of mankind by underhanded,
secret and deceptive methods, for the purpose of augmenting,
furthering, and reinforcing their own charms and designs.

"Oh, I don't know!" said I, vernacularly.

"Have you ever heard of Oratama?" he asked.

"Possibly," I answered. "I seem to recall a toe dancer--or a
suburban addition--or was it a perfume?--of some such name."

"It is a town," said Judson Tate, "on the coast of a foreign
country of which you know nothing and could understand less. It is
a country governed by a dictator and controlled by revolutions and
insubordination. It was there that a great life-drama was played,
with Judson Tate, the homeliest man in America, and Fergus McMahan,
the handsomest adventurer in history or fiction, and Senorita
Anabela Zamora, the beautiful daughter of the alcalde of Oratama, as
chief actors. And, another thing--nowhere else on the globe except
in the department of Trienta y tres in Uruguay does the _chuchula_
plant grow. The products of the country I speak of are valuable
woods, dyestuffs, gold, rubber, ivory, and cocoa."

"I was not aware," said I, "that South America produced any ivory."

"There you are twice mistaken," said Judson Tate, distributing the
words over at least an octave of his wonderful voice. "I did not say
that the country I spoke of was in South America--I must be careful,
my dear man; I have been in p