the romantic coast, "is a fine theater
for anything dramatic."

"Oh, it's dramatic in its way," admitted Vane, not without a faint
satisfaction. "It's all about those things over there we call the
peacock trees--I suppose, because of the queer color of the leaf, you
know, though I have heard they make a shrill noise in a high wind that's
supposed to be like the shriek of a peacock; something like a bamboo in
the botanical structure, perhaps. Well, those trees are supposed to have
been brought over from Barbary by my ancestor Sir Walter Vane, one of
the Elizabethan patriots or pirates, or whatever you call them. They say
that at the end of his last voyage the villagers gathered on the beach
down there and saw the boat standing in from the sea, and the new trees
stood up in the boat like a mast, all gay with leaves out of season,
like green bunting. And as they watched they thought at first that the
boat was steering oddly, and then that it wasn't steering at all; and
when it drifted to the shore at last every man in that boat was dead,
and Sir Walter Vane, with his sword drawn, was leaning up against the
tree trunk, as stiff as the tree."

"Now this is rather curious," remarked Paynter thoughtfully. "I told
you I collected legends, and I fancy I can tell you the beginning of the
story of which that is the end, though it comes hundreds of miles across
the sea."

He tapped meditatively on the table with his thin, taper fingers, like
a man trying to recall a tune. He had, indeed, made a hobby of such
fables, and he was not without vanity about his artistic touch in
telling them.

"Oh, do tell us your part of it?" cried Barbara Vane, whose air of sunny
sleepiness seemed in some vague degree to have fallen from her.

The American bowed across the table with a serious politeness, and then
began playing idly with a quaint ring on his long finger as he talked.

"If you go down to the Barbary Coast, where the last wedge of the forest
narrows down between the desert and the great tideless sea, you will
find the natives still telling a strange story about a saint of the Dark
Ages. There, on the twilight border of the Dark Continent, you feel the
Dark Ages. I have only visited the place once, though it lies, so to
speak, opposite to the Italian city where I lived for years, and yet you
would hardly believe how the topsy-turvydom and transmigration of this
myth somehow seemed less mad than they really are, with the wood loud
w