rnal sunrise.

"Silent upon a peak in Darien," he remarked, in a needlessly loud and
cheerful voice; and though the claim, thus expressed, was illogical, it
was not inappropriate. He did feel as if he were a primitive adventurer
just come to the New World, instead of a modern traveler just come from
it.

"I wonder," he proceeded, "whether I am really the first that ever burst
into this silent tree. It looks like it. Those--"

He stopped and sat on his branch quite motionless, but his eyes were
turned on a branch a little below it, and they were brilliant with a
vigilance, like those of a man watching a snake.

What he was looking at might, at first sight, have been a large white
fungus spreading on the smooth and monstrous trunk; but it was not.

Leaning down dangerously from his perch, he detached it from the twig on
which it had caught, and then sat holding it in his hand and gazing at
it. It was Squire Vane's white Panama hat, but there was no Squire Vane
under it. Paynter felt a nameless relief in the very fact that there was
not.

There in the clear sunlight and sea air, for an instant, all the
tropical terrors of his own idle tale surrounded and suffocated him. It
seemed indeed some demon tree of the swamps; a vegetable serpent that
fed on men. Even the hideous farce in the fancy of digesting a whole man
with the exception of his hat, seemed only to simplify the nightmare.
And he found himself gazing dully at one leaf of the tree, which
happened to be turned toward him, so that the odd markings, which
had partly made the legend, really looked a little like the eye in a
peacock's feather. It was as if the sleeping tree had opened one eye
upon him.

With a sharp effort he steadied himself in mind and posture on the
bough; his reason returned, and he began to descend with the hat in his
teeth. When he was back in the underworld of the wood, he studied the
hat again and with closer attention. In one place in the crown there was
a hole or rent, which certainly had not been there when it had last lain
on the table under the garden tree. He sat down, lit a cigarette, and
reflected for a long time.

A wood, even a small wood, is not an easy thing to search minutely;
but he provided himself with some practical tests in the matter. In one
sense the very density of the thicket was a help; he could at least see
where anyone had strayed from the path, by broken and trampled growths
of every kind. After many hours' in