he place as a flower turns to the sun. He
discovered that for thirty years something in him had been cheated. For
thirty years he had believed that completely to satisfy his soul all he
needed was the gray stone walls and the gray-shingled cabins under the
gray skies of New England, that what in nature he most loved was the
pine forests and the fields of goldenrod on the rock-bound coast of the
North Shore. But now, like a man escaped from prison, he leaped and
danced in the glaring sunlight of the equator, he revelled in the
reckless generosity of nature, in the glorious confusion of colors, in
the "blooming blue" of the Indian Ocean, in the Arabian nights spent
upon the housetops under the purple sky, and beneath silver stars so
near that he could touch them with his hand.

He found it like being perpetually in a comic opera and playing a part
in one. For only the scenic artist would dare to paint houses in such
yellow, pink, and cobalt-blue; only a "producer" who had never ventured
farther from Broadway than the Atlantic City boardwalk would have
conceived costumes so mad and so magnificent. Instinctively he cast
the people of Zanzibar in the conventional roles of musical comedy.

His choruses were already in waiting. There was the Sultan's
body-guard in gold-laced turbans, the merchants of the bazaars in red
fezzes and gowns of flowing silk, the Malay sailors in blue, the black
native police in scarlet, the ladies of the harems closely veiled and
cloaked, the market women in a single garment of orange, or scarlet, or
purple, or of all three, and the happy, hilarious Zanzibari boys in the
color God gave them.

For hours he would sit under the yellow-and-green awning of the Greek
hotel and watch the procession pass, or he would lie under an umbrella
on the beach and laugh as the boatmen lifted their passengers to their
shoulders and with them splash through the breakers, or in the bazaars
for hours he would bargain with the Indian merchants, or in the great
mahogany hall of the Ivory House, to the whisper of a punka and the
tinkle of ice in a tall glass, listen to tales of Arab raids, of
elephant poachers, of the trade in white and black ivory, of the great
explorers who had sat in that same room--of Emin Pasha, of Livingstone,
of Stanley. His comic opera lacked only a heroine and the love
interest.

When he met Mrs. Adair he found both. Polly Adair, as every one who
dared to do so preferred to call her, wa