ven more enjoyable than if they sat still
to be caught."

"We were speaking of dogs," said Miss Lansdale. "At any rate Jim had
_you_ from the first."

"Let us keep to dogs, then," I answered. "Meantime, if you listen to me,
you'll soon be in deep water, when we've both lost the taste for
adventure. This current will take us over the dam in about seven
minutes, I should judge."

She fell to the oars again with a dreaming face, in which Lansdale and
the other were so well blended that it was indeed the face of visions
that had long been coming to me.

"You remind me again of the wild gentleman," I said, after a long look
at her, a look which she was good enough to let me see that she
observed.

"_Et ego in Arcadia vixi_--and I, too, was netted in my native jungle."

I saw that she, too, essayed the feat of being both light and serious
without letting the seam show.

"I mean about pictures," I explained. "The gentlemanly curator of the
side-show always says of the wild man thoughtfully, 'I _believe_ he has
a few photographs for sale.' He is always right--the wild man does have
them, though I should not care to say that they're worth the money; that
depends upon one's tastes, of course--by the way, Miss Lansdale, I have
long had a picture of you."

"Has mother--"

"No--long before I became a fellow-slave with Clem--long before there
was a juvenile mother or even a Clem in Little Arcady."

"May I ask how you got it?"

"Certainly you may! I don't know."

"May I see it?" I thought she felt a deeper interest than she cared to
reveal.

"Unfortunately, no. If you only could see it, you would see that it is
almost a perfect likeness--perhaps a bit more Little Miss than you could
be now--but it's unmistakably true."

"I lost such a picture once," she said with a fall of her eyes. "Where
is the one you have?"

"Sometimes it's behind my eyes and sometimes it is out before them."

"Nonsense!"

"To be sure! Only Jim and I, trained and hardened in the ways of belief,
are equal to a feat of that sort."

"I see no merit in believing that."

"I don't know that there is, especially--not in believing this
particular thing, but the power for belief in general which it
implies--you see I am unprejudiced."

"Why should you want to believe it?"

I should have known, without catching the glint of her eyes under the
hat brim, that a Peavey spoke there.

"If you could see the thing once, you'd understand," I said, an