four months or so the thing was complete.
Great pearls most of them were--pure white, black, pink, some perfectly
round, some tear shaped, some irregular. The thing was worth fifteen,
or perhaps twenty thousand pounds, for he only used the biggest he
could find, casting away the small ones as useless.

Emmeline this morning had just finished restringing them on a double
thread. She looked pale and not at all well and had been restless all
night.

As he went off, armed with his spear and fishing tackle, she waved her
hand to him without getting up. Usually she followed him a bit into the
wood when he was going away like this, but this morning she just sat at
the doorway of the little house, the necklace in her lap, following him
with her eyes until he was lost amidst the trees.

He had no compass to guide him, and he needed none. He knew the woods
by heart. The mysterious line beyond which scarcely an artu tree was to
be found. The long strip of mammee apple--a regular sheet of it a
hundred yards broad, and reaching from the middle of the island right
down to the lagoon. The clearings, some almost circular where the ferns
grew knee-deep. Then he came to the bad part.

The vegetation here had burst into a riot. All sorts of great sappy
stalks of unknown plants barred the way and tangled the foot; and there
were boggy places into which one sank horribly. Pausing to wipe one's
brow, the stalks and tendrils one had beaten down, or beaten aside,
rose up and closed together, making one a prisoner almost as closely
surrounded as a fly in amber.

All the noontides that had ever fallen upon the island seemed to have
left some of their heat behind them here. The air was damp and close
like the air of a laundry; and the mournful and perpetual buzz of
insects filled the silence without destroying it.

A hundred men with scythes might make a road through the place to-day;
a month or two later, searching for the road, you would find none--the
vegetation would have closed in as water closes when divided.

This was the haunt of the jug orchid--a veritable jug, lid and all.
Raising the lid you would find the jug half filled with water.
Sometimes in the tangle up above, between two trees, you would see a
thing like a bird come to ruin. Orchids grew here as in a hothouse. All
the trees--the few there were--had a spectral and miserable appearance.
They were half starved by the voluptuous growth of the gigantic weeds.

If one had mu