ht of gray-blue cranes across a pearl-gray sky, shot with
threads of evening scarlet, makes a masterly picture: indeed, an effect
worthy of reproduction in Art. You see a Japanese screen done in heroic
size; and it is a sight to make you long exquisitely for things that are
not--like a poet. But----

Let us have no illusions about this matter! Crane soup is not
satisfactory. It looks gray-blue and tastes gray-blue, and gives to your
psychic inwardness a dull, gray-blue, melancholy tone. And when you
nibble at the boiled gray-blue meat of an adult crane, you catch
yourself wondering just what sort of _ragout_ could be made out of
boots; you have a morbid longing to know just how bad such a _ragout_
would really be!

Hereafter on whatever trails I may follow, blue cranes shall be used
chiefly for Japanese screen effects. Little by little (the latent
philosopher in me emerges to remark) by experience we place not only
ourselves but all things in their proper places in the universe. This
process of fitting things properly in one's cosmos seems to be one of
the chief aims of conscious life. Therefore I score one for
myself--having placed blue cranes permanently in that cosmic nook given
over to Japanese screen effects!

Next morning we pushed on. The taste of that crane soup clung to me all
day like the memory of an old sorrow dulled by time.

Deer tracks were plentiful, but it has long been conceded that the
tracks are by far the least edible things pertaining to an animal.
Cranes seemed to have multiplied rapidly. Impudently tame, they lined
the gravel-bars, and regarded us curiously as we fought our way past
them. Now and then a flock of wild ducks alighted several hundred yards
from us. We had only a rifle. To shoot a moving duck out of a moving
boat with a rifle is a feat attended with some difficulties. Once we
wounded a wild goose, but it got away; which offended our sense of
poetic justice. After crane soup one would seem to deserve roast goose.

I scanned the dreary monotonous valleys stretching away from the river.
We had for several days been living on scenery, tobacco, and flapjacks.
The scenery had flattened out, tobacco was running low; but the
flapjacks bid fair to go on forever. I sought in my head for the exact
adjective, the particular epithet with the inevitable feel about it,
with which to describe that monotonous melancholy stretch. Every time I
tried, I came back to the word "_baconless_." The word