self, you wear deer-skin from throat to ankle, and your
nose is ever sniffing to windward. But this is a strange wind to you.
You see, you smell, but your eyes ask, 'What is it?' You are a woodsman,
but a stranger among your own kin. You have never seen a living Varick;
you have never even seen a partridge."

"Your wisdom is at fault there," I said, maliciously.

"Have you seen a Varick?"

"No; but the partridge--"

"Pooh! a little creature, like a gray meadow-lark remoulded! You call it
partridge, I call it quail. But I speak of the crested thunder--drumming
cock that struts all ruffed like a Spanish grandee of ancient times.
Wait, sir!" and he pointed to a string of birds' footprints in the dust
just ahead. "Tell me what manner of creature left its mark there?"

I leaned from my saddle, scanning the sign carefully, but the bird that
made it was a strange bird to me. Still bending from my saddle, I heard
his mocking laugh, but did not look up.

"You wear a lynx-skin for a saddle-cloth," he said, "yet that lynx never
squalled within a thousand miles of these hills."

"Do you mean to say there are no lynxes here?" I asked.

"Plenty, sir, but their ears bear no black-and-white marks. Pardon, I do
not mean to vex you; I read as I run, sir; it is my habit."

"So you have traced me on a back trail for a thousand miles--from
habit," I said, not exactly pleased.

"A thousand miles--by your leave."

"Or without it."

"Or without it--a thousand miles, sir, on a back trail, through forests
that blossom like gigantic gardens in May with flowers sweeter than our
white water-lilies abloom on trees that bear glossy leaves the year
round; through thickets that spread great, green, many-fingered hands at
you, all adrip with golden jasmine; where pine wood is fat as bacon;
where the two oaks shed their leaves, yet are ever in foliage; where the
thick, blunt snakes lie in the mud and give no warning when they deal
death. So far, sir, I trail you, back to the soil where your baby
fingers first dug--soil as white as the snow which you are yet to see
for the first time in your life of twenty-three years. A land where
there are no hills; a land where the vultures sail all day without
flapping their tip-curled wings; where slimy dragon things watch from
the water's edge; where Greek slaves sweat at indigo-vats that draw
vultures like carrion; where black men, toiling, sing all day on the
sea-islands, plucking cotton-blossoms; wh