iant looking over the valley of the
pygmies. When he dropped into the hollow, however, the impression
was lost; the rocky banks, though hardly above the height of a
cottage, hung over and had the profile of a precipice. As he began
to wander down the course of the stream, in idle but romantic
curiosity, and saw the water shining in short strips between the
great gray boulders and bushes as soft as great green mosses, he
fell into quite an opposite vein of fantasy. It was rather as if the
earth had opened and swallowed him into a sort of underworld of
dreams. And when he became conscious of a human figure dark against
the silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking rather
like a large bird, it was perhaps with some of the premonitions
proper to a man who meets the strangest friendship of his life.

The man was apparently fishing; or at least was fixed in a
fisherman's attitude with more than a fisherman's immobility. March
was able to examine the man almost as if he had been a statue for
some minutes before the statue spoke. He was a tall, fair man,
cadaverous, and a little lackadaisical, with heavy eyelids and a
highbridged nose. When his face was shaded with his wide white hat,
his light mustache and lithe figure gave him a look of youth. But
the Panama lay on the moss beside him; and the spectator could see
that his brow was prematurely bald; and this, combined with a
certain hollowness about the eyes, had an air of headwork and even
headache. But the most curious thing about him, realized after a
short scrutiny, was that, though he looked like a fisherman, he was
not fishing.

He was holding, instead of a rod, something that might have been a
landing-net which some fishermen use, but which was much more like
the ordinary toy net which children carry, and which they generally
use indifferently for shrimps or butterflies. He was dipping this
into the water at intervals, gravely regarding its harvest of weed
or mud, and emptying it out again.

"No, I haven't caught anything," he remarked, calmly, as if
answering an unspoken query. "When I do I have to throw it back
again; especially the big fish. But some of the little beasts
interest me when I get 'em."

"A scientific interest, I suppose?" observed March.

"Of a rather amateurish sort, I fear," answered the strange
fisherman. "I have a sort of hobby about what they call 'phenomena
of phosphorescence.' But it would be rather awkward to go about in
soci