United States an electric light bulb, a stuffed
possum, an old hat, a stalactite from the Mammoth cave, a sackful of
pecan nuts, a pair of handcuffs, half a dozen photographs and a dozen
packing cases full of things gathered from here and there, and then set
the whole junk pile up under a roof in the Fiji Islands, what would his
fellow Fijians know from that of the social life of this country. Eh?
Tell me that?"

"You exaggerate," I protested. "You take an extreme point of view."

"I don't," he said.

His contradictions would have made me angry, perhaps, were they not made
in such a quiet tone of voice.

"Take anything from its natural surroundings," he went on, "and it is
meaningless. The dull-eyed men and women that wander through this Museum
of yours are just killing time. There's no education in that kind of
thing. Besides, what they see are dead things, anyway, and you can't
study human nature in a morgue."

He resumed his seat on the window sill, then took from an inner pocket a
leather wallet, and drew from that a photograph which he tossed across
so that it fell on the desk before me. I examined it carefully. It had
been badly developed and badly printed, and what was worse, roughly
handled. But still, one could distinguish certain features.

It pictured the interior of a building. It was roofless, and above the
rear wall was what I recognized as tropical vegetation, mainly by its
wild luxuriance. In the center of the rear wall was what seemed to be a
giant stone lizard, standing on its hind legs. The one foreleg that
showed was disproportionately short. The body, too, was more attenuated
than that of any lizard. The thing was headless and the statue, idol or
whatever it was, stood on a pedestal, and before that again, seemed to
be a slab of stone. Then my attention was caught by the head of the
thing, which was to be seen in a corner. It was shaped roughly
triangular. The jaws were broad at the base and the thing had, even in
the photograph, something of the same repulsive appearance as the head
of a vampire bat.

"It is the result of the imagination of some Indian," I said. "No
post-diluvian Saurian ever existed of that size."

"Good God, man, you jump to conclusions," he said. "This is only a
representation of the thing itself. Made in heroic size, so to say. But
see here!"

He leaned over my shoulder and pointed to a kind of border that ran
along the base of the pedestal. Examining closely, I mad