the
evening took us with him to the Club.

A military band was playing and men in white, well-dressed women, and
officers in uniform strolled about or sipped iced drinks beside the tennis
court. We felt strange and shy but doubtless we seemed more strange to them
for we were newly come from a far country which they saw only as a mystic,
unknown land.

On June 9, at noon, we embarked for the 1,200-mile journey to Rangoon,
exactly nine months after we had ridden away from Yuen-nan Fu toward the
Mountain of Eternal Snow. Our further travels need not be related here.
When we reached civilization we expected that our transport difficulties
were ended; instead they had only begun. India was well-nigh isolated from
the Pacific and to expose our valuable collection to the attacks of German
pirates in the Mediterranean and Atlantic was not to be considered even
though it necessitated traveling two thirds around the world to reach
America safely.

We left Rangoon for Calcutta, crossed India with all our baggage to Bombay,
and after a seemingly endless wait eventually succeeded in arriving at
Hongkong by way of Singapore. There we separated from our faithful Wu and
sent him to his home in Foochow. It was hard to say "good-by" to Wu, for
his efficient service, his enthusiastic interest in the work of the
Expedition, and, above all, his willingness to do whatever needed to be
done, had won our gratitude and affection. We ourselves went northward to
Japan, across the Pacific to Vancouver, and overland to New York, arriving
on October 1, 1917, nearly nineteen months from the time we left. We were
never separated from our collections for, had we left them, I doubt if they
would ever have reached America. It was difficult enough to gather them in
the field, but infinitely more so to guide the forty-one cases through the
tangled shipping net of a war-mad world.

They reached New York without the loss of a single specimen and are now
being prepared in the American Museum of Natural History for the study
which will place the scientific results of the Asiatic Zooelogical
Expedition before the public.

* * * * *

The story of our travels is at an end. Once more we are indefinable units
in a vast work-a-day world, bound by the iron chains of convention to the
customs of civilized men and things. The glorious days in our beloved East
are gone, and yet, to us, the Orient seems not far away, for the miles of