moths which slipped into the bungalow like shadows; pet
tarantulas; golden-eyed gongasocka geckos; automatic, house-cleaning
ants; opossums large and small; tiny lizards who had tongues in place
of eyelids; wasps who had doorsteps and watched the passing from their
windows;--all these were intimates of my laboratory table, whose
riches must be spread elsewhere; but the sounds of the bungalow were
common to the whole structure.

One of the first things I noticed, as I lay on my cot, was the new
voice of the wind at night. Now and then I caught a familiar
sound,--faint, but not to be forgotten,--the clattering of palm
fronds. But this came from Boom-boom Point, fifty yards away (an out
jutting of rocks where we had secured our first giant catfish of that
name). The steady rhythm of sound which rose and fell with the breeze
and sifted into my window with the moonbeams, was the gentlest
_shussssss_ing, a fine whispering, a veritable fern of a sound, high
and crisp and wholly apart from the moaning around the eaves which
arose at stronger gusts. It brought to mind the steep mountain-sides
of Pahang, and windy nights which presaged great storms in high passes
of Yunnan.

But these wonder times lived only through memory and were misted with
intervening years, while it came upon me during early nights, again
and again, that this was Now, and that into the hour-glass neck of Now
was headed a maelstrom of untold riches of the Future--minutes and
hours and sapphire days ahead---a Now which was wholly unconcerned
with leagues and liquor, with strikes and salaries. So I turned over
with the peace which passes all telling--the forecast of delving into
the private affairs of birds and monkeys, of great butterflies and
strange frogs and flowers. The seeping wind had led my mind on and on
from memory and distant sorrows to thoughts of the joy of labor and
life.

At half-past five a kiskadee shouted at the top of his lungs from the
bamboos, but he probably had a nightmare, for he went to sleep and did
not wake again for half-an-hour. The final swish of a bat's wing came
to my ear, and the light of a fog-dimmed day slowly tempered the
darkness among the dusty beams and rafters. From high overhead a
sprawling tarantula tossed aside the shriveled remains of his night's
banquet, the emerald cuirass and empty mahogany helmet of a
long-horned beetle, which eddied downward and landed upon my sheet.

Immediately around the bungalow the bamb