red with a single green pond and all that it
holds?"

"By Jove! Is that so--and would you find a volume in a caterpillar?"

"Why not? Listen to me, Dick. Take the silver-spiked caterpillar,
with a skin of black satin and a length that runs to four inches. He
lives his life in the topmost boughs of an African palm--a feathered
dome amid the forest--and there beneath the blue sky he browses till
he descends into the warm earth to sleep in chrysalis form before he
emerges as a splendid moth, with glass windows in his wide wings to
sail with the fire-flies through the dark vaults of the silent
woods."

"All that from a caterpillar?"

"That and much more, Dicky."

"And where will this study of the caterpillar lead you, Godfrey? One
can't live on a caterpillar."

"Yet there is one kind--fat and creamy--that makes good soup."

"Ugh, you cormorant! But tell me seriously, what is the end of your
studies--where will they lead you?"

"To Central Africa."

"Do you mean that, Venning?"

"I do, Dick. There is one spot on the map of Africa that is marked
black. That spot is covered over hundreds of square miles by the
unexplored forest. Think what that means to me!"

"Fever most likely--or three inches of spear-head."

"A forest big enough to cover England! Just think of the new forms
of life--from a new ant to an elephant or hornless giraffe. The
okapi was discovered near that great hunting-ground--and, who is to
say there are not other animals as strange in its untrodden depths?"

"Is it a wild-fowl, the okapi?"

"A wild-fowl, you duffer!" exclaimed Venning, indignantly. "Haven't
you heard of the dwarfed giraffe, part zebra, discovered by Sir
Harry Johnston? It lost the long neck of the original species which
browses in the open veld by the necessity to adapt its habits to the
changed conditions of life within the forest."

"Your neck is rather long, my boy, from much stretching to watch
things. Look out that you don't have it shortened. And so you intend
to visit Central Africa? That is very curious!"

"I don't see anything curious about it."

"Nor do I, as to one thing. If a fellow is crazy about butterflies,
he may as well roam in Africa as a lunatic with a net as anywhere
else; but the curious part of the matter is, that my study of Arabic
is intended to prepare me for a trip to the very same place."

"Compton, you don't mean it," said the other, jumping from his seat.

"I do, most decidedly."

"But