overhead: a giant bat flapped through an open window, fluttered,
crazy-winged, thrice about the big room and blundered through another
window into the night: the low voweled voices of native passersby
floated up from the dark street.

But Terry heard nothing, nor felt the scent-laden breezes which roused
the heat-soaked town to life.... He was walking up Main Street again,
with rifle and snowshoes and fox, of a Sunday morning just as the
heavy church doors swung wide to the emerging congregation....

A strong gust flickered the lamp. He rose, slid shut the exposed
window and returned to his desk. In a few moments he took pen and
paper, and wrote.

DEANE-DEAR:--

Your letters come to me across the thousands of miles of
land and sea, carried by sooty train and boat, buried in a
dross of mail in prosy canvas sacks: I open them with the
delight one feels when he brushes aside the mat of damp and
frosty withered leaves to find the timid beauty of arbutus.

You think, perhaps, you might grow fond of these people? I
know that you would love this Gulf as I do. The humid heat
of the day oppresses me but little: I love the sparkling
hours of dawn, the cool of the evenings; the great tangled
stretches of green which clothe the slopes from sea to the
edge of the mountains that loom gray in the distance, like
the rim of the world. And I like the courageous planters,
toiling that the world may have its hemp: the young-old wild
tribes, emerging from their primitive mental shallows, a bit
bewildered, pathetic.

Yes, I think that you would like it all, too,
though--sometimes--I am not quite sure.

The mountains are not like our Vermont hills: more rugged,
wilder, more--what shall I say!--unsolved.... Thinking of
the home hills I can almost conceive the vast significance
of the word "eternity": but thoughts of these primeval hills
sweeps my mind backward, to the infinity of creation.
Untamed, untraveled, mysterious by day as by night, they
threaten as they beckon.

Nearly every evening, near sundown, I see a pair of wild
pigeons homing toward the crest of Apo. "Limocons," the
Bogobos call them--"leem-o-sahns": the word falls limpid
from their lips, unaccented. They say the limocon never was
heard to sing in the lowlands, and tell a strange legend
that it is an oracle of t