Island, the eyes of which were two missionary shirt buttons of
mother-of-pearl, of the Puritan type; your practical cannibal, having
eaten his missionary, spits out the shirt buttons to be used as the eyes
which see not; carved gourds were there, and calabashes; Mexican
pottery; and some of the latest Pompeiian antiquities such as are
miraculously discovered in the presence of the amazed and delighted
tourist who secretly purchases the same for considerably more than a
song.

There were pious objects, many of them resembling the Ex Votos at a
shrine; an ebony and bronzed indulgenced crucifix with a history, and
Sacred Hearts done in scarlet satin with flames of shining tinsel
flickering from their tops.

There were vines creeping everywhere within the room, from jars that
stood on brackets and made hanging gardens of themselves; creepers,
yards in length that sprung from the mouths of water-pots hidden behind
objects of interest, and these framed the pictures in living green; a
huge wide-mouthed vase stood in the bay window filled with a great pulu
fern still nourished by its native soil--a veritable tropical island
this, now basking in the moonlight far from its native clime. Japanese
and Chinese lanterns were there; and an ostrich egg brought from Nubia
that hung like an alabaster lamp lit by a moonbeam; and fans, of course,
but quaint barbaric ones from the Orient and the Equatorial Isles; and
framed and unframed photographs of celebrities each bearing an original
autograph; and easy chairs, nothing but the easiest chairs from the very
far-reaching one with the long arms like a pair of oars over which one
throws his slippered feet, and lolls in his pajamas in memory of an East
Indian season of exile, to the deep nest-like sleepy hollow quite big
enough for two, in which one dozes and dreams, and out of which it is so
difficult for one to rise. Over all this picturesque confusion grinned a
fleshless human skull with its eye sockets and yawning jaws stuffed full
of faded boutonnieres.

The moon shone, but paler now for it was growing late, on a closed coupe
that rolled rapidly from the Club House in the early morning after a
High Jinks night, and clattered through the streets accompanied by the
matutinal milk wagons with their frequent, intermittent pauses; thus it
rolled and rolled over the resounding pavement toward that house on the
hill top, The Eyrie.

The vehicle zigzagged up the steep grade, and stopped at t