animal," he said.

CHAPTER XVI: SUNRISE

Mrs. Kerrick sat at a little teak-wood table in the verandah of a low-
pitched teak-built house that stood on the steep slope of a brown
hillside. Her youngest child, with the grave natural dignity of nine-
year old girlhood, maintained a correct but observant silence, looking
carefully yet unobtrusively after the wants of the one guest, and
checking from time to time the incursions of ubiquitous ants that were
obstinately disposed to treat the table-cloth as a foraging ground. The
wayfaring visitor, who was experiencing a British blend of Eastern
hospitality, was a French naturalist, travelling thus far afield in quest
of feathered specimens to enrich the aviaries of a bird-collecting Balkan
King. On the previous evening, while shrugging his shoulders and
unloosing his vocabulary over the meagre accommodation afforded by the
native rest-house, he had been enchanted by receiving an invitation to
transfer his quarters to the house on the hillside, where he found not
only a pleasant-voiced hostess and some drinkable wine, but three brown-
skinned English youngsters who were able to give him a mass of
intelligent first-hand information about the bird life of the region. And
now, at the early morning breakfast, ere yet the sun was showing over the
rim of the brown-baked hills, he was learning something of the life of
the little community he had chanced on. "I was in these parts many years
ago," explained the hostess, "when my husband was alive and had an
appointment out here. It is a healthy hill district and I had pleasant
memories of the place, so when it became necessary, well, desirable let
us say, to leave our English home and find a new one, it occurred to me
to bring my boys and my little girl here--my eldest girl is at school in
Paris. Labour is cheap here and I try my hand at farming in a small way.
Of course it is very different work to just superintending the dairy and
poultry-yard arrangements of an English country estate. There are so
many things, insect ravages, bird depredations, and so on, that one only
knows on a small scale in England, that happen here in wholesale fashion,
not to mention droughts and torrential rains and other tropical
visitations. And then the domestic animals are so disconcertingly
different from the ones one has been used to; humped cattle never seem to
behave in the way that straight-backed cattle would, and goats and geese
an