real at any rate; about the largest I ever
saw, indeed. Give up dreams, old boy, and take to something useful. You
might go back to your fiction writing; you seem to have leanings that
way, and you know you need not publish the stories, except privately for
the edification of your friends."

With this Parthian shaft Bickley took his departure to make a job of
Widow Jenkins's legs.

I took his advice. During the next few months I did write something
which occupied my thoughts for a while, more or less. It lies in my safe
to this minute, for somehow I have never been able to make up my mind to
burn what cost me so much physical and mental toil.

When it was finished my melancholy returned to me with added force.
Everything in the house took a tongue and cried to me of past days.
Its walls echoed a voice that I could never hear again; in the very
looking-glasses I saw the reflection of a lost presence. Although I had
moved myself for the purposes of sleep to a little room at the further
end of the building, footsteps seemed to creep about my bed at night
and I heard the rustle of a remembered dress without the door. The place
grew hateful to me. I felt that I must get away from it or I should go
mad.

One afternoon Bastin arrived carrying a book and in a state of high
indignation. This work, written, as he said, by some ribald traveller,
grossly traduced the character of missionaries to the South Sea Islands,
especially of those of the Society to which he subscribed, and he threw
it on the table in his righteous wrath. Bickley picked it up and opened
it at a photograph of a very pretty South Sea Island girl clad in a few
flowers and nothing else, which he held towards Bastin, saying:

"Is it to this child of Nature that you object? I call her distinctly
attractive, though perhaps she does wear her hibiscus blooms with a
difference to our women--a little lower down."

"The devil is always attractive," replied Bastin gloomily. "Child of
Nature indeed! I call her Child of Sin. That photograph is enough to
make my poor Sarah turn in her grave."

"Why?" asked Bickley; "seeing that wide seas roll between you and this
dusky Venus. Also I thought that according to your Hebrew legend sin
came in with bark garments."

"You should search the Scriptures, Bickley," I broke in, "and cultivate
accuracy. It was fig-leaves that symbolised its arrival. The garments,
which I think were of skin, developed later."

"Perhaps," went