articulated skeletons of wild animals. From among the books themselves
the jaws and ivory fangs of skulls gleamed out at him. Before he had
finished his wondering survey of the strange room, John Adare stepped
to the table and picked up a skull.

"This is my latest specimen," he said, his voice eager with enthusiasm.
"It is perfect. Jean secured it for me while I was away. It is the
skull of a beaver, and shows in three distinct and remarkable
gradations how nature replaces the soft enamel as it is worn from the
beaver's teeth. You see, I am a hobbyist. For twenty years I have been
studying wild animals. And there--"

He replaced the skull on the table to point to an isolated shelf filled
with books and magazines.

"--there is my most remarkable collection," he added, a gleam of humour
in his eyes. "They are the books and magazine stories of nature fakirs,
the 'works' of naturalists who have never heard the howl of a wolf or
the cry of a loon; the wild dreams of fictionists, the rot of writers
who spend two weeks or a month each year on some blazed trail and
return to the cities to call themselves students of nature. When I feel
in bad humour I read some of that stuff and laugh."

He leaned over to press a button under the table,

"One of my little electrical arrangements," he explained. "That will
bring our breakfast. To use a popular expression of the uninformed, I'm
as hungry as a bear. As a matter of fact, you know, a bear is the
lightest eater of all brute creation for his size, strength, and fat
supply. That row of naturalists over there have made him out a pig. The
beast's a genius, for it takes a genius to grow fat on poplar buds!"

Then he laughed good humouredly.

"I suppose you are tired of this already. Josephine has probably been
filling you with a lot of my foolishness. She says I must be silly or I
would have my stuff published in books. But I am waiting, waiting until
I have come down to the last facts. I am experimenting now with the
black and the silver fox. And there are many other experiments to come,
many of them. But you are tired of this."

"Tired!"

Philip had listened to him without speaking. In this room John Adare
had changed. In him he saw now the living, breathing soul of the wild.
His own face was flushed with a new enthusiasm as he replied:

"Such things could never tire me. I only ask that I may be your
companion in your researches, and learn something of the wonders which
yo