uldn't have put into words though I'd tried for a
month. I enclose it herewith. . . .

"When I had finished my copying, I took the thing back, meaning
to slip it under Miss Denistoun's cushion. But she had returned
to her chair, and so I was caught red-handed. 'So it was you?'
said she. 'What have you been doing with my magazine?'
'Skimming it,' said I--which was true enough, literally, but I
didn't manage it very well. 'Did you find anything to interest
you specially?' she asked. 'Well, yes,' I admitted;' I picked
it up and lit on something that promised well: but the story
came to nothing.' She gave me a glance and I felt sure she had
spotted my awkwardness and was going to pursue the catechism.
But she didn't. To my relief she harked back to our previous
talk. At tea-time, however, she remembered to take the
magazine away with her. . . . It has not yet been returned to
store. . . ."

(ENCLOSURE)

"'_Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated
and attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen
known as the head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless
little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the
subtle terror of their concealed presence, paralleling the trail
of their prey through unmapped forests, across perilous
mountain-tops, adown bottomless chasms, into uninhabitable
jungles, always near, with the inevitable hand of death
uplifted, betraying their pursuits only by such signs as a beast
or a bird or a gliding serpent might make--a twig crackling in
the awful sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew showering from the
screening foliage of a giant tree, a whisper at even from the
rushes of a water-level--a hint of death for every mile and
every hour--they amused me greatly, those little fellows of one
idea._'"

You observe that a lady has come into the story at last, as she was
bound to do. (You will hear of another and a very different one by
and by.) It is not my fault that she enters it so late--I tell of
things as they occurred--though a clever writer would have dragged
her in long before this. I wish to God I hadn't to bring her into it
at all. I slipped out her surname just now. . . .

It was through being a friend of mine that she comes into it.
Constantia Denistoun and I ha