lding of San Ramon. Above that it becomes a
gully curved by torrential rains; above that, zigzags again as a
mule-track up to a pass in the mountains--and thereafter God knows
whither. Connecting the lower zigzags (I need scarcely say) are
short-cuts or slides made by the brown-footed children, who plunge
down almost as steeply and quickly as the stream itself when the
fortnightly fruit-steamer blows her siren beyond the point.

There is no harbour, you understand. The small steamer--by name the
_P.M. Diaz_--drops anchor a short mile out in a half-protected
roadstead, and discharges what she has to discharge, or lades what
she has to lade, by boats. Her ladings during the banana-harvest are
feverish, tumultuous, vociferous. Her ladings during the sleepy
remainder of the year comprise canned meats, Scotch whisky,
illustrated magazines, and plantation inspectors.

It was almost twelve months to a day--I am trying to tell the story
to-night as a novelist would tell it, but without going beyond the
material supplied to me--It was almost twelve months from the day Foe
left the portico of the Flaxman Building Hotel, New York, that he
stepped ashore on the beach below San Ramon and resigned his light
suitcase to a herd of bare-legged boys who offered to carry it up to
the hotel, but seemed likelier to dismember it on the way and share
up the shreds. They took him, as a matter of course, for a
plantation inspector, arrived in the off-season. He was the only
passenger landed from the _P.M. Diaz_, which had dropped anchor
comfortably, in perfect weather, but would sail in the morning.
A light land-breeze blew off the mountains: but it passed over a mile
of water before rippling the sea, which, inshore, lay as glass.
The sunset from the Pacific lit up San Ramon above him, all terraced
and embowered.

Halted there, gazing up and taking stock of this Paradise before
scaling it, Foe could not be aware, though he might have guessed,
that half a hundred embrasures in the climbing foliage hid
field-glasses and telescopes of which he was the one and common
focus. Up at the hotel, one idler said to another, "Will it be
Morgansen this time, d'you think?" The other passed on the question
to Engelbaum, who was so far the master of his guests that he had
lazily commandeered the large telescope on the _galeria_, and without
gainsay. "If it's old Morgansen," the second man added, "we might
trot some way down the hill to wish him