land, and I naturally fell to comparing them with this one, at which I was the guest of so extraordinary a woman, under such novel and exciting circumstances.
Had I been told only half a year before that I should be picnicking on an island in the North Pacific, of which I knew neither the location nor the name, with a woman who had a reputation such as Alie unfortunately possessed, I should certainly have refused to believe it. Yet it was so, and, what was more to the point, I was not only picnicking, but was head over ears in love with that self-same woman, and, what was perhaps still more extraordinary, gloried in the fact.
As soon as breakfast was over we remounted our ponies and pushed on in the same fashion, through the same sort of country, with a brief halt at midday, until nightfall. Towards the middle of the afternoon the view once more began to change; craggy uplands rose on our right, while the same wonderful forest still continued on our left. What struck me as remarkable was the fact that so far we had seen no villages and encountered no natives. Could the island—if island it really were, and of that I was beginning to have my doubts—be inhabited only by the people of our settlement? It seemed scarcely probably, but if not, where were the rest of its aboriginal population?
A little before sundown, Alie informed me that we were close upon our destination. And surely enough, just as the orb of day disappeared behind the tree tops, we saw before us, on a small plateau, four or five large and exceedingly comfortable huts, which the men who had preceded us that morning had erected for our accommodation. They faced towards the east, and the
