and society.
At the last the hermit went to an inner corner of his cave and began

to dig in the soft earth with a long iron spoon. Out of the cavity he
thus made he drew a tin can, and out of the can three thousand dollars

in bills, tightly rolled and wrapped in oiled silk. He was a real
hermit, as this may assure you.

You may take a brief look at him as he hastens down the little
mountain-side. A long, wrinkled black frock-coat reached to his

calves. White duck trousers, unacquainted with the tailor's goose, a
pink shirt, white standingcollar with brilliant blue butterfly tie,

and buttoned congress gaiters. But think, sir and madam--ten years!
>From beneath a narrow-brimmed straw hat with a striped band flowed his

hair. Seeing him, with all your shrewdness you could not have guessed
him. You would have said that he played Hamlet--or the tuba--or

pinochle--you would never have laid your hand on your heart and said:
"He is a hermit who lived ten years in a cave for love of one lady--to

win another."
The dancing pavilionextended above the waters of the river. Gay

lanterns and frosted electric globes shed a soft glamour within it. A
hundred ladies and gentlemen from the inn and summer cottages flitted

in and about it. To the left of the dusty roadway down which the
hermit had tramped were the inn and grill-room. Something seemed to

be on there, too. The windows were brilliantly lighted, and music was
playing--music different from the two-steps and waltzes of the casino

band.
A negro man wearing a white jacket came through the iron gate, with

its immensegranite posts and wrought-iron lamp-holders.
"What is going on here to-night?" asked the hermit.

"Well, sah," said the servitor, "dey is having de reg'lar Thursday-
evenin' dance in de casino. And in de grill-room dere's a beefsteak

dinner, sah."
The hermit glanced up at the inn on the hillsidewhence burst suddenly

a triumphantstrain of splendid harmony.
"And up there," said he, "they are playing Mendelssohn--what is going

on up there?"
"Up in de inn," said the dusky one, "dey is a weddin' goin' on. Mr.

Binkley, a mighty rich man, am marryin' Miss Trenholme, sah--de young
lady who am quite de belle of de place, sah."

HE ALSO SERVES
If I could have a thousand years--just one little thousand years--more

of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to
touch the hem of her robe.

Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road and
garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words of

the things they have seen and considered. The recording of their
tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers. There are only

two fates I dread--deafness and writer's cramp. The hand is yet
steady; let the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in

the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, true camp-follower
of fortune.

Biography shall claim you but an instant--I first knew Hunky when he
was head-waiter at Chubb's little beefsteak restaurant and cafe on

Third Avenue. There was only one waiter besides.
Then, successively, I caromed against him in the little streets of the

Big City after his trip to Alaska, his voyage as cook with a treasure-
seeking expedition to the Caribbean, and his failure as a pearl-fisher

in the Arkansas River. Between these dashes into the land of
adventure he usually came back to Chubb's for a while. Chubb's was a

port for him when gales blew too high; but when you dined there and
Hunky went for your steak you never knew whether he would come to

anchor in the kitchen or in the Malayan Archipelago. You wouldn't
care for his description--he was soft of voice and hard of face, and

rarely had to use more than one eye to quell any approach to a
disturbance among Chubb's customers.

One night I found Hunky standing at a corner of Twenty-third Street
and Third Avenue after an absence of several months. In ten minutes

we had a little round table between us in a quiet corner, and my ears
began to get busy. I leave out my sly ruses and feints to draw

Hunky's word-of-mouth blows--it all came to something like this:
"Speaking of the next election," said Hunky, "did you ever know much

about Indians? No? I don't mean the Cooper, Beadle, cigar-store, or
Laughing Water kind-I mean the modern Indian--the kind that takes

Greek prizes in colleges and scalps the half-back on the other side in
football games. The kind that eats macaroons and tea in the

afternoons with the daughter of the professor of biology, and fills up
on grasshoppers and fried rattlesnake when they get back to the

ancestral wickiup.
"Well, they ain't so bad. I like 'em better than most foreigners that

have come over in the last few hundred years. One thing about the
Indian is this: when he mixes with the white race he swaps all his own

vices for them of the pale-faces--and he retains all his own virtues.
Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves whenever he lets

'em loose. But the imported foreigners adopt our virtues and keep
their own vices--and it's going to take our whole standing army some

day to police that gang.
"But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with High jack

Snakefeeder, a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a Pennsylvania
college and the latest thing in pointed-toed, rubber-heeled, patent

kid moccasins and Madras hunting-shirt with turned-back cuffs. He was
a friend of mine. I met him in Tahlequah when I was out there during

the land boom, and we got thick. He had got all there was out of
colleges and had come back to lead his people out of Egypt. He was a

man of first-class style and wrote essays, and had been invited to
visit rich guys' houses in Boston and such places.

"There was a Cherokee girl in Muscogee that High Jack was foolish
about. He took me to see her a few times. Her name was Florence Blue

Feather--but you want to clear your mind of all ideas of squaws with
nose-rings and army blankets. This young lady was whiter than you

are, and better educated than I ever was. You couldn't have told her
from any of the girls shopping in the swell Third Avenue stores. I

liked her so well that, I got to calling on her now and then when High
Jack wasn't along, which is the way of friends in such matters. She

was educated at the Muscogee College, and was making a specialty of--
let's see--eth--yes, ethnology. That's the art that goes back and

traces the descent of different races of people, leading up from
jelly-fish through monkeys and to the O'Briens. High Jack had took up

that line too, and had read papers about it before all kinds of
riotous assemblies--Chautauquas and Choctaws and chowder-parties, and

such. Having a mutual taste for musty information like that was what
made 'em like each other, I suppose. But I don't know! What they

call congeniality of tastes ain't always it. Now, when Miss Blue
Feather and me was talking together, I listened to her affidavits

about the first families of the Land of Nod being cousins german
(well, if the Germans don't nod, who does?) to the mound-builders of

Ohio with incomprehension and respect. And when I'd tell her about
the Bowery and Coney Island, and sing her a few songs that I'd heard

the Jamaica niggers sing at their church lawn-parties, she didn't look
much less interested than she did when High Jack would tell her that

he had a pipe that the first inhabitants of America originally arrived
here on stilts after a freshet at Tenafly, New Jersey.

"But I was going to tell you more about High Jack.
"About six months ago I get a letter from him, saying he'd been

commissioned by the Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology at Washington
to go down to Mexico and translate some excavations or dig up the

meaning of some shorthand notes on some ruins--or something of that
sort. And if I'd go along he could squeeze the price into the expense