THE LURE OF KARTABO 6 



song after me from the sentinel palm, just as 

 he had greeted me four years ago. 



Then I gathered about me all the strange and 

 unnamable possessions of a tropical laboratory — 

 and moved. A wren reaches its home after hun- 

 dreds of miles of fast aerial travel; a hermit 

 crab achieves a new lease with a flip of his tail. 

 Between these extremes, and in no less strange 

 a fashion, I moved. A great barge pushed off 

 from the Penal Settlement, piled high with my 

 zoological Lares and Penates, and along each 

 side squatted a line of paddlers, — white-garbed 

 burglars and murderers, forgers and fighters, — 

 while seated aloft on one of my ammunition 

 trunks, with a microscope case and a camera close 

 under his watchful eye, sat Case, King of the 

 Warders, the biggest, blackest, and kindest- 

 hearted man in the world. 



Three miles up river swept my moving-van; 

 and from the distance I could hear the half- 

 whisper — which was yet a roar — of Case as he 

 admonished his children. "Mon," he would say 

 to a shirking, shrinking coolie second-story man, 

 *'mon, do you t'ink dis the time to sleep? What 

 toughts have you in your bosom, dat you delay 

 de Professor's household?" And then a chanty 



