THE LURE OF KARTABO 5 
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 tink dis the time to sleep? What 
toughts have you in your bosom, dat you delay 
de Professor’s household?’ And then a chanty 
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