likened himself to a wounded bull pursued by plains' coyotes too
cowardly to battle with him for the meat of him, yet certain of the
inevitable end of him when they would be full gorged. As the
bull's horns and stamping hoofs kept off the coyotes, so his shot-
gun kept off these Solomon Islanders, these twilight shades of
bushmen of the island of Guadalcanal.

Came the day of the grass lands. Abruptly, as if cloven by the
sword of God in the hand of God, the jungle terminated. The edge
of it, perpendicular and as black as the infamy of it, was a
hundred feet up and down. And, beginning at the edge of it, grew
the grass--sweet, soft, tender, pasture grass that would have
delighted the eyes and beasts of any husbandman and that extended,
on and on, for leagues and leagues of velvet verdure, to the
backbone of the great island, the towering mountain range flung up
by some ancient earth-cataclysm, serrated and gullied but not yet
erased by the erosive tropic rains. But the grass! He had crawled
into it a dozen yards, buried his face in it, smelled it, and
broken down in a fit of involuntary weeping.

And, while he wept, the wonderful sound had pealed forth--if by
PEAL, he had often thought since, an adequate description could be
given of the enunciation of so vast a sound melting sweet. Sweet
it was, as no sound ever heard. Vast it was, of so mighty a
resonance that it might have proceeded from some brazen-throated
monster. And yet it called to him across that leagues-wide
savannah, and was like a benediction to his long-suffering, pain
racked spirit.

He remembered how he lay there in the grass, wet-cheeked but no