“I don’t like to think of that even now.  I felt like a murderer while I did it, though my anger was hot against him.  When I stood over him and saw him bleeding on the white sand, and his beautiful great legs and neck writhing in his last agony ...  Pah!

“With that tragedy loneliness came upon me like a curse.  Good Lord! you can’t imagine how I missed that bird.  I sat by his corpse and sorrowed over him, and shivered as I looked round the desolate, silent reef.  I thought of what a jolly little bird he had been when he was hatched, and of a thousand pleasant tricks he had played before he went wrong.  I thought if I’d only wounded him I might have nursed him round into a better understanding.  If I’d had any means of digging into the coral rock I’d have buried him.  I felt exactly as if he was human.  As it was, I couldn’t think of eating him, so I put him in the lagoon, and the little fishes picked him clean.  I didn’t even save the feathers.  Then one day a chap cruising about in a yacht had a fancy to see if my atoll still existed.

“He didn’t come a moment too soon, for I was about sick enough of the desolation of it, and only hesitating whether I should walk out into the sea and finish up the business that way, or fall back on the green things....

“I sold the bones to a man named Winslow—­a dealer near the British Museum, and he says he sold them to old Havers.  It seems Havers didn’t understand they were extra large, and it was only after his death they attracted attention.  They called ’em Aepyornis—­what was it?”

“Aepyornis vastus,” said I.  “It’s funny, the very thing was mentioned to me by a friend of mine.  When they found an Aepyornis, with a thigh a yard long, they thought they had reached the top of the scale, and called him Aepyornis maximus.  Then someone turned up another thighbone four feet six or more, and that they called Aepyornis Titan.  Then your vastus was found after old Havers died, in his collection, and then a vastissimus turned up.”

“Winslow was telling me as much,” said the man with the scar.  “If they get any more Aepyornises, he reckons some scientific swell will go and burst a bloodvessel.  But it was a queer thing to happen to a man; wasn’t it—­altogether?”

THE REMARKABLE CASE OF DAVIDSON’S EYES

The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable enough in itself, is still more remarkable if Wade’s explanation is to be credited.  It sets one dreaming of the oddest possibilities of intercommunication in the future, of spending an intercalary five minutes on the other side of the world, or being watched in our most secret operations by unsuspected eyes.  It happened that I was the immediate witness of Davidson’s seizure, and so it falls naturally to me to put the story upon paper.