“Now this is rather curious,” remarked Paynter thoughtfully.  “I told you I collected legends, and I fancy I can tell you the beginning of the story of which that is the end, though it comes hundreds of miles across the sea.”

He tapped meditatively on the table with his thin, taper fingers, like a man trying to recall a tune.  He had, indeed, made a hobby of such fables, and he was not without vanity about his artistic touch in telling them.

“Oh, do tell us your part of it?” cried Barbara Vane, whose air of sunny sleepiness seemed in some vague degree to have fallen from her.

The American bowed across the table with a serious politeness, and then began playing idly with a quaint ring on his long finger as he talked.

“If you go down to the Barbary Coast, where the last wedge of the forest narrows down between the desert and the great tideless sea, you will find the natives still telling a strange story about a saint of the Dark Ages.  There, on the twilight border of the Dark Continent, you feel the Dark Ages.  I have only visited the place once, though it lies, so to speak, opposite to the Italian city where I lived for years, and yet you would hardly believe how the topsy-turvydom and transmigration of this myth somehow seemed less mad than they really are, with the wood loud with lions at night and that dark red solitude beyond.  They say that the hermit St. Securis, living there among trees, grew to love them like companions; since, though great giants with many arms like Briareus, they were the mildest and most blameless of the creatures; they did not devour like the lions, but rather opened their arms to all the little birds.  And he prayed that they might be loosened from time to time to walk like other things.  And the trees were moved upon the prayers of Securis, as they were at the songs of Orpheus.  The men of the desert were stricken from afar with fear, seeing the saint walking with a walking grove, like a schoolmaster with his boys.  For the trees were thus freed under strict conditions of discipline.  They were to return at the sound of the hermit’s bell, and, above all, to copy the wild beasts in walking only to destroy and devour nothing.  Well, it is said that one of the trees heard a voice that was not the saint’s; that in the warm green twilight of one summer evening it became conscious of some thing sitting and speaking in its branches in the guise of a great bird, and it was that which once spoke from a tree in the guise of a great serpent.  As the voice grew louder among its murmuring leaves the tree was torn with a great desire to stretch out and snatch at the birds that flew harmlessly about their nests, and pluck them to pieces.  Finally, the tempter filled the tree-top with his own birds of pride, the starry pageant of the peacocks.  And the spirit of the brute overcame the spirit of the tree, and it rent and consumed the blue-green birds till not a plume was left, and returned to the