“Say,” Honey Smith burst out the next morning.  “Funny thing happened to me in the middle the night.  I woke out of a sound sleep — don’t know why - woke with a start as if somebody’d shaken me — felt something brush me so close — well, it touched me.  I was so dead that I had to work like the merry Hades to open my eyes — seemed as if it was a full minute before I could lift my eyelids.  When I could make things out — damned if there wasn’t a bird — a big bird — the biggest bird I ever saw in my life — three times as big as any eagle — flying over the water.”

Nothing could better have indicated Honey’s mental turmoil than the fact that he talked in broken phrases rather than in his usual clear, swift-footed curt sentences.

Nobody noticed this.  Nobody offered comment.  Nobody seemed surprised.  In fact, all the psychological areas which explode in surprise and wonder were temporarily deadened.

“As sure as I live,” Honey continued indignantly, “that bird’s wings must have extended twenty feet above its head.”

“Oh, get out!” said Ralph Addington perfunctorily.

“As sure as I’m sitting here,” Honey went on earnestly.  “I heard a woman’s laugh.  Any of you others get it?”

The sense of humor, it seemed, was not extinct.  Honey’s companions burst into roars of laughter.  For the rest of the morning, they joked Honey about his hallucination.  And Honey, who always responded in kind to any badinage, received this in silence.  In fact, wherever he could, a little pointedly, he changed the subject.

Honey Smith was the type of man whom everybody jokes, partly because he received it with such good humor, partly because he turned it back with so ready and so charming a wit.  Also it gave his fellow creatures a gratifying sense of equality to pick humorous flaws in one so manifestly a darling of the gods.

Honey Smith possessed not a trace of genius, not a suggestion of what is popularly termed “temperament.”  He had no mind to speak of, and not more than the usual amount of character.  In fact, but for one thing, he was an average person.  That one thing was personality — and personality he possessed to an extraordinary degree.  Indeed, there seemed to be something mysteriously compelling about this personality of Honey’s.  The whole world of creatures felt its charm.  Dumb beasts fawned on him.  Children clung to him.  Old people lingered near as though they could light dead fires in the blaze of his radiant youth.  Men hob-nobbed with him; his charm brushed off on to the dryest and dullest so that, temporarily, they too bloomed with personality.  As for women — His appearance among them was the signal for a noiseless social cataclysm.  They slipped and slid in his direction as helplessly as if an inclined plane had opened under their feet.  They fluttered in circles about him like birds around a light.  If he had been allowed to follow the pull of his inclination, they would have held a subsidiary