And again, further on—­“never did I see so much gold whether in dust, nuggets, or worked articles.  I imagine it must be worth millions, but at that time gold was the last thing with which I wished to trouble myself.”

After this entry many pages were utterly effaced.

The last legible passage ran as follows—­“So guided by the lad Jeekie, and wearing the gold mask, Little Bonsa, on my head, I ran through them all, holding him by the hand as though I were dragging him away.  A strange spectacle I must have been with my old black clergyman’s coat buttoned about me, my naked legs and the gold mask, as pretending to be a devil such as they worship, I rushed through them in the moonlight, blowing the whistle in the mask and bellowing like a bull. . . .  Such was the beginning of my dreadful six months’ journey to the coast.  Setting aside the mercy of Providence that preserved me for its own purposes, I could never have lived to reach it had it not been for Little Bonsa, since curiously enough I found this fetish known and dreaded for hundreds of miles, and that by people who had never seen it, yes, even by the wild cannibals.  Whenever it was produced food, bearers, canoes, or whatever else I might want were forthcoming as though by magic.  Great is the fame of Big and Little Bonsa in all that part of West Africa, although, strange as it may seem, the outlying tribes seldom mention them by name.  If they must speak of either of these images which are supposed to be man and wife, they call it the ‘Yellow-God-who-lives-yonder.’”

Not another word of all this strange history could Alan decipher, so with aching eyes he shut up the stained and tattered volume, and at last, just as the day was breaking, fell asleep.

At eleven o’clock on that same morning, for he had slept late, Alan rose from his breakfast and went to smoke his pipe at the open door of the beautiful old hall in Yarleys that was clad with brown Elizabethan oak for which any dealer would have given hundreds of pounds.  It was a charming morning, one of those that comes to us sometimes in an English April when the air is soft like that of Italy and the smell of the earth rises like that of incense, and little clouds float idly across a sky of tender blue.  Standing thus he looked out upon the park where the elms already showed a tinge of green and the ash-buds were coal black.  Only the walnuts and the great oaks, some of them pollards of a thousand years of age, remained stark and stern in their winter dress.

Alan was in a reflective mood and involuntarily began to wonder how many of his forefathers had stood in that same spot upon such April mornings and looked out upon those identical trees wakening in the breath of spring.  Only the trees and the landscape knew, those trees which had seen every one of them borne to baptism, to bridal and to burial.  The men and women themselves were forgotten.  Their portraits, each in the garb of his or her generation, hung here and there upon the walls of the ancient house which once they had owned or inhabited, but who remembered anything of them to-day?  In many cases their names even were lost, for believing that they, so important in their time, could never sink into oblivion, they had not thought it necessary to record them upon their pictures.