at the futility of man through a rime of moss and mottled fungus.  A poor little sea-wall, never much at its best, sprawled in ruin from the coconut roots to the placid sea.  Bananas, plantains, and breadfruit lay rotting on the ground.  Bones lay about, human bones, and Jerry nosed them out, knowing them for what they were, emblems of the nothingness of life.  Skulls he did not encounter, for the skulls that belonged to the scattered bones ornamented the devil devil houses in the upland bush villages.

The salt tang of the sea gladdened his nostrils, and he snorted with the pleasure of the stench of the mangrove swamp.  But, another Crusoe chancing upon the footprint of another man Friday, his nose, not his eyes, shocked him electrically alert as he smelled the fresh contact of a living man’s foot with the ground.  It was a nigger’s foot, but it was alive, it was immediate; and, as he traced it a score of yards, he came upon another foot-scent, indubitably a white man’s.

Had there been an onlooker, he would have thought Jerry had gone suddenly mad.  He rushed frantically about, turning and twisting his course, now his nose to the ground, now up in the air, whining as frantically as he rushed, leaping abruptly at right angles as new scents reached him, scurrying here and there and everywhere as if in a game of tag with some invisible playfellow.

But he was reading the full report which many men had written on the ground.  A white man had been there, he learned, and a number of blacks.  Here a black had climbed a coconut tree and cast down the nuts.  There a banana tree had been despoiled of its clustered fruit; and, beyond, it was evident that a similar event had happened to a breadfruit tree.  One thing, however, puzzled him—­a scent new to him that was neither black man’s nor white man’s.  Had he had the necessary knowledge and the wit of eye-observance, he would have noted that the footprint was smaller than a man’s and that the toeprints were different from a Mary’s in that they were close together and did not press deeply into the earth.  What bothered him in his smelling was his ignorance of talcum powder.  Pungent it was in his nostrils, but never, since first he had smelled out the footprints of man, had he encountered such a scent.  And with this were combined other and fainter scents that were equally strange to him.

Not long did he interest himself in such mystery.  A white man’s footprints he had smelled, and through the maze of all the other prints he followed the one print down through a breach of sea-wall to the sea-pounded coral sand lapped by the sea.  Here the latest freshness of many feet drew together where the nose of a boat had rested on the beach and where men had disembarked and embarked again.  He smelled up all the story, and, his forelegs in the water till it touched his shoulders, he gazed out across the lagoon where the disappearing trail was lost to his nose.