the type. I know now why you don’t understand the Irish. Sometimes you think it’s soft, and sometimes sly, and sometimes murderous, and sometimes uncivilized; and all the time it’s only civilized; quivering with the sensitive irony of understanding all that you don’t understand.”      

       “Well,” said Ashe shortly, “we’ll see who’s right.”      

       “We will,” cried Cyprian, and rose suddenly from the table. All the drooping of the aesthete had dropped from him; his Yankee accent rose high, like a horn of defiance, and there was nothing about him but the New World.     

       “I guess I will look into this myself,” he said, stretching his long limbs like an athlete. “I search that little wood of yours to-morrow. It’s a bit late, or I’d do it now.”      

       “The wood has been searched,” said the lawyer, rising also.     

       “Yes,” drawled the American. “It’s been searched by servants, policemen, local policeman, and quite a lot of people; and do you know I have a notion that nobody round here is likely to have searched it at all.”      

       “And what are you going to do with it?” asked Ashe.     

       “What I bet they haven’t done,” replied Cyprian. “I’m going to climb a tree.”      

       And with a quaint air of renewed cheerfulness he took himself away at a rapid walk to his inn.     

       He appeared at daybreak next morning outside the Vane Arms with all the air of one setting out on his travels in distant lands. He had a field glass slung over his shoulder, and a very large sheath knife buckled by a belt round his waist, and carried with the cool bravado of the bowie knife of a cowboy. But in spite of this backwoodsman’s simplicity, or perhaps rather because of it, he eyed with rising relish the picturesque plan and sky line of the antiquated village, and especially the wooden square of the old inn sign that hung over his head; a shield, of which the charges seemed to him a mere medley of blue dolphins, gold crosses, and scarlet birds. The colors and cubic corners of that painted board pleased him like a play or a puppet show. He stood staring and straddling for some moments on the cobbles of the little market place; then he gave a short laugh and began to mount the steep 

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