"He was here a moment ago." Walt Irvine drew himself away with a jerk from the metaphysics and poetry of the organic miracle of blossom, and surveyed the landscape. "He was running a rabbit the last I saw of him." "Wolf! Wolf! Here Wolf!" she called, as they left the clearing and took the trail that led down through the waxen-belled manzanita jungle to the county road. Irvine thrust between his lips the little finger of each hand and lent to her efforts a shrill whistling. She covered her ears hastily and made a wry grimace. "My! for a poet, delicately attuned and all the rest of it, you can make unlovely noises. My ear-drums are pierced. You outwhistle--" "Orpheus." "I was about to say a street-arab," she concluded severely. "Poesy does not prevent one from being practical--at least it doesn't prevent _me_. Mine is no futility of genius that can't sell gems to the magazines." He assumed a mock extravagance, and went on: "I am no attic singer, no ballroom warbler. And why? Because I am practical. Mine is no squalor of song that cannot transmute itself, with proper exchange value, into a flower-crowned cottage, a sweet mountain-meadow, a grove of redwoods, an orchard of thirty-seven trees, one long row of blackberries and two short rows of strawberries, to say nothing of a quarter of a mile of gurgling brook. I am a beauty-merchant, a trader in song, and I pursue utility, dear Madge. I sing a song, and thanks to the magazine editors I transmute my song into a waft of the west wind sighing through our redwoods, into a murmur of waters over mossy stones that sings back to me another song than the one I sang and yet the same song wonderfully--er--transmuted." "O that all your song-transmutations were as successful!" she laughed. "Name one that wasn't." "Those two beautiful sonnets that you transmuted into the cow that was accounted the worst milker in the township." "She was beautiful--" he began, "But she didn't give milk," Madge interrupted. "But she _was_ beautiful, now, wasn't she?" he insisted. "And here's where beauty and utility fall out," was her reply. "And there's the Wolf!" From the thicket-covered hillside came a crashing of underbrush, and then, forty feet above them, on the edge of the sheer wall of rock, appeared a wolf's head and shoulders. His braced fore paws dislodged a pebble, and with sharp-pricked ears and peering eyes he watched the fall of the pebble till it struck at their feet. Then he transferred his gaze and with open mouth laughed down at them. "You Wolf, you!" and "You blessed Wolf!" the man and woman called out to him. The ears flattened back and down at the sound, and the head seemed to snuggle under the caress of an invisible hand.