"Forgotten everything?" repeated Daphne. "Everything except how to make coffee," said her father, "or fry a bit of fish now and then! Forgotten who he is, I mean! Forgotten who he was! Forgotten even who he intends to be! That's rather the trouble, it seems, with this forgetting business! When [111] you once start out to 'forget' there doesn't seem to be any special discrimination about it! Your father's name, the location of your banker, the price of turnips, the esthetic value of brushing your hair all wiped out of existence by a single slop of the same sponge!" "Yes, but Old-Dad----" parried Daphne. With a smile that was almost caressing her father narrowed his gaze once more to the tragic old figure. "Hanged if I don't think the old chap would die for me!" he attested. "But nothing on earth, it seems, could make him remember me! Seventy years old and seventy miles from a fish hook and seventy times battier than batty! That's the way I found him five or six years ago!" "Yes, but where did you find him?" wakened Daphne. "How ever did you happen to find him?" "Well, if the truth must be told," said her father, "I was hunting rather zealously at the moment for a pink curlew. It is against the law, I believe, to be hunting overzealously for a pink curlew. Way up one of those tortuous green waterways it was! An absolute [112] maze of mangrove islands! No conceivable footing, you understand, except that great bare fretwork of mangrove roots clawing down into the water! And every separate way you stared was just another dank green tunnel! Glossy leaves slapping along the sides of your canoe, dove-gray curlews blocking out the sky, alligators guzzling in every slimy bog hole! Had a little chunk of dry land, the old chap did, just about the size and substantiality of a crumpled-up newspaper, and a wigwam thatched like a cannibal hut with palm leaf fans! And there he lay in the damp and the heat and the buzz, too weak any longer to raise his head, but swearing like a trooper because in some inexplicable way he had missed the trading boat that chugged along his coast line every three months or so. For days and days, I suppose, he had rowed laboriously down to the mouth of the pass and leaned on his oars from dawn to dusk raking that blue horizon line for rice and 'white bacon' and coffee and matches and--life. It wasn't just that he was fastidious, you know! Raw curlew or raw jewfish would have tasted like pudding to him by then! [113] But something seemed to have happened to his shotgun and his last fish hook--rot, I suppose. Anyway, from grass floor to peak of that rattling palm-leaf hut there wasn't a single thing left but damp and heat and buzz! Yet somewhere up in the North, I suppose, or the East or the West, there's a baffled little family group still arguing round the evening lamp or over the morning porridge: 'Whatever in the world became of Father?' Wrecked by a typhoon or a bank defalcation, swerved from