At half-past three that afternoon, at a point five miles from the railway station, there was enacted a scene which might more properly have claimed as its home a country far distant from this. Yet there was something fitting in this environment. All around swept the heavy, solemn forest, its giant oaks draped here and there with the funereal Spanish moss. A ghostly sycamore, a mammoth gum-tree now and then thrust up a giant head above the lesser growth. Smaller trees, the ash, the rough hickory, the hack-berry, the mulberry, and in the open glades the slender persimmon and the stringy southern birches crowded close together. Over all swept the masses of thick cane growth, interlaced with tough vines of grape and creeping, thorned briers. It was the jungle. This might have been Africa itself! And it might have been Africa itself which produced the sound that now broke upon the ear--a deep, single, booming note which caused the brooding air of the ancient wood to shiver as though in apprehension. There had been faint forest sounds before that note broke out: the small birds running up and down the tree-trunks had chirped and chattered faintly; the squirrels on the nut trees had dropped some bits of bark which rustled faintly as they fell from leaf to leaf; a rabbit ambling across the way had left a vine a-tremble as it disappeared, and a far-off crow had uttered its hoarse note as it alighted on a naked limb. But as this deep, reverberant, single note boomed out across the jungle, there came a sudden hush of all nature. It was as though each living thing caught terror at the sound. Only far above, as though they heard a summons, the black-winged buzzards idly circled over. The note came again, single, deep, vibrant, smiting a world gone silent. There had been the interval of a full minute between the two echoes of the giant drum. A minute followed before it spoke again. And thus there boomed out across the jungle, deep, solemn, ominous, miles-wide in its far-reaching quality, this note of the savage drum; the drum never made by white hands, never seen by the eyes of white men; the drum whose note has never yet been heard in the North, but which some day, perhaps, may be; whose note is not yet understood by those of the North, over-wise, arrogant in the arrogance of an utter ignorance, who may yet one day hear its strange and frenzied summons!