The boy, flattered by the attention of his audience, with the treachery of the born story-teller, sharpened their appetite by suspense. He wagged his head mysteriously. “I could tell you heaps about him if you were to come here often.” He waited to see what effect that would have. Kay had been hiding behind her brother, clinging to his hand. Now she came level with him, bending her face across him so that she could meet the eyes of the boy. She asked, “May we, Peter? Do you think we can?” “Not often,” said Peter guardedly; “but as often as we can.” The boy held out a further inducement. “One day I might show him to you. He's like that with dogs and--and especially with girls: laughs at 'em, hollers at 'em, and then-----. He's the most glad-eyed chap that ever came down the pike, I reckon. That's what gives me all my trouble.” Neither Kay nor Peter knew exactly what was meant. So Peter said, “You've been everywhere, haven't you? And we--we just tricycle out and----” The boy had drawn his mouth-organ from his pocket and was playing, stamping his feet and swaying his body. Suddenly he stopped and his voice took up the air: “I've been shipwrecked off Patagonia, Home and Colonia, Antipodonia; I've shot cannibals, Funny looking animals, Top-knot coons; I've bought diamonds twenty a penny there, I've been somewhere, nowhere, anywhere-- And I'm the wise, wise man of the Wide, wide world.” They gazed at him wide-eyed in the hushed summer woodland. Then they beat their hands together, crying, “Oh, again, again, please.” The boy smiled tantalizingly. “Can you climb?” He shot the question out. The next moment he was scrambling up a tall oak. Sometimes his body was lost in leaves. Sometimes it sounded as though he were tumbling, tumbling through the branches to the ground. At last, from a bough high up where the sky commenced, his impish face gazed down on them. First they heard the mouth-organ, then the voice, singing of somewhere, nowhere, anywhere--of the splendidly imagined No-Man's-Land through which every child has longed to wander. And they believed his song, as though it were autobiography. In a picture-flash they saw the world, beautiful, tumultuous, full of terrors--saw it as a vast balloon, swimming through eternal clouds, painted with the dreams of young desire: islands in sun-drenched seas, where palms stood motionless, pointing to the skies with silent hands; countries of yellow men, small and crafty, who lived in paper houses and fed on flowers; enfeebled cities, dazzlingly white, whose eyes had been burnt out by the door of hell left open in the iron heavens; and snow-deserts where the frost carved Titans with his breath. This freckled pugnacious master of the mouth-organ,