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 ing her skirts and one foot galleryward, Camille d'Arville, Saharet and Otero and Cléo de Merode, recent rages at Koster and Bial's in New York, Lulu Glaser in The Merry Monarch, Marie Jansen in The Oolah, Pauline Hall, Virginia Earle, Edna Wallace Hopper in El Capitan, Mrs. James Brown Potter, Julia Marlowe as Juliet, Georgia Cayvan, Lillian Russell in The Little Duke, Virginia Harned as Trilby, Adele Ritchie in The Algerian, Madge Lessing, Maurice Barrymore, Nat Goodwin, Blanche Walsh, Ada Rehan in Much Ado, Caroline Miskel Hoyt, Jessie Bartlett Davis, Lily Langtry: these were a few of the names. Some of these stage-folk (as many of them as had visited Maple Valley during his theatre-going days, which extended back for ten years) Gareth had seen; he knew all about the others through reading the Chicago papers and certain New York theatrical periodicals for which he subscribed.

He had become interested in birds and their eggs later than most boys. He delighted in the colours of the birds, and marvelled constantly at their wanderings. They flew, so he had read in books, to the great plains of South America, and he reminded himself that he could do what a bird could do. He liked the clusters of eggs, too, lying in their cabinet, embedded in the soft cotton. They were his jewels; they satisfied his esthetic sense. Long moments he would spend bending over them, gazing with rare pleasure at the greenish-blue eggs, spotted with