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 influence of unnumbered generations of man-fearing and man-hating ancestors had triumphed in the end. Swiftly he had slunk away into the thicket, trembling, hating, fearing, yet remembering and loving; and always thereafter, when he saw or scented the boy in the woods, these memories—like faint whisperings or dim cloudy picturings in his brain—came back to him. But they never conquered his fear or led him to approach very close to the boy. Even when, as happened upon more than one occasion, he came upon the boy taking a nap in the woods, the lynx kept his distance, watching from some dense covert until the sleeper rose and went his way.

Thus the winter passed and presently it was spring in the Low Country; for the boy a season of delight because of the immeasurable beauty of it and the wonderful birds that it brought—the tall white egrets, the high-soaring ibises, the fantastic anhingas, or water turkeys, the painted blue-and-green-and-crimson nonpareils, and all the other gay-plumaged makers of music who came up from the tropics with the warm weather. He seldom thought of Byng now on his rambles because there were so many other things of absorbing interest to occupy his mind.

Then, early one May morning, when the boy dis-