His voice was a persuasive instrument, upon which he played with
a somewhat specious but effective art. He did not try to make you
forget his ugliness; he flaunted it in your face and made it part of
the charm of his speech. Shutting your eyes, you would have trailed
after this rat-catcher's pipes at least to the walls of Hamelin.
Beyond that you would have had to be more childish to follow. But
let him play his own tune to the words set down, so that if all is
too dull, the art of music may bear the blame.

"Women," said Judson Tate, "are mysterious creatures."

My spirits sank. I was not there to listen to such a world-old
hypothesis--to such a time-worn, long-ago-refuted, bald, feeble,
illogical, vicious, patent sophistry--to an ancient, baseless,
wearisome, ragged, unfounded, insidious, falsehood originated by
women themselves, and by them insinuated, foisted, thrust, spread,
and ingeniously promulgated into the ears of mankind by underhanded,
secret and deceptive methods, for the purpose of augmenting,
furthering, and reinforcing their own charms and designs.

"Oh, I don't know!" said I, vernacularly.

"Have you ever heard of Oratama?" he asked.

"Possibly," I answered. "I seem to recall a toe dancer--or a
suburban addition--or was it a perfume?--of some such name."

"It is a town," said Judson Tate, "on the coast of a foreign
country of which you know nothing and could understand less. It is
a country governed by a dictator and controlled by revolutions and