roughness. "Yo-to-to-wi is not much to look at. But be not hard upon
her. The fault is with the grasshopper and the ring-tailed cat. Me, I
am Ai-kut, the first man; but question not my taste. I was the first
man, and this, I saw, was the first woman. Where there is but one
choice, there is not much to choose. Adam was so circumstanced. He
chose Eve. Yo-to-to-wi was the one woman in all the world for me, so I
chose Yo-to-to-wi."

And Evan Graham, listening, his eyes on that possessive, encircling
arm of all his hostess's fairness, felt an awareness of hurt, and
arose unsummoned the thought, to be dismissed angrily, "Dick Forrest
is lucky--too lucky."

"Me, I am Ai-kut," Dick chanted on. "This is my dew of woman. She is
my honey-dew of woman. I have lied to you. Her father and her mother
were neither hopper nor cat. They were the Sierra dawn and the summer
east wind of the mountains. Together they conspired, and from the air
and earth they sweated all sweetness till in a mist of their own love
the leaves of the chaparral and the manzanita were dewed with the
honey-dew.

"Yo-to-to-wi is my honey-dew woman. Hear me! I am Ai-kut. Yo-to-to-wi
is my quail woman, my deer-woman, my lush-woman of all soft rain and
fat soil. She was born of the thin starlight and the brittle dawn-
light before the sun . . .

"And," Forrest concluded, relapsing into his natural voice and
enunciation, having reached the limit of extemporization,--"and if you
think old, sweet, blue-eyed Solomon has anything on me in singing the
Song of Songs, just put your names down for the subscription edition