sides of the rink shouting like Indians. Each seven refused to go on the defensive. It was fight, fight, fight, skating at top speed and rushing until the breath came in short, sharp gasps. It was Dickson who finally gave them a moment's rest and sent St. Jo's wild. His shot was a desperate one, but the puck flew true and the score was 2 to 1 at last.

The Norton captain whispered to his forwards as they lined up. As soon as play began, Dickson understood. They were going

to play safe. "Faster now!" Dick called to his line. But they had driven almost to their last ounce. The game became football, and Norton was well content to have the puck hang in the scrimmages. Yet, slowly, St. Jo's edged her way down the ice. Again and again a Norton forward sent the puck out of danger, but a St. Jo's back shot it down once more and the slow attack commenced again. And at last came reward. Some one in the scrimmage gave the tap which sent the puck between the Norton posts and tied the score. "Is n't more than a minute left," gulped Dickson; "don't let it go overtime. can't last."

We

"What 'll we do?" puffed Sackett. "Open up the game. No more football." "We'll feed the puck to you." The Humming-bird's feet were like lead. "You do the shooting; we 'll get it to you somehow." The whistle blew. The puck shot off to one side. A Norton wing was on it in a flash. But Sackett was there, too. "Pass!" he yelled, and shot it through the very heart of the line to the Bird on the opposite wall.

He caught the slithering puck and looked ahead. The side-line was clear. He started down at full speed. Across the ice came a clear-called "St. Jo's!" It was the new signal Cam had given them. Without waiting to place the unseen danger, he sent the puck flashing across the ice.

Dickson caught it cleverly, but the Norton back was on him before he could shoot.

He knew the Bird should have wheeled in to back the play. If he had n't-"St. Jo's!" he cried, and tapped the puck gently into the open ice before the Norton goal.

There was a yell as the crowd saw the free puck; another as the Bird and the Norton goal-keeper charged. Would it be crash or score? Rescue or victory?

"Faster!" High above the roar the Hippo's voice urged his room-mate on.

The Bird's skates rang out a tattoo on the ice. His eyes were on the puck, but the Norton boy was beating him. It would be close, but that would be all. He had done his best to fill Hip's place, but that was not enough. "St. Jo's!"

Cam's clear voice rang above the din. There was no signal there; it could mean but one thing. The man was calling to the boy to rise to the crisis, to give more than his tired muscles had; calling on him in the name of the school, calling on him to show the unconquerable spirit of St. Jo's.

The Norton player swooped forward. Even as his stick swept out to take the puck, it all became clear in the Bird's quick brain. The chance was there, had he the speed to take it. And now he was skating for St. Jo's! In such a close play the puck must be dribbled to his left. His right skate dug deep. It was he who dodged. But before the sharp-cut arc was half completed, the left skate bit and the Humming-bird whirled in like a flash of light. There was the swish of his stick, a thud, silence, then a mounting roar as the puck shot through the Norton goal.

It was a howling, triumphant, half-crazy Hip who grabbed him. "Great!" he yelled. "Huroo! You sure made good for us both!"

But he saw only the eyes of the coach above the Hippo's broad shoulders, and in them was a queer twinkle. And then the Humming-bird, who had sneered at that intangible something called "school spirit," gulped. "Sure!" he agreed. "But St. Jo's won!"

Grace Purdie Moon.

CHAPTER II

A NEW WORLD

A WEEK later found the whole party aboard one of the great South American liners bound for Belem. The voyage across was uneventful except for the constant bickerings between Jud and Professor Ditson, in which Will and Joe acted sometimes as peacemakers and sometimes as pace-makers. Then, one morning, Will woke up to find that the ocean had changed overnight from a warm sapgreen to a muddy clay-color. Although they were not yet within sight of land, the vast river had swept enough earth from the southern continent into the ocean to change the color of the water for a hundred miles out at sea. Just at sunrise the next day the steamer glided up the Amazon on its way to the old city of Belem, seventy miles inland.

"The air smells like a hot, moldy cellar!" grumbled Jud; and soon the Cornwall pilgrims began to glimpse things strange and new to all three of them. Groups of slim assai palms showed their feathery foliage; slender lianas hung like green snakes from the trees; and everywhere were pineapple plants, bread-fruit trees, mangos, blossoming oranges and lemons, rows of enormous silk-cotton trees, and superb banana plants, with glossy, velvety green leaves twelve feet in length curving over the roof of nearly every house. Beyond the city the boys had a sight of the jungle, which almost without a break covers the greater part of the Amazon basin, the largest river-basin on earth. They landed just before sunset, and under Professor Ditson's direction, a retinue of porters carried their luggage to the professor's house, far down the beach, the starting-point for many of his South American expeditions.

As the sun set, the sudden dark of the tropics dropped down upon them, with none of the twilight of higher latitudes. Jud grumbled at the novelty.

"This ain't no way to do," he complained to Professor Ditson. "The sun no more than goes down, when bang! it 's as black as your hat."

"We'll have that seen to at once," responded the professor, sarcastically. "In the meantime, be as patient as you can."

With the coming of the dark, a deafening din began. Frogs and toads croaked, drummed, brayed, and roared. Cicadas whirred, and a vast variety of crickets and grasshoppers added their shrill note to the uproar, so strange to visitors and so unnoticed by natives in the tropics.

"Hey, Professor!" shouted Jud, above the tumult, "what in time is all this noise, anyway?"

"What noise?" inquired Professor Ditson, abstractedly.

The old trapper waved both hands in a circle around his head and turned to the boys for sympathy. "Sounds like the Cornwall Drum and Fife Corps at their worst!" he shrieked.

"What do you mean, Jud?" said Will, winking at Joe.

"Poor Jud!" chimed in the latter, shaking his head sadly, "this trip too much for him. He hearing noises inside his head."

For a moment, Jud looked so horrified that, in spite of their efforts to keep up the joke, the boys broke down and laughed uproariously.

"You'll get so used to this," said Professor Ditson, at last understanding what they were talking about, "that after a few nights you won't notice it at all."

At the professor's bungalow they met two other members of the expedition. One of these was Hen Pine, a negro over six feet tall, but with shoulders of such width that he seemed much shorter. He had an enormous head that seemed to be set directly between his shoulders, so short and thick was his neck. Hen had been with Professor Ditson for many

years, and, in spite of his size and strength, was of a happy, good-natured disposition, constantly showing his white teeth in irresistible smiles. Pinto, Professor Ditson's other retainer, was short and dark, an Indian of the Mundurucu tribe, that warlike people which early made an alliance of peace with the Portugese pioneers of Brazil and which they had always scrupulously kept. Pinto had an oval, aquiline face, and his bare breast and arms had the cross-marks of dark-blue tattooing which showed him to have won high rank as a warrior on the lonely River of the Tapirs, where his tribe had held their own against the fierce Mayas, those outlawed cannibals who are the terror of the South American forest.

That evening, after dinner, Professor Ditson took Jud and the boys out for a walk along the beach which stretched away in front of them in a long white curve under the light of the full moon. The night was full of strange sounds, and in the sky overhead burned new stars and unknown constellations, undimmed even by the moonlight, which showed like snow against the shadows of the jungle. Professor Ditson pointed out to the boys Agena and Bungula, a noble pair of firstmagnitude stars never seen in the north, which flamed in the violet-black sky. As they looked, Will remembered the night up near Wizard Pond before the bear came, when Joe had told him Indian stories of the stars. Tonight, almost overhead, shone the most famous of all the tropical constellations, the Southern Cross.

Professor Ditson told them that it had been seen on the horizon of Jerusalem about the date of the Crucifixion. From that day, the precession of the equinoxes had carried it slowly southward, and it became unknown to Europeans until Amerigo Vespucci on his first voyage saw the Cross and exultantly wrote that he had seen the "Four Stars," of which the tradition had lingered.

The pro

fessor told them that it was the sky-clock of the tropics and that sailors, shepherds, and other night-wanderers could tell the time within fifteen minutes of watch-time by the position of the two upper stars of this constellation.

"It looks more like a kite than a cross," interjected Jud. "What's that dark patch in the Milky Way?" he inquired, pointing to a strange black, blank space showing in the milky glimmer of the galaxy.

"That must be the Coal-sack," broke in Will, before Professor Ditson could reply.

"I remember reading about it at school. When Magellan sailed around Cape Horn, his sailors saw it and were afraid that they would sail so far south that the sky would n't have any stars. What cheered them up," went on Will, "was the sight of old Orion, which stays in the sky in both hemispheres," and he pointed out the starry belt to Jud and Joe, with that sky-king Sirius shining above it instead of below as in the northern hemisphere.

As Jud and the boys stared up at the familiar line of the three stars, with rose-red Betelgeuse on one side and fire-white Rigel on the other, they too felt something of the

"ONLY A HARMLESS HOUSE-LIZARD"

same comfort that the old-time navigators had known at the sight of this constellation, steadfast when the Great Bear and even the pole star itself had faded from the sky. As they continued to gaze upward they caught sight of another star, which shone with a wild, blue gleam that rivaled the green glare of even the dog-star, Sirius. Professor Ditson told them that it was Canopus, Mohammed's star, which he thought led him to victory, even as Napoleon believed that the planet Venus, seen by daylight, was his guiding star. Then the professor traced for them that glittering river of stars, Eridanus, and showed them, guarding the southern horizon, gleaming Achernar, the End of the River, a star as bright as is Arcturus or Vega in the northern sky. Then he showed them Fomalhaut, of the Southern Fish, which in the north they had seen in the fall just skipping the horizon, one of the faintest of the first-magnitude stars. Down in the southern hemisphere it had come into its own and gleamed as brightly near this northern horizon as did Achernar by the southern. It was Will who discovered the Magellanic clouds, like fragments of the Milky Way