A TRAMP'S NOTE-BOOK

BY

MORLEY ROBERTS

AUTHOR OF

"RACHEL MARE," "BIANCA'S CAPRICE,"
"THE PROMOTION OF THE ADMIRAL."

LONDON

F. V. WHITE & CO. LTD.

14 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C.

1904

CONTENTS

A Tramp's Note-Book

A WATCH-NIGHT SERVICE IN SAN FRANCISCO

How much bitter experience a man keeps to himself, let the experienced say, for they only know. For my own part I am conscious that it rarely occurs to me to mention some things which happened either in England or out of it, and that if I do, it is only to pass them over casually as mere facts that had no profound effect upon me. But the importance of any hardship cannot be estimated at once; it has either psychological or physiological sequelæ, or both. The attack of malaria passes, but in long years after it returns anew and devouring the red blood, it breaks down a man's cheerfulness; a night in a miasmic forest may make him for ever a slave in a dismal swamp of pessimism. It is so with starvation, and all things physical. It is so with things mental, with degradations, with desolation; the scars and more than scars remain: there is outward healing, it may be, but we often flinch at mere remembrance.

But time is the vehicle of philosophy; as the years pass we learn that in all our misfortunes was something not without value. And what was of worth grows more precious as our harsher memories fade. Then we may bear to speak of the days in which we were more than outcasts; when we recognised ourselves as such, and in strange calm and with a broken spirit made no claim on Society. For this is to be an outcast indeed.

I came to San Francisco in the winter of 1885 and remained in that city for some six months. What happened to me on broad lines I have written in the last chapter of The Western Avernus. But nowadays I know that in that chapter I have told nothing. It is a bare recital of events with no more than indications of deeper miseries, and some day it may chance to be rewritten in full. That I was of poor health was nothing, that I could obtain no employment was little, that I came to depend on help was more. But the mental side underlying was the worst, for the iron entered into my soul. I lost energy. I went dreaming. I was divorced from humanity.

America is a hard place, for it has been made by hard men. People who would not be crushed in the East have gone to the West. The Puritan element has little softness in it, and in some places even now gives rise to phenomena of an excessive and religious brutality which tortures without pity, without sympathy. But not only is the Puritan hard; all other elements in America are hard too. The rougher emigrant, the unconquerable rebel, the natural adventurer, the desperado seeking a lawless realm, men who were iron and men with the fierce courage which carries its vices with its virtues, have made the United States. The rude individualist of Europe who felt the slow pressure of social atoms which precedes their welding, the beginning of socialism, is the father of America. He has little pity, little tolerance, little charity. In what States in America is there any poor law? Only an emigration agent, hungry for steamship percentages, will declare there are no poor there now. The survival of the fit is the survival of the strong; every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost might replace the legend on the silver dollar and the golden eagle, without any American denying it in his heart.

But if America as a whole is the dumping ground and Eldorado combined of the harder extruded elements of Europe, the same law of selection holds good there as well. With every degree of West longitude the fibre of the American grows harder. The Dustman Destiny sifting his cinders has his biggest mesh over the Pacific States. If charity and sympathy be to seek in the East, it is at a greater discount on the Slope. The only poor-house is the House of Correction. Perhaps San Francisco is one of the hardest, if not the hardest city in the world. Speaking from my own experience, and out of the experience gathered from a thousand miserable bedfellows in the streets, I can say I think it is, not even excepting Portland in Oregon. But let it be borne in mind that this is the verdict of the unsuccessful. Had I been lucky it might have seemed different.

I came into the city with a quarter of a dollar, two bits, or one shilling and a halfpenny in my possession. Starvation and sleeping on boards when I was by no means well broke me down and at the same time embittered me. On the third day I saw some of my equal outcasts inspecting a bill on a telegraph pole in Kearny Street, and on reading it I found it a religious advertisement of some services to be held in a street running out of Kearny, I believe in Upper California Street. At the bottom of the bill was a notice that men out of work and starving who attended the meeting would be given a meal. Having been starving only some twenty-four hours I sneered and walked on. My agnosticism was bitter in those days, bitter and polemic.

But I got no work. The streets were full of idle men. They stood in melancholy groups at corners, sheltering from the rain. I knew no one but a few of my equals. I could get no ship; the city was full of sailors. I starved another twenty-four hours, and I went to the service. I said I went for the warmth of the room, for I was ill-clad and wet. I found the place half full of out-o'-works, and sat down by the door. The preacher was a man of a type especially disagreeable to me; he looked like a business man who had cultivated an aspect of goodness and benevolence and piety on business principles. Without being able to say he was a hypocrite, he struck me as being one. He was not bad-looking, and about thirty-five; he had a band of adoring girls and women about him. I was desolate and disliked him and went away.

But I returned.

I went up to him and told him brutally that I disbelieved in him and in everything he believed in, explaining that I wanted nothing on false pretences. My attitude surprised him, but he was kind (still with that insufferable air of being a really first-class good man), and he bade me have something to eat. I took it and went, feeling that I had no place on the earth.

But a little later I met an old friend from British Columbia. He was by way of being a religious man, and he had a hankering to convert me. Failing personally, he cast about for some other means, and selected this very preacher as his instrument. Having asked me to eat with him at a ten-cent hash house, he inveigled me to an evening service, and for the warmth I went with him. I became curious about these religious types, and attended a series of services. I was interested half in a morbid way, half psychologically. Scott, my friend, found me hard, but my interest made him hope. He took me, not at all unwilling, to hear a well-known revivalist who combined religion with anecdotes. He told stories well, and filled a church every night for ten days. During these days I heard him attentively, as I might have listened to any well-told lecture on any pseudo-science. But my intellect was unconvinced, my conscience untouched, and Scott gave me up. I attended a number of services by myself; I was lonely, poor, hopeless, living an inward life. The subjective became real at times, the objective faded. I had a little occasional work, and expected some money to reach me early in the year. But I had no energy, I divided my time between the Free Library and churches. And it drew on to Christmas.

It was a miserable time of rain, and Christmas Day found me hopeless of a meal. But by chance I came across a man whom I had fed, and he returned my hospitality by dining me for fifteen cents at the "What Cheer House," a well-known poor restaurant in San Francisco. Then followed some days of more than semi-starvation, and I grew rather light-headed. The last day of the year dawned and I spent it foodless, friendless, solitary. But after a long evening's aimless wandering about the city I came back to California Street, and at ten o'clock went to the Watch-Night Service in the room of the first preacher I had heard.

The hall was a big square one, capable of seating some three hundred people. There was a raised platform at the end; a broad passage way all round the room had seats on both sides of it, and made a small square of seats in the centre. I sat down in the middle of this middle square, and the room was soon nearly full. The service began with a hymn. I neither sang nor rose, and I noticed numbers who did not. In peculiar isolation of mind my heart warmed to these, and I was conscious of rising hostility for the creatures of praise. There was one strong young fellow about three places from me who remained seated. Glancing behind the backs of those who were standing between us I caught his eye, which met mine casually and perhaps lightened a little. He had a rather fine face, intelligent, possibly at better times humorous. I was not so solitary.

A man singing on my left offered me a share of his hymn-book. I declined courteously. The woman on my right asked me to share hers. That I declined too. Some asked the young fellow to rise, but he refused quietly. Yet I noticed some of those who had remained seated gave in to solicitations or to the sound or to some memory, and rose. Yet many still remained. They were all men, and most of them young.

After the hymn followed prayer by the minister, who was surrounded on the daïs by some dozen girls. I noticed that few were very good-looking; but in their faces was religious fervour. Yet they kept their eyes on the man. The prayer was long, intolerably and trickily eloquent and rhetorical, very self-conscious. The man posed before the throne. But I listened to every word, half absorbed though I was in myself. He was followed in prayer by ambitious and emotional people in the seats. One woman prayed for those who would not bow the knee. Once more a hymn followed, "Bringing home the sheaves."

The air is not without merit, and has a good lilt and swing. I noted it tempted me to sing it, for I knew the tune well, and in the volume of voices was an emotional attraction. I repressed the inclination even to move my lips. But some others rose and joined in. My fellow on the left did not. The sermon followed, and I felt as if I had escaped a humiliation.

What the preacher said I cannot remember, nor is it of any importance. He was not an intellectual man, nor had he many gifts beyond his rather sleek manner and a soft manageable voice. He was obviously proud of that, and reckoned it an instrument of success. It became as monotonous to me as the slow oily swell of a tropic sea in calm. I would have preferred a Boanerges, a bitter John Knox. The intent of his sermon was the usual one at such periods; this was the end of the year, the beginning was at hand. Naturally he addressed himself to those who were not of his flock; it seemed to me, as it doubtless seemed to others, that he spoke to me directly.

The custom of mankind to divide time into years has had an effect on us, and we cannot help feeling it. Childhood does not understand how artificial the portioning of time is; the New Year affects us even when we recognise the fact. It required no florid eloquence of the preacher to convince me of past folly and weakness; but it was that weakness that made me weak now in my allowing his insistence on the New Year to affect me. I was weak, lonely, foolish. Oh, I acknowledged I wanted help! But could I get help here?

It was past eleven when they rose to sing another hymn. Many who had not sung before sang now. Some of the girls from the platform came down and offered us hymn-books. A few took them half-shamefacedly; some declined with thanks; some ignored the extended book. And after two hymns were sung and some more prayers said, it was half-past eleven. They announced five minutes for silent meditation. Looking round, I saw my friend on the left sitting with folded arms. He was obviously in no need of five minutes.

In the Free Library I had renewed much of my ancient scientific reading, and I used it now to control some slight emotional weakness, and to explain it to myself. Half-starved, nay more than half-starved, as I was, such weakness was likely; I was amenable to suggestion. I asked myself a dozen crucial questions, and was bitterly amused to know how the preacher would evade answering them if put to him. Such a creature could not succeed, as all great teachers have done, in subduing the intellect by the force of his own personality. But all the same the hour, the time, and the song followed by silence, and the silence by song, affected me and affected many. What had I to look forward to when I went out into the street? And if I yielded they might, nay would, help me to work. I laughed a little at myself, and was scornful of my thoughts. They were singing again.

This time the band of women left the daïs and in a body went slowly round and round the aisle isolating the centre seats from the platform and the sides. From the platform the preacher called on the others to rise and join them, for it was nearly twelve o'clock, the New Year was at hand. Most of the congregation obeyed him, I counted but fifteen or twenty who refused.

The volume of the singing increased as the seats emptied, in it there was religious fervour; it appealed strongly even to me. I saw some young fellows rise and join the procession; perhaps three or four. There were now less than twelve seated. The preacher spoke to us personally; he insisted on the passing minutes of the dying year. And still the singers passed us. Some leant over and called to us. Our bitter band lessened one by one.

Then from the procession came these girl acolytes, and, dividing themselves, they appealed to us and prayed. They were not beautiful perhaps, but they were women. We outcasts of the prairie and the camp fire and the streets had been greatly divorced from feminine sweet influences, and these succeeded where speech and prayer and song had failed. As one spoke to me I saw hard resolution wither in many. What woman had spoken kindly to them in this hard land since they left their eastern homes? Why should they pain them? And as they joined the singing band of believers the girls came to those of us who still stayed, and doubled and redoubled their entreaties. That it was not what they said, but those who said it, massing influences and suggestion, showed itself when he who had been stubborn to one yielded with moist eyes to two. And three overcame him who had mutely resisted less.

They knew their strength, and spoke softly with the voice of loving women. And not a soul had spoken to me so in my far and weary songless passage from the Atlantic States to the Pacific Coast. Long-repressed emotions rose in me as the hair of one brushed my cheek, as the hand of another lay upon my shoulder and mutely bade me rise; as another called me, as another beckoned. I looked round like a half-fascinated beast, and I caught the eye again of the man on my left. He and I were the only ones left sitting there. All the rest had risen and were singing with the singers.

In his eye, I doubt not, I saw what he saw in mine. A look of encouragement, a demand for it, doubt, an emotional struggle, and deeper than all a queer bitter amusement, that said plainly, "If you fail me, I fall, but I would rather not play the hypocrite in these hard times." We nodded rather mentally than actually, and were encouraged, I knew if I yielded I was yielding to something founded essentially on sex, and for my honesty's sake I would not fail.

"My child, it is no use," I said to her who spoke to me, and, struggling with myself, I put her hand from me. But still they moved past and sang, and the girls would not leave me till the first stroke of midnight sounded from the clock upon the wall. They then went one by one and joined the band. I turned again to my man, and conscious of my own hard fight, I knew what his had been. We looked at each other, and being men, were half ashamed that another should know we had acted rightly according to our code, and had won a victory over ourselves.

And now we were truly outcasts, for no one spoke to us again. The preacher prayed and we still sat there. But he cast us no word, and the urgent women were good only to their conquered. Perhaps in their souls was some sense of personal defeat; they had been rejected as women and as angels of the Lord. We two at anyrate sat beyond the reach of their graciousness; their eyes were averted or lifted up; we lay in outer darkness.

As they began to sing once more we both rose and with a friendly look at each other went out into the streets of the hostile city. It is easy to understand why we did not speak.

I never saw him again.

SOME PORTUGUESE SKETCHES

The Portuguese are wholly inoffensive, except when their pride is touched. In politics, or when they hunger after African territory we fancy needed for our own people, they may not seem so. When a rebuff excites them against the English, Lisbon may not be pleasant for Englishmen. But in such cases would London commend itself to a triumphant foreigner? For my own part, I found a kind of gentle, unobtrusive politeness even among those Portuguese who knew I was English when I went to Lisbon on the last occasion of the two nations quarrelling about a mud flat on the Zambesi. Occasionally, on being taken for an American, I did not correct the mistake, for having no quarrel with Americans they sometimes confided to me the bitterness of their hearts against the English. I stayed in Lisbon at the Hotel Universal in the Rua Nova da Almeda, a purely Portuguese house where only stray Englishmen came. At the table d'hôte one night I had a conversation with a mild-mannered Portuguese which showed the curious ignorance and almost childish vanity of the race. I asked him in French if he spoke English. He did so badly and we mingled the two languages and at last talked vivaciously. He was an ardent politician and hated the English virulently, telling me so with curious circumlocutions. He was of opinion, he said, that though the English were unfortunately powerful on the sea, on land his nation was a match for us. As for the English in Africa, he declared the Portuguese able to sweep them into the sea. But though he hated the English, his admiration for Queen Victoria was as unbounded as our own earth-hunger. She was, he told me, entirely on the side of the Portuguese in the sad troubles which English politicians were then causing. He detailed, as particularly as if he had been present, a strange scene reported to have taken place between Soveral, their ambassador, and Lord Salisbury, in which discussion grew heated. It seemed as if they would part in anger. At last Soveral arose and exclaimed with much dignity: "You must now excuse me, my Lord Salisbury, I have to dine with the Queen to-night." My Lord Salisbury started, looked incredulous, and said coldly, "You are playing with me. This cannot be." "Indeed," said the ambassador, producing a telegram from Windsor, "it is as I say." And then Salisbury turned pale, fell back in his chair, and gasped for breath. "And after that," said my informant, "things went well." Several people at the table listened to this story and seemed to believe it. With much difficulty I preserved a grave countenance, and congratulated him on the possession of an ambassador who was more than a match for our Foreign Minister. Before the end of dinner he informed me that the English were as a general rule savages, while the Portuguese were civilised. Having lived in London he knew this to be so. Finding that he knew the East End of our gigantic city, I found it difficult to contradict him.

Certainly Lisbon, as far as visible poverty is concerned, is far better than London. I saw few very miserable people; beggars were not at all numerous; in a week I was only asked twice for alms. One constantly hears that Lisbon is dirty, and as full of foul odours as Coleridge's Cologne. I did not find it so, and the bright sunshine and the fine colour of the houses might well compensate for some draw-backs. The houses of this regular town are white, and pale yellow, and fine worn-out pink, with narrow green painted verandahs which soon lose crudeness in the intense light. The windows of the larger blocks are numerous and set in long regular lines; the streets if narrow run into open squares blazing with white unsoiled monuments. All day long the ways are full of people who are fairly but unostentatiously polite. They do not stare one out of countenance however one may be dressed. In Antwerp a man who objects to being wondered at may not wear a light suit. Lisbon is more cosmopolitan. But the beauty of the town of Lisbon is not added to by the beauty of its inhabitants. The women are curiously the reverse of lovely. Only occasionally I saw a face which was attractive by the odd conjuncture of an olive skin and light grey eyes. They do not wear mantillas. The lower classes use a shawl. Those who are of the bourgeois class or above it differ little from Londoners. The working or loafing men, for they laugh and loaf, and work and chaff and chatter at every corner, are more distinct in costume, wearing the flat felt sombrero with turned-up edges that one knows from pictures, while the long coat which has displaced the cloak still retains a smack of it in the way they disregard the sleeves and hang it from their shoulders. These men are decidedly not so ugly as the women, and vary wonderfully in size, colour and complexion, though a big Portuguese is a rarity. The strong point in both sexes is their natural gift for wearing colour, for choosing and blending or matching tints.

These Portuguese men and women work hard when they do not loaf and chatter. The porters, who stand in knots with cords upon their shoulders, bear huge loads; a characteristic of the place is this load-bearing and the size of the burdens. Women carry mighty parcels upon their heads; men great baskets. Fish is carried in spreading flat baskets by girls. They look afar off like gigantic hats: further still, like quaint odd toadstools in motion. All household furniture removing among the poor is done by hand. Two or four men load up a kind of flat hand-barrow without wheels till it is pyramidal and colossal with piled gear. Then passing poles through the loop of ropes, with a slow effort they raise it up and advance at a funereal and solemn pace. The slowness with which they move is pathetic. It is suggestive of a dead burden or of some street accident. But of these latter there must be very few; there is not much vehicular traffic in Lisbon. It is comparatively rare to see anything like cruelty to horses. The mules which draw the primitive ramshackle trams have the worst time of it, and are obliged to pull their load every now and again off one line on to another, being urged thereto with some brutality. But these trams do not run up the very hilly parts of the city; the main lines run along the Tagus east and west of the great Square of the Black Horse. And by the river the city is flat.

Only a little way up, in my street for instance, it rapidly becomes hilly. On entering the hotel, to my surprise I went downstairs to my bedroom. On looking out of the window a street was even then sixty feet below me. The floor underneath me did not make part of the hotel, but was a portion of a great building occupied by the poorer people and let out in flats. During the day, as I sat by the window working, the noise was not intolerable, but at night when the Lisbonensians took to amusing themselves they roused me from a well-earned sleep. They shouted and sang and made mingled and indistinguishable uproars which rose wildly through the narrow deep space and burst into my open window. After long endurance I rose and shut it, preferring heat to insomnia. But in the day, after that discord, I always had the harmonious compensations of true colour. Even when the sun shone brilliantly I could not distinguish the grey blue of the deep shadows, so much blue was in the painted or distempered outer walls. It was in Lisbon that I first began to discern the mental effect of colour, and to see that it comes truly and of necessity from a people's temperament. Can a busy race be true colourists?

In some parts of the town—the eastern quarters—one cannot help noticing the still remaining influence of the Moors. There are even some true relics; but certainly the influence survives in flat-sided houses with small windows and Moorish ornament high up just under the edge of the flat roof. One day, being tired of the more noisy western town, I went east and climbed up and up, being alternately in deep shadow and burning sunlight and turned round by a barrack, where some soldiers eyed me as a possible Englishman. I hoped to see the Tagus at last, for here the houses are not so lofty, and presently, being on very high ground, I caught a view of it, darkly dotted with steamers, over some flat roofs. Towards the sea it narrows, but above Lisbon it widens out like a lake. On the far side was a white town, beyond that again hills blue with lucid atmosphere. At my feet (I leant against a low wall) was a terraced garden with a big vine spread on a trellis, making—or promising to make in the later spring—a long shady arbour, for as yet the leaves were scanty and freshly green. Every house was faint blue or varied pink, or worn-out, washed-out, sun-dried green. All the tones were beautiful and modest, fitting the sun yet not competing with it. In London the colour would break the level of dull tints and angrily protest, growing scarlet and vivid and wrathful. And just as I looked away from the river and the vine-clad terrace there was a scurrying rush of little school-boys from a steep side-street. They ran down the slope, and passed me, going quickly like black blots on the road, yet their laughter was sunlight on the ripple of waters. The Portuguese are always children and are not sombre. Only in their graveyards stand solemn cypresses which rise darkly on the hillside where they bury their dead; but in life they laugh and are merry even after they have children of their own.

Though little apt to do what is supposed to be a traveller's duty in visiting certain obvious places of interest, I one day hunted for the English cemetery in which Fielding lies buried, and found it at last just at the back of a little open park or garden where children were playing. On going in I found myself alone save for a gardener who was cutting down some rank grass with a scythe. This cemetery is the quietest and most beautiful I ever saw. One might imagine the dead were all friends. They are at anyrate strangers in a far land, an English party with one great man among them. I found his tomb easily, for it is made of massive blocks of stone. Having brought from home his little Voyage to Lisbon, written just before he died, I took it out, sat down on the stone, and read a page or two. He says farewell at the very end. As I sat, the strange and melancholy suggestion of the dead man speaking out of that great kind heart of his, now dust, the strong contrast between the brilliant sunlight and the heavy sombreness of the cypresses of death, the song of spring birds and the sound of children's voices, were strangely pathetic. I rose up and paced that little deadman's ground which was still and quiet. And on another grave I read but a name, the name of some woman "Eleanor." After life, and work, and love, this is the end. Yet we do remember Fielding.

On the following day I went to Cintra out of sheer ennui, for my inability to talk Portuguese made me silent and solitary perforce. And at Cintra I evaded my obvious duty, and only looked at the lofty rock on which the Moorish castle stands. For one thing the hill was swathed in mists, it rained at intervals, a kind of bitter tramontana was blowing. And after running the gauntlet of a crowd of vociferous donkey-boys I was anxious to get out of the town. I made acquaintance with a friendly Cintran dog and went for a walk. My companion did not object to my nationality or my inability to express myself in fluent Portuguese, and amused himself by tearing the leaves of the Australian gum-trees, which flourish very well in Portugal. But at last, in cold disgust at the uncharitable puritanic weather which destroyed all beauty in the landscape, I returned to the town. Here I passed the prison. On spying me the prisoners crowded to the barred windows; those on the lower floor protruded their hands, those on the upper storey sent down a basket by a long string; I emptied my pockets of their coppers. It seemed not unlike giving nuts to our human cousins at the Zoo. Surely Darwin is the prince of pedigree-makers. Before him the darings of the bravest herald never went beyond Adam. He has opened great possibilities to the College dealing with inherited dignity of ancient fame.

This Cintra is a town on a hill and in a hole, a kind of half-funnel opening on a long plain which is dotted by small villages and farms. If the donkey-boys were extirpated it might be fine on a fine day.

Returning to the station, I ensconced myself in a carriage out of the way of the cutting wind, and talked fluent bad French with a kindly old Portuguese who looked like a Quaker. Two others came in and entered into a lively conversation in which Charing Cross and London Bridge occurred at intervals. It took an hour and a quarter to do the fifteen mites between Cintra and Lisbon. I was told it was considered by no means a very slow train. Travelling in Portugal may do something to reconcile one to the trains in the south-east of England.

The last place I visited in Lisbon was the market. Outside, the glare of the hot sun was nearly blinding. Just in that neighbourhood all the main buildings are purely white, even the shadows make one's eyes ache. In the open spaces of the squares even brilliantly-clad women seemed black against white. Inside, in a half-shade under glass, a dense crowd moved and chattered and stirred to and fro. The women wore all the colours of flowers and fruit, but chiefly orange. And on the stone floor great flat baskets of oranges, each with a leaf of green attached to it, shone like pure gold. Then there were red apples, and red handkerchiefs twisted over dark hair. Milder looking in tint was the pale Japanese apple with an artistic refinement of paler colour. The crowd, the good humour, the noise, even the odour, which was not so offensive as in our English Covent Garden, made a striking and brilliant impression. Returning to the hotel, I was met by a scarlet procession of priests and acolytes who bore the Host. The passers-by mostly bared their heads. Perhaps but a little while ago every one might have been worldly wise to follow their example, for the Inquisition lasted till 1808 in Spain.

In the afternoon of that day I went on board the Dunottar Castle, and in the evening sailed for Madeira.

A week's odd moments of study and enforced intercourse with waiters and male chambermaids, whose French was even more primitive than my own, had taught me a little Portuguese, that curious, unbeautiful sounding tongue, and I found it useful even on board the steamer. At anyrate I was able to interpret for a Funchal lawyer who sat by me at table, and afterwards invited me to see him. This smattering of Portuguese I found more useful still in Madeira, or at Funchal—its capital—for I stayed in native hotels. It is the only possible way of learning anything about the people in a short visit. Moreover, the English hotels are full of invalids. It is curious to note the present prevalence of consumption among the natives of Funchal. It is a good enough proof on the first face of it that consumption is catching. There is a large hospital here for Portuguese patients, though the disease was unknown before the English made a health resort of it.

Funchal has been a thousand times described, and is well worthy of it. Lying as it does in a long curve with the whole town visible from the sea, as the houses grow fewer and fewer upon the slopes of the lofty mountain background, it is curiously theatrical and scenic in effect. It is artistically arranged, well-placed; a brilliant jewel in a dark-green setting, and the sea is amethyst and turquoise.

I stayed in an hotel whose proprietor was an ardent Republican. One evening he mentioned the fact in broken English, and I told him that in theory I also was of that creed. He grew tremendously excited, opened a bottle of Madeira, shared it with me and two Portuguese, and insisted on singing the Marseillaise until a crowd collected in front of the house, whose open windows looked on an irregular square. Then he and his friends shouted "Viva la partida dos Republicanos!" The charges at this hotel were ridiculously small—only three and fourpence a day for board and lodging. And it was by no means bad; at anyrate it was always possible to get fruit, including loquats, strawberries, custard apples, bananas, oranges, and the passion-flower fruit, which is not enticing on a first acquaintance, and resembles an anæmic pomegranate. Eggs, too, were twenty-eight for tenpence; fish was at nominal prices.

But there is nothing to do in Funchal save eat and swim or ride. The climate is enervating, and when the east wind blows from the African coast it is impossible to move save in the most spiritless and languid way. It may make an invalid comparatively strong, but I am sure it might reduce a strong man to a state of confirmed laziness little removed from actual illness. I was glad one day to get horses, in company with an acquaintance, and ride over the mountains to Fayal, on the north side of the island. And it was curious to see the obstinate incredulity of the natives when we declared we meant going there and back in one day. The double journey was only a little over twenty-six miles, yet it was declared impossible. Our landlord drew ghastly pictures of the state we should be in, declaring we did not know what we were doing; he called in his wife, who lifted up her hands against our rashness and crossed herself piously when we were unmoved; he summoned the owner of the horses, who said the thing could not be done. But my friend was not to be persuaded, declaring that Englishmen could do anything, and that he would show them. He explained that we were both very much more than admirable horsemen, and only minimised his own feats in the colonies by kindly exaggerating mine in America, and finally it was settled gravely that we were to be at liberty to kill ourselves and ruin the horses for a lump sum of two pounds ten, provided we found food and wine for the two men who were to be our guides. In the morning, at six o'clock, we set out in a heavy shower of rain. Before we had gone up the hill a thousand feet we were wet through, but a thousand more brought us into bright sunlight. Below lay Funchal, underneath a white sheet of rain-cloud; the sea beyond it was darkened here and there; it was at first difficult to distinguish the outlying Deserta Islands from sombre fogbanks. But as we still went up and up the day brightened more and more, and when Funchal was behind and under the first hills the sea began to glow and glitter. Here and there it shone like watered silk. The Desertas showed plainly as rocky masses; a distant steamer trailed a thin ribbon of smoke above the water. Close at hand a few sheep and goats ran from us; now and again a horse or two stared solemnly at us; and we all grew cheerful and laughed. For the air was keen and bracing; we were on the plateau, nearly four thousand feet above the sea, and in a climate quite other than that which choked the distant low-lying town. Then we began to go down.

All the main roads of the Ilha da Madeira are paved with close-set kidney pebbles, to save them from being washed out and destroyed by the sudden violent semi-tropical rains. Even on this mountain it was so, and our horses, with their rough-shod feet, rattled down the pass without faltering. The road zigzagged after the manner of mountain roads. When we reached the bottom of a deep ravine it seemed impossible that we could have got there, and getting out seemed equally impossible. The slopes of the hills were often fifty degrees. Everywhere was a thick growth of brush and trees. At times the road ran almost dangerously close to a precipice. But at last, about eleven o'clock, we began to get out of the thick entanglement of mountains and in the distance could see the ocean on the north side of the island. "Fayal is there," said our guide, pointing, as it seemed, but a little way off. Yet it took two hours' hard riding to reach it. Our path lay at first along the back of a great spur of the main mountain; it narrowed till there was a precipice on either side—on the right hand some seven or eight hundred feet, on the left more than a thousand. I had not looked down the like since I crossed the Jackass Mountain on the Fraser River in British Columbia. Underneath us were villages—scattered huts, built like bee-hives. The piece of level ground beneath was dotted with them. The place looked like some gigantic apiary. The dots of people seemed little larger than bees. And soon we came to the same stack-like houses close to our path. It was Sunday, and these village folks were dressed in their best clothes. They were curiously respectful, for were we not gente de gravate—people who wore cravats—gentlemen, in a word? So they rose up and uncovered. We saluted them in passing. It was a primitive sight. As we came where the huts were thicker, small crowds came to see us. Now on the right hand we saw a ridge with pines on it, suggesting, from the shape of the hill, a bristly boar's back; on the left the valley widened; in front loomed up a gigantic mass of rock, "The Eagle's Cliff," in shape like Gibraltar. It was 1900 feet high, and even yet it was far below us. But now the path pitched suddenly downwards; there were no paving-pebbles here, only the native hummocks of rock and the harder clay not yet washed away. The road was like a torrent-bed, for indeed it was a torrent when it rained; but still our horses were absolute in faith and stumbled not. And the Eagle's Cliff grew bigger and bigger still as we plunged down the last of the spur to a river then scanty of stream, and we were on the flat again not far from the sea. But to reach Fayal it was necessary to climb again, turning to the left.

Here we found a path which, with all my experience of Western America mountain travel, seemed very hard to beat in point of rockiness and steepness. We had to lead our horses and climb most carefully. But when a quarter of a mile had been done in this way it was possible to mount again, and we were close to Fayal. I had thought all the time that it was a small town, but it appeared to be no more than the scattered huts we had passed, or those we had noted from the lofty spur. Our objective was a certain house belonging to a Portuguese landowner who occupied the position of an English squire in the olden days. Both my friend and I had met him several times in Funchal, and, by the aid of an interpreter, had carried on a conversation. But my Portuguese was dinner-table talk of the purely necessary order, and my companion's was more exiguous than my own. So we decided to camp before reaching his house, and eat our lunch undisturbed by the trouble of being polite without words. We told our guide this, and as he was supposed to understand English we took it for granted that he did so when we ordered him to pick some spot to camp a good way from the landowner's house. But in spite of our laborious explanations he took us on to the very estate, and plumped us down not fifty yards from the house. As we were ignorant of the fact that this was the house, we sent the boy there for hot water to make coffee, and then to our horror we saw the very man whom we just then wanted to avoid. We all talked together and gesticulated violently. I tried French vainly; my little Portuguese grew less and less, and disappeared from my tongue; and then in despair we hailed the cause of the whole misfortune, and commanded him to explain. What he explained I know not, but finally our friend seemed less hurt than he had been, and he returned to his house on our promising to go there as soon as our lunch was finished.

The whole feeling of this scene—of this incident, of the place, the mountains, the primitive people—was so curious that it was difficult to think we were only four days from England. Though the people were gentle and kind and polite, they seemed no more civilised, from our point of view, than many Indians I have seen. Indeed, there are Indian communities in America which are far ahead of them in culture. I seemed once more in a wild country. But our host (for, being on his ground, we were his guests) was most amiable and polite. It certainly was rather irksome to sit solemnly in his best room and stare at each other without a word. Below the open window stood our guide, so when it became absolutely necessary for me to make our friend understand, or for me to die of suppression of urgent speech, I called to João and bade him interpret. We were silent again until wine was brought. Then his daughter, almost the only beautiful Portuguese or Madeiran girl I ever saw, came in. We were introduced, and, in default of the correct thing in her native language, I informed her, in a polite Spanish phrase I happened to recollect, that I was at her feet. Then, as I knew her brother in Funchal, I called for the interpreter and told her so as an interesting piece of information. She gave me a rose, and, looking out of the window, she taught me the correct Portuguese for Eagle's Cliff—"Penha d'aguila." We were quite friends.

It was then time for us to return if we meant to keep to our word and do the double journey in one day. But a vociferous expostulation came from our host. He talked fast, waved his hands, shook his head, and was evidently bent on keeping us all night. We again called in the interpreter, explaining that our reputation as Englishmen, as horsemen, as men, rested on our getting back to Funchal that night, and, seeing the point as a man of honour, he most regretfully gave way, and, having his own horse saddled, accompanied us some miles on the road. We rode up another spur, and came to a kind of wayside hut where three or four paths joined. Here was congregated a brightly-clad crowd of nearly a hundred men, women and children. They rose and saluted us; we turned and took off our hats. I noticed particularly that this man who owned so much land and was such a magnate there did the same. I fancied that these people had gathered there as much to see us pass as for Sunday chatter. For English travellers on the north side of the island are not very common, and I daresay we were something in the nature of an event. Turning at this point to the left, we plunged sharply downwards towards a bridge over a torrent, and here parted from our land-owning friend. We began to climb an impossible-looking hill, which my horse strongly objected to. On being urged he tried to back off the road, and I had some difficulty in persuading him that he could not kill me without killing himself. But a slower pace reconciled him to the road, and as I was in no great hurry I allowed him to choose his own. Certainly the animals had had a hard day of it even so far, and we had much to do before night. We were all of us glad to reach the Divide and stay for a while at the Poizo, or Government rest-house, which was about half-way. One gets tolerable Madeira there.

It was eight or half-past when we came down into Funchal under a moon which seemed to cast as strongly-marked shadows as the very sun itself. The rain of the morning had long ago passed away, and the air was warm—indeed, almost close—after the last part of the ride on the plateau, which began at night-time to grow dim with ragged wreaths of mist. Our horses were so glad to accomplish the journey that they trotted down the steep stony streets, which rang loudly to their iron hoofs. When we stopped at the stable I think I was almost as glad as they; for, after all, even to an Englishman with his country's reputation to support, twelve or thirteen hours in the saddle are somewhat tiring. And though I was much pleased to have seen more of the Ilha da Madeira than most visitors, I remembered that I had not been on horseback for nearly five years.

A PONDICHERRY BOY

When I first went out to the Australian colonies in 1876 in the Hydrabad, a big sailing ship registered as belonging to Bombay, I had a very curious time of it, take it altogether. It was my first real experience of the outside world, and the hundred and two days the Hydrabad took from Liverpool to Melbourne made a very valuable piece of schooling for a greenhorn. I was a steerage passenger, and the steerage of a sailing vessel twenty-five years ago was something to see and smell. Perhaps it is no better now, but then it was certainly very bad. The food was poor, the quarters dirty, the accommodation far too limited to swing even the traditional cat in, and my companions were for the most part Irishmen of the lowest and poorest peasant class. In these days I was quite fresh from home and was rather particular in my tastes. Some of that has been knocked out of me since. A great deal of it was knocked out of me in that passage.

Yet it was, take it altogether, an astonishingly fertile trip for a young and green lad who was not yet nineteen. The Hydrabad usually made a kind of triangular voyage. She took emigrants and a general cargo to Melbourne, loaded horses there for Australia, and came back to England once more with anything going in the shape of cargo to be picked up in the Hooghly. She carried a Calashee crew, that is, a crew of mixed Orientals, and among them were native Hindoos, Klings, Malays, Sidi-boys. In those days I had not been in the United States and had not yet imbibed any great contempt for coloured people. They were on the whole infinitely more interesting than the Irish. I knew nothing of the world, nothing of the Orient, and here was an Oriental microcosm. The old serang, or bo'sun, was a gnarled and knotted and withered Malay, who took rather a fancy to me. Sometimes I sat in his berth and smoked a pipe with him. At other times I deciphered the wooden tallies for the sails in the sail-locker, for though he talked something which he believed to be English, he could not read a word, even in the Persi-Arabic character. The cooks, or bandaddies, were also friends of mine, and more than once they supplemented the intolerably meagre steerage fare by giving me something good to eat. I soon knew every man in the crew, and could call each by his name. Sometimes I went on the lookout with one of them, and one particular Malay was very keen on teaching me his language. So far as I remember the languages talked by the crew included Malay, Hindustani, Tamil and, oddly enough, French. That language was of course spoken by someone who came from Pondicherry, that small piece of country which, with Chandernagor, represents the French-Indian Empire of Du Plessis's time. I had learnt a little Hindustani and Malay, and could understand all the usual names of the sails and gear before I discovered that there was someone on board whose native tongue was French, or who, at anyrate, could talk it fluently enough. We were far to the south of the Line before I found this out. For, of course, among his fellows the boy from Pondicherry spoke Hindustani mixed with Malay and perhaps with Tamil. I well remember how I made the discovery. It was odd enough to me, but far stranger, far more wonderful, far more full of mystery to my little, excitable and very dark-skinned friend. I daresay, if he lives, that to this hour he remembers the English boy who so surprised him.

The weather was intensely hot and I had climbed for a little air into one of the boats lying in the skids. The shadow of the main-topsail screened me from the sun; there was just enough wind to keep the canvas doing its work in silence. It was Sunday and the whole ship was curiously quiet. But as I lay in my little shelter I was presently disturbed by Pondicherry (that was what he was called by everyone), who came where I was to fetch away a plate full of some occult mystery which he had secreted there. He nodded to me brightly, and then for the first time it occurred to me that if he came from his nameplace he might know a little French. I knew remarkably little myself; I could read it with difficulty. My colloquial French was then, as now, intensely and intolerably English. I said, "Bon jour, Pondicherry!"

The result was astounding. He turned to me with an awe-stricken look, as he dropped his tin plate with its precious burden, and holding out both hands as though to embrace a fellow countryman, he exclaimed in French,—

"What—what, do you come from Pondicherry?"

For a moment or two I did not follow his meaning. I did not see what French meant to him; I could not tell that it represented his little fatherland. I had imagined he knew it was a foreign tongue. But it was not foreign to him.

"No," I said, "I am an Englishman."

He sat down on a thwart and stared at me as if I was some strange miracle. His next words let me into the heart of his mystery.

"It is not possible. You speak Pondicherry!"

He did not even know that he was speaking French, the language of a great Western nation. He could not know that I was doing my feeble best to speak the language of a great literature; the language of Voltaire, of Victor Hugo, of diplomacy. No, he and I were speaking Pondicherry, the language of a derelict corner of mighty Hindustan. Now he eyed me with suspicion.

"When were you there?" he demanded in a whisper.

If I was not Pondicherry born I must at least have lived there in order to have learnt the language.

"Pondy, I was never there," I answered.

He evidently did not believe me. I had some mysterious reason for concealing that I was either Pondicherry born or that I had resided there.

"Then you didn't know it?"

"No."

"And you have not been in Villianur?"

"No."

"Or Bahur?"

I shook my head. He shook his and stared at me suspiciously. Perhaps I had committed some crime there.

"Then how did you learn it?"

"I learnt it in England."

That I was undoubtedly speaking the unhappy truth would have been obvious to any Frenchman. But to Pondicherry what I said was so obviously a gross and almost foolish piece of fiction that he shook his head disdainfully. And yet why should I lie? He spoke so rapidly that I could not follow him.

"If you speak so fast I cannot understand," I said.

"Ah, then," he replied hopefully, "it is a long time since you were there. Perhaps you were very young then?"

I once more insisted that I had never been at Pondicherry, or even in any part of India. All I said convinced him the more that I was not speaking the truth.

"You speak Hindustani with the bandaddy."

It is true I had learnt a dozen phrases and had once or twice used them. To say I had learnt them in the ship was useless.

"Oh, no, you have been in India. Why will you not tell me the truth, sahib? I am the only one from Pondicherry but you."

He spoke mournfully. I was denying my own fatherland, denying help and comradeship to my own countryman! It was, thought Pondicherry, cruel, unkind, unpatriotic. He gathered up the mess he had spilt and descended sorrowfully to the main deck to discuss me with his friends among the crew. As I heard afterwards from the wrinkled old serang, there were many arguments started in the fo'castle as to my place of origin. It was said, by those who took sides against Pondicherry, that even if I knew "Pondicherry" (and for that they only had his word), I also undoubtedly knew English. And when did any of the white rulers of Pondicherry know that tongue? Some of the Lascars who had been on the Madras coast in country boats swore that no one spoke English there. On the whole, as I came from England and knew English it was more likely that I was what I said than that I came from Pondicherry. But even so all agreed it was a mystery that I could speak it. The serang came to me quietly.

"Say, Robat, you tell me. You come Pondicherry?"

"No, serang," said "Robat."

"But you speak Pondicherry the boy say, Robat?"

"Yes, I speak it, serang. Many English people speak it a little. Very easy for English people learn a little, just the same as we learn jeldy jow, toom sooar."

And as the serang was well acquainted with the capabilities of English officers with regard to abusive language, he went away convinced that "Pondicherry" and "Hindustani" insults were perhaps taught in English schools after all.

In spite of my refusing to take Pondicherry into my confidence he remained on friendly, if suspicious, terms with me. When I said a word or two of French to him he beamed all over, and turned to the others as much as to say, "Didn't I tell you he came from my country?" For nothing that I and the serang or his friends said convinced him, or even shook his opinion. He used to sneak up to me occasionally as he worked about the decks and spring a question on me about someone at Pondicherry. Of course I had heard of no one there. But my ignorance was wholly put on; he was sure of that. Often and often I caught his eyes on me, and I knew his mind was pondering theories to account for my conduct. It was all very well for me or anyone else to say that Pondicherry was talked elsewhere than in his own home. He had travelled, he had been in Australia, in England, in many parts of the East, and he had never, never met anyone but himself and myself who knew it! I think he would have given me a month's pay if I would have only owned up to having been at Pondicherry. He certainly offered me an ample plateful of curried shark, a part of one we had caught days before, if I would be frank about the matter; but even my desire to obtain possession of that smell and drop it overboard did not tempt me to a white lie. I persisted in remaining an Englishman through the whole passage of one hundred and two days. And then at last, after good times and bad, after calms on the Line and no small hurricane south of stormy Cape Leuuwin, we came up with Cape Otway and entered the Heads. Pondicherry's time for solving the mystery grew short. In another few hours the passengers would go ashore and be never seen again. For my own part, though the passage had been one of pure discomfort, I was almost sorry to leave the old ship. I had to quit a number of friends, black and white, and had to face a new and perhaps unfriendly world. Though the Hydrabad half-starved me I was at anyrate sure of water and biscuit. And many of the poor Lascars had been chums to me. As I made preparations to leave the vessel and stood on deck waiting, I saw Pondicherry sneaking about in the background. I said farewell to his old serang, and the Malay quartermasters, who were all fine men, and to some of the meaner outcast Klings, and then Pondicherry darted up to me. I knew quite well what was in his mind. It was in his very eyes. I was now going, and should be seen no more. Perhaps at the last I might be induced to speak the truth. And even if I did not own up bravely, it was at anyrate necessary to bid farewell to a countryman, though he denied his own country. He came close to me in the crowd and touched my sleeve appealingly.

"What is it, Pondy?"

"Oh, sahib, you tell me now where you learn Pondicherry?"

"Pondy, I told you the truth long ago," I answered.

"Sahib, it is not possible."

He turned away, and I went on board the tug which served us as a tender. Presently I saw him lean over the rail and wave his hand. When he saw that I noticed him he called out in French once more, with angry, scornful reproach,—

"If you were not there, how, how can you speak it?"

A GRADUATE BEYOND SEAS

The travel-micrococcus infected me early. Before I can remember I travelled in England, and, when my memory begins, a stay of two years in any town made me weary. My brothers and sisters and I would then inquire what time the authorities meant to send my father elsewhere, and we were accustomed to denounce any delay on the part of a certain Government department in giving us "the route." Such a youth was gipsying, and if any original fever of the blood led to wandering, such a training heightened the tendency. To this day even, after painful and laborious travel, Fate cannot persuade me that my stakes should not be pulled up at intervals. I understand "trek fever," which, after all, is only Eldorado hunting. With the settler unsatisfied a belief in immortality takes its place.

In the ferment of youth and childhood, which now threatens to quiet down, my feet stayed in many English towns and villages, from Barnstaple to Carlisle, from Bedford to Manchester, and I hated them all with fervour, only mitigating my wrath by great reading. I could only read at eight years of age, but from that time until eleven I read a mingled and most preposterous mass of literature and illiterature. It was a substitute for travel, and, in my case, not a substitute only, but a provoker. Reading is mostly dram-drinking, mostly drugging; it throws a veil over realities. With the child I knew best it urged him on and infected me with world-hunger and roused activities. To be sure the Elder Brethren, who are youth's first gaolers, nearly made me believe, by dint of repetition (they, themselves, probably believing it by now), that books and knowledge, which are acquired for, with, by and through examinations, were, of themselves, noble and admirable, and that an adequate acquaintance with them (provided such acquaintance could be proved adequate to Her Majesty's Commissioners of the Civil Service) would inevitably make a man of me. For the opinion is rooted deep in many minds that to surrender one's wings, to clip one's claws, to put a cork in one's raptorial beak, and masquerade in a commercial barnyard, is to be a very fine fowl indeed.

Some spirit of revolt saved the child (now a boy, I guess) from being a Civil Cochin China, and sent him to Australia. The ship in which I sailed for Melbourne was my first introduction to outside realities, to world realities as distinct from the preliminary brutalities of school, and it opened my eyes—indeed, gave me eyes instead of the substitutes for vision favoured by the Elder Brethren, who may be taken to include schoolmasters, professors, and good parents. How any child survives without losing his eyesight altogether is now a marvel to me. Certainly, very few retain more than a dim vision, which permits them to wallow amongst imitations (such as a last year's Chippendale morality) and imagine themselves well furnished. My new university (after Owens College an admirable hot-bed for some products under glass) was the Hydrabad, 1600 tons burden, with a mixed mass of passengers, mostly blackguards in the act of leaving England to allow things to blow over, and a Lascar crew, Hindoos, Seedee boys and Malays. The professors at this notable college were many, and all were fit for their unendowed chairs. They taught mostly, and in varying ways, the art of seeing things as they are, and if some saw things as they were not, that is, double, the object lesson was eminently useful to the amazed scholar. Some of them pronounced me green, and I was green.

But a four months' session and procession through the latitudes and longitudes brought me to Australia in a less obviously green condition. I had learnt the one big lesson that too few learn. I had to depend on myself. And Australia said, "You know nothing and must work." Had I not sat with Malays, and collogued with negroes, and eaten ancient shark with Hindoos? I was afraid of the big land where I could reckon on no biscuit tub always at hand, but these were men who had faced other continents and other seas. I could face realities, too, or I could try.

It is the unnecessary work that gets the glory mostly, especially in a fat time of peace, but some day the scales will be held more level. A shearer of sheep will be held more honourable than a shearer of men; and he who shirks the world's right labour will rank with the unranked lowest. The music-hall and theatre and unjustified fiction will have had their day. The little man with a little gift, that should be no more than an evening's joke or pleasure after real work, will exist no more. But we live under the rule of Rabesqurat, Queen of Illusion.

The Australian bush university, with the sun, moon and stars in the high places, and labour, hunger and thirst holding prominent lecturerships, helped to educate me. The proof of that education was that I know now that a big bit of my true life's work was done there. The preparation turned out to be the work itself. One does necessary things there, and they are done without glory and often without present satisfaction, except the satisfaction given to toil. What does the world want and must have? If all the theatres were put down and all the actors sent to useful work, things would be better instead of worse. If all the music-halls became drill-halls it would add to the world's health. If most of the writers concluded justly that they were in no way necessary or useful, some healthy man might be added to the list of workers and some unhealthy ones would find themselves better or very justly dead. But the sheep and cattle have to be attended to, and ships must be sailed, and bridges must be built. Hunger and thirst, and all the educational unrighteousness of the elements must be met, fought, out-marched or out-manœuvred. I went to school in the Murray Ranges, and carried salt to fluky sheep. Even if this present screed stirred me doubly to action, the salt-carrying was better. The sun and moon and stars overhead, and the big grey or brown plain beneath were for ever instilling knowledge that a city knows not. A city's soot kills elms, they say; only plane trees, self-scaling and self-cleaning, live and grow and survive. I think man is more like the elm; he cannot clean himself in a city.

It has often been a question for me to solve, now youth exists no more, except in memory, whether this present method of keeping even with one's own needs and the world's has any justification. If it has, it lies in the fact that my real work was mostly done before I knew it. When energy exists devoid of self-consciousness (for self-consciousness is the beginning of death) the individual fulfils himself naturally, obeying the mandate within him. So in Australia, and at sea, or in America, lies what I sometimes call the justification of my writing to amuse myself or a few others.

For America was my second great university, and though I lack any learned degree earned by examinations, and may put no letters after my name, I maintain I passed creditably, if without honours, in the hardest schools of the world. About a young man's first freedom still hangs some illusion. With apparently impregnable health and unsubdued spirits, he has the illusion of present immortality; life is a world without end. But when youth begins to sober and health shows cracks and gaps, and hard labour comes, then the realities, indeed, crawl out and show themselves. My early work in New South Wales seemed to me then like sport. America was real life; it was for ever putting the stiffest questions to me. I can imagine an examination paper which might appal many fat graduates.

1. Describe from experience the sensations of hunger when prolonged over three days.

2. Explain the differences in living in New York, Chicago and San Francisco on a dollar a week. In such cases, how would you spend ten cents if you found it in the street at three o'clock in the morning?

3. How long would it be in your own case before want of food destroyed your sense of private property? Give examples from your own experience.

4. How far can you walk without food—(a) when you are trying to reach a definite point; (b) when you are walking with an insane view of getting to some place unknown where a good job awaits you?

5. If, after a period (say three weeks) of moderate starvation, and two days of absolute starvation, you are offered some work, which would be considered laborious by the most energetic coal-heaver, would you tackle it without food or risk the loss of the job by requesting your employer to advance you 15 cents for breakfast?

6. Can you admire mountain scenery—(a) when you are very hungry; (b) when you are very thirsty? If you have any knowledge of the ascetic ecstasy, describe the symptoms.

7. You are in South-west Texas without money and without friends. How would you get to Chicago in a fortnight? What is the usual procedure when a town objects to impecunious tramps staying around more than twenty-four hours? Can you describe a "calaboose"?

8. Sketch an American policeman. Is he equally polite to a railroad magnate and a tramp? What do you understand by "fanning with a club"?

9. Which are the best as a whole diet—apples or water-melons?

10. Define "tramp," "bummer," "heeler," "hoodlum," and "politician."

This is a paper put together very casually, and just as the pen runs, but the man who can pass such an examination creditably must know many things not revealed to the babes and sucklings of civilisation. From my own point of view I think the questions fairly easy, a mere matriculation paper.

When the Queen of Illusion illudes no more youth is over. I am ready to admit Illusion still reigned when I took to writing for a living. The first illusion was that I was not doing it for a living (it is true I did not make one) but because the arts were rather noble than otherwise and extremely needed. I admit now that they are necessary, in the sense of the necessarian, but I can see little use for them, unless the production of Illusion (with few or many gaps in it) is needed for the world's progress. The laudation of the artist, the writer, and the actor returns anew with the end of the world's great year. But if any golden age comes back, the setting apart of the Amusement Monger will cease. If it does not cease, their antics will be the warnings of the intoxicated Helot.

Yet without illusion one cannot write. Or so it seems to me. Is this writing period only another university after all? Perhaps teaching never ends, though the art of learning what is taught seems very rare. To write and "get there" in the meanest sense, so far as money is concerned, is the overcoming of innumerable obstacles. London taught me a great deal that I could not learn in Australia, or on the sea, or in any Texas, or British Columbia. But I came to London with scaled eyes, and tasted other poverty than that I knew. Illusion is mostly foreshortening of time. One wants to prophesy and to see. The chief lesson here is that prophets must be blind. The end of the race is the racing thereof after all. To do a little useful work (even though the useful may be a thousandth part of the useless) is the end of living. The only illusion worth keeping is that anything can be useful. So far my youth is not ended.

MY FRIEND EL TORO

It is not everyone who can make friends with a bull, and it is not every bull that one can make friends with. Yet next to one or two horses, about which I could spin long yarns, El Toro, the big brindled bull of Los Guilucos Ranch, Sonoma County, California, is certainly nearest my heart. He was my friend, and sometimes my companion; he had a noble character for fighting, and in spite of his pugnacity he was amiability itself to most human beings. His final end, too, fills me with a sense of pathos, and enrages me against those who owned him. They were obviously incapable of understanding him as I did.

When I went up to Los Guilucos from San Francisco to take up the position of stableman on that ranche, I had little notion of the full extent of my duties. What these were is perhaps irrelevant in the present connection. And yet it was because I had to work so incredibly hard, being often at it from six in the morning to eight or nine o'clock at night, that I made particular friends with El Toro, to give him his Spanish name. In all that western and south-western part of the United States there are remnants of Spanish or Mexican in the common talk. For California was once part of Mexico. El Toro became my friend and my refuge: when I was driven half-desperate by having ten important things to do at once he often came in and helped me to preserve an equal mind. I have little doubt that I should have discovered how to work this by myself, but as a matter of fact I was put up to some of his uses by the man whose place I took. He showed me all I had to do, and lectured me on the character of the hard-working lady who owned the place; and when I was dazed and stood wondering how one man could do all the stableman was supposed to accomplish between sunrise and sundown, Jack said, "And besides all this there is a bull!" He said it so oddly and so significantly that my heart sank. I imagined a very fierce and ferocious animal fit for a Spanish bull-ring, a sharp-horned Murcian good enough to try the nerve of the best matador who ever faced horns and a vicious charge. Then he took me round the barn and opened a stable. In it El Toro was tied to a manger by a rope and ring through his nose: he greeted us with a strangled whistle as he still lay down. "When you are hard driven good old El Toro will help you," said Jack, as he sat down on the bull's big shoulders and started to scratch his curl with a little piece of wood which had a blunt nail in it. As I stood El Toro chewed the cud and was obviously delighted at having his curl combed.

The departing Jack delivered me another lecture on the uses of a mild and amiable but fighting bull on a ranche where a man was likely to be worried to death by a lady who had no notion of how much a man ought to do in a day. When he had finished he invited me to make friends with El Toro by also sitting on his back and scratching him with the blunt nail. I did as I was told, and though El Toro twisted his huge head round to inspect me he lay otherwise perfectly calm while I went on with his toilet. He evidently felt that I was an amiable character, and one well adapted to act as his own man. His views of me were confirmed when I brought him half a bucket of pears from the big orchard. With a parting slap and a sigh of regret which spoke well both for him and the bull, Jack went away to "fix" himself for travel. I was left in charge.

How hard I worked on that Sonoma County ranch I can hardly say. I had horses in the stable and horses outside. The cattle outside were mine. Three hundred sheep I was responsible for. Some young motherless foals I nursed. I milked six cows. I chopped wood. I cleaned buggies. I drove wagons and carriages and cleaned and greased them. Sometimes I stood in the middle of the great barn-lot or barnyard and tore my hair in desperation. I had so much to attend to that only the strictest method enabled me to get through it. And, as Jack had told me would happen, my method was knocked endways by the requirements of the lady who was my "boss." What a woman wants done is always the most important thing on earth. She used to ask me to do up her acre of a garden in between times when the sheep wanted water or twenty horses required hay. She was amiable, kindly, but she never understood. At such times who could blame me if I went to the bull's stable when I saw her coming. Though the bull was the sweetest character on the ranch, she went in mortal terror of him. She would try to find me in the horse stable, but she would not come near El Toro for her very life. It was better to sit quietly with him and recover my equanimity while she called. I knew her well enough to know that in a quarter of an hour something else of the vastest importance would engage her attention and I should be free to attend more coolly to my own work.

Yet sometimes she stuck to my track so closely that there was nothing for me to do but to turn El Toro loose. Then I could say, "Very well, madam, but in the meantime I must go after the bull." She knew what the bull being loose meant; he carried devastation wherever he went. He was the greatest fighter in the whole county. I had to get my whip and my fastest horse to try and catch him. I can hardly be blamed if I did not catch him till the evening. For in that way I got a wild kind of holiday on horseback and was saved from insanity. Certainly, when El Toro got away on the loose and was looking for other bulls to have a row with I could think of nothing else. Sometimes he got free by the rope rotting close up to his ring. In that case he went headlong. If he took the rope with him he sometimes trod on it and gave himself a nasty check. Usually, however, he got it across his big neck and kept it from falling to the ground. He never stopped for any gate. When he saw one he gave a bellow, charged it and went through the fragments with me after him. If I was really anxious to get him back at once I usually caught him within a mile. When I wanted a rest I only succeeded in turning him five or six miles away, after he had thrashed a bull or two belonging to other ranchers. No fence was any use to keep him out or in. On one occasion he broke into a barn in which a rash young bull was kept. When the row was over that barn stood sadly in need of repair: and so did the young pedigree bull. I may say that on this particular occasion El Toro got away entirely by himself, and I only knew he was free when I found the door of his stable in splinters.

There was a magnificent difference between El Toro as I sat on him and scratched him with a nail and as he was when he turned himself loose for a happy day in the country. In the stable he was as mild as milk. I could have almost imagined him purring like a cat. He chewed the cud and made homely sloppy noises with his tongue, and regarded me with a calm, bovine gaze, which was as gentle as that of any pet cow's. I could have fallen asleep beside him. It is reported that my predecessor Jack, on one occasion, came home much the worse for liquor and was found reclining on El Toro. There was not a soul on the ranch who dared disturb the loving couple. But when the rope was parted and El Toro loped down the road to seek a row as keenly as any Irishman on a fair day, he was another guess sort of an animal. He carried his tail in the air and bellowed wildly to the hills. He threw out challenges to all and sundry. He gave it to be understood that the world and the fatness thereof were his. This was no mere braggadocio; it was not the misplaced confidence of a stall-fed bull in his mere weight; he really could fight, and though he was only on the warpath about once a month, there was not a bull in the valley which had not retained in his thick skull and muddy brains some recollection of El Toro's prowess. The only trouble about this, from my pet bull's point of view, was that he could rarely get up a row. Most of his possible enemies fled when he tooted his horn and waltzed into the arena through a smashed fence. He was magnificent and he was war incarnate.

In that country, which is a hard-working country, there is really very little sport. Further south in California, the ease-loving Spanish people who remain among the Americans still love music and the dance. We worked, and worked hard; only Sundays brought us a little surcease from toil. All our notions of sport centred on our bull. I had many Italian co-workers, some Swedes, and an odd citizen of the United States. All alike agreed in being proud of El Toro. We yearned to match him against any bull in the State. Sometimes of a Sunday morning, after he had devastated the country and was back again, he held a kind of levée. The Italians brought him pears as I sat on him in triumph and combed him in places where he had not been wounded. He always forgot that I had come behind him and laced his tough hide with my stock-whip. He bore no malice, but took his fruit like a good child. I think he was almost as proud of himself as we were. Certainly we were proud of him. As for me, had I not ridden desperate miles after him: had I not interviewed outraged owners of other bulls and broken fences: had I not played the diplomat or the bully according to the treatment which seemed indicated? He was, properly speaking, my bull; I did not care if I had to spend three days mending our home gates and other's alien fences.

Yes, it was a fine thing to gallop through that warm, bright, Californian air after El Toro, with the brown hills on either side and its patches of green vineyard brightening daily. It was freedom after the toil of axle-greasing and the slow work with sheep. It was better than grinding axes and trying to cut the tough knobs of vine stumps: better than grooming horses and milking cows. It made me think even more of the great Australian plains and of the Texas prairie and the round up. Ay de mi, I remember it now, sometimes, and I wish I was on horseback, swinging my whip and uttering diabolic yells, significant of the freedom of the spirit as I rush after the spirit of El Toro. For my pet, my brindled fighter, my own El Toro, whom I combed so delicately with a bent nail, for whom I gathered buckets of bruised but fat Californian pears, is now no more. They told me, when I visited Los Guilucos seven years ago, that he became difficult, morose, hard to handle, and they sold him. They sold this joyous incarnation of the spirit of battle and the pure joy of life for a mean and miserable thirteen dollars! When I think of it I almost fall to tears. So might some coward son of the seas sell a battleship for ten pounds because it was not suitable for a ferry-boat or a river yacht. I would rather a thousand times have paid the thirteen dollars myself and have taken him out to fight his last Armageddon and then have shot him on the lonely hills from which all other bulls had fled. These mean-souled, conscienceless moneymakers, who could not understand so brave, so fine a spirit, sold him to a Santa Rosa butcher! Shame on them, I say. I am sorry I ever revisited the Valley of the Seven Moons to hear such lamentable news. It made me unhappy then, makes me unhappy now. My only consolation is that once, and twice, and thrice, and yet again, I gave El Toro the chance of finding happiness in the conflict. And when I left Los Guilucos, before I returned to England, I sat upon his huge shoulders and scratched him most thoroughly, while ever and again I offered him a juicy and unbruised pear. On that occasion I pulled him the best fruit, and left windfalls for the ranging, greedy hogs. And as I fed and scratched him he lay on his hunkers in great content, and made pleasant noises as he remembered the day before. On that day, owing to the kindly feeling of me, his true and real friend, he had had a great time three miles towards Glenallen, and had beaten a newly-imported bull out of all sense of self-importance. He was pleased with himself, pleased with me, pleased with the world.

BOOKS IN THE GREAT WEST

Since taking to writing as a profession I have lost most of the interest I had in literature as literature pure and simple. That interest gradually faded and "Art for Art's sake," in the sense the simple in studios are wont to dilate upon, touches me no more, or very, very rarely. The books I love now are those which teach me something actual about the living world; and it troubles me not at all if any of them betray no sense of beauty and lack immortal words. Their artistry is nothing, what they say is everything. So on the shelf to which I mostly resort is a book on the Himalayas; a Lloyd's Shipping Register; a little work on seamanship that every would-be second mate knows; Brown's Nautical Almanacs; a Channel Pilot; a Continental Bradshaw; many Baedekers; a Directory to the Indian Ocean and the China Seas; a big folding map of the United States; some books dealing with strategy, and some touching on medical knowledge, but principally pathology, and especially the pathology of the mind.

Yet in spite of this utilitarian bent of my thoughts there are very many books I know and love and sometimes look into because of their associations. As I cannot understand (through some mental kink which my friends are wont to jeer at) how anyone can return again and again to a book for its own sake, I do not read what I know. As soon would I go back when it is my purpose to go forward. A book should serve its turn, do its work, and become a memory. To love books for their own sake is to be crystallised before old age comes on. Only the old are entitled to love the past. The work of the young lies in the present and the future.

But still, in spite of my theories, I like to handle, if not to read, certain books which were read by me under curious and perhaps abnormal circumstances. If I do not open them it is due to a certain bashfulness, a subtle dislike of seeing myself as I was. Yet the books I read while tramping in America, such as Sartor Resartus, have the same attraction for me that a man may feel for a place. I carried the lucubrations of Teufelsdröckh with me as I wandered; I read them as I camped in the open upon the prairie; I slipped them into my pocket when I went shepherding in the Texan plateau south of the Panhandle.

Another book which went with me on my tramps through Minnesota and Iowa was a tiny volume of Emerson's essays. This I loved less than I loved Carlyle, and I gave it to a railroad "section boss" in the north-west of Iowa because he was kind to me. When Sartor Resartus had travelled with me through the Kicking Horse Pass and over the Selkirks into British Columbia, and was sucked dry, I gave it at last to a farming Englishman who lived not far from Kamloops. I remember that in the flyleaf I kept a rough diary of the terrible week I spent in climbing through the Selkirk Range with sore and wounded feet. It is perhaps little wonder that I associate Teufelsdröckh, the mind-wanderer, with those days of my own life. And yet, unless I live to be old, I shall never read the book again.

The tramp, or traveller, or beach-comber, or general scallywag finds little time and little chance to read. And for the most part we must own he cares little for literature in any form. But I was not always wandering. I varied wandering with work, and while working at a sawmill on the coast, or close to it, in the lower Fraser River in British Columbia, I read much. In the town of New Westminster was a little public library, and I used to go thither after work if I was not too tired. But the work in a sawmill is very arduous to everyone in it, and while the winter kept away I had little energy to read. Presently, however, the season changed, and the bitter east winds came out of the mountains and fixed the river in ice and froze up our logs in the "boom," so that the saws were at last silent, and I was free to plunge among the books and roll and soak among them day and night.

The library was very much mixed. It was indeed created upon a pile of miscellaneous matter left by British troops when they were stationed on the British Columbian mainland. There was much rubbish on the shelves, but among the rubbish I found many good books. For instance, that winter I read solidly through Gibbon's Rome, and refreshed my early memories of Mahomet, of Alaric, and of Attila. Those who imported fresh elements into the old were even then my greatest interest. I preferred the destroyers to the destroyed, being rather on the side of the gods than on the side of Cato. Lately, as I was returning from South Africa, I tried to read Gibbon once more, and I failed. He was too classic, too stately. I fell back on Froude, and was refreshed by the manner, if not always delighted by the matter.

After emerging from the Imperial flood at the last chapter, I fell headlong into Vasari's Lives of the Painters, in nine volumes. Then I read Motley's Netherlands and the Rise of the Dutch Republic, always terrible and picturesque since I had read it as a boy of eleven.

At the sawmill there was but one man with whom I could talk on any matters of intellectual interest. He was a big man from Michigan and ran the shingle saw. We often discussed what I had lately read, and went away from discussion to argument concerning philosophy and theology. He was a most lovable person; as keen as a sharpened sawtooth, and a polemic but courteous atheist. His greatest sorrow in life was that his mother, a Middle State woman of ferocious religion, could not be kept in ignorance of his principles. We argued ethics sophistically as to whether a convinced agnostic might on occasion hide what he believed.

Sometimes this friend of mine went to the library with me. He had the penchant for science so common among the finer rising types of the lower classes. So I read Darwin's Origin of Species, and talked of it with my Michigan man. And then I took to Savage Landor and learnt some of his Imaginary Conversations by heart. I could have repeated Æsop and Rhodope.

But the one thing I for ever fell back upon was an old encyclopædia. I should be afraid to say how much I read, but to it I owe, doubtless, a stock of extensive, if shallow, general knowledge. Certainly it appears to have influenced me to this day; for given a similar one I can wander from shipbuilding to St. Thomas Aquinas; from the Atomic Theory to the Marquis de Sade; from Kant to the building of dams; and never feel dull.

Now when I come across any of these books I am filled with a curious melancholy. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire means more to me than to some: I hear the whirr of the buzz-saw as I open it; even in its driest page I smell the resin of fir and spruce; Locke's Human Understanding recalls things no man can understand if he has not worked alongside Indians and next to Chinamen. As for Carlyle, I never hear him mentioned without seeing the mountains and glaciers of the Selkirks; in his pages is the sound of the wind and rain.

There are some novels, too, which have attractions not all their own. I remember once walking into a store at Eagle Pass Landing on the Shushwap Lake and asking for a book. I was referred to a counter covered with bearskins, and beneath the hides I unearthed a pile of novels. The one I took was Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. And another time I rode into Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, California, and, while buying stores, saw Gissing's Demos open in front of me. It was anonymous, but I knew it for his, and I read it as I rode slowly homeward down the Sonoma Valley, the Valley of the Seven Moons.

These are but a few of the books that are burnt into one's memory as by fire. All I remember are not literature: perhaps I should reject many with scorn at the present day; nevertheless, they have a value to me greater than the price set upon many precious folios. I propose one of these days to make a shelf among my shelves sacred to the books which I read under curious circumstances. I cannot but regret that I often had nothing to read at the most interesting times. So far as I can recollect, I got through five days' starvation in Australia without as much as a newspaper.

A VISIT TO R. L. STEVENSON

It was late in May or early in June, for I cannot now remember the exact date, that I landed in Apia, in the island of Upolu. Naturally enough that island was not to me so much the centre of Anglo-American and German rivalries as the home of Robert Louis Stevenson, then become the literary deity of the Pacific. In a dozen shops in Honolulu I had seen little plaster busts of him; here and there I came across his photograph. And I had a theory about him to put to the test. Though I was not, and am not, one of those who rage against over-great praise, when there is any true foundation for it, I had never been able to understand the laudation of which he was the subject. At that time, and until the fragment of Weir of Hermiston was given to the world, nothing but his one short story about the thief and poet, Villon, had seemed to me to be really great, really to command or even to be an excuse for his being in the position in which his critics had placed him. Yet I had read The Wrecker, The Ebb Tide, The Beach of Falesa, Kidnapped, Catriona, The Master of Ballantrae, and the New Arabian Nights. I came to the conclusion that, as most of the organic chorus of approval came from men who knew him, he must be (as all writers, I think, should be) immeasurably greater than his books. I was prepared then for a personality, and I found it. When his name is mentioned I no longer think of any of his works, but of a sweet-eyed, thin, brown ghost of a man whom I first saw upon horseback in a grove of cocoanut palms by the sounding surges of a tropic sea. There are writers, and not a few of them, whose work it is a pleasure to read, while it is a pain to know them, a disappointment, almost an unhappiness, to be in their disillusioning company. They have given the best to the world. Robert Louis Stevenson never gave his best, for his best was himself.

At any time of the year the Navigator Islands are truly tropical, and whether the sun inclines towards Cancer or Capricorn, Apia is a bath of warm heat. As soon as the Monowai dropped her anchor inside the opening of the reef that forms the only decent harbour in all the group, I went ashore in haste. Our time was short, but three or four hours, and I could afford neither the time nor the money to stay there till the next steamer. I had much to do in Australia, and was not a little exercised in mind as to how I should ever be able to get round the world at all unless I once more shipped before the mast. I was, in fact, so hard put to it in the matter of cash, that when the hotel-keeper asked three dollars for a pony on which to ride to Vailima, I refused to pay it, and went away believing that after all I should not see him whom I most desired to meet. Yet it was possible, if not likely, that he would come down to visit the one fortnightly link with the great world from which he was an exile. I had to trust to chance, and in the meantime walked the long street of Apia and viewed the Samoans, whom he so loved, with vivid interest. These people, riven and torn by internal dissensions between Mataafa and Malietoa, and honeycombed by Anglo-American and German intrigue, were the most interesting and the noblest that I had met since I foregathered for a time with a wandering band of Blackfeet Indians close to Calgary beneath the shadows of the Rocky Mountains. Their dress, their customs, and their free and noble carriage, yet unspoiled by civilisation, appealed to me greatly. I could understand as I saw them walk how Stevenson delighted in them. Man and woman alike looked me and the whole world in the face, and went by, proud, yet modest, and with the smile of a happy, unconquered race.

As I walked with half a dozen curious indifferents whom the hazards of travel had made my companions, we turned from the main road into the seclusion of a shaded group of palms, and as I went I saw coming towards me a mounted white man behind whom rode a native. As he came nearer I looked at him without curiosity, for, as the time passed, I was becoming reconciled by all there was to see to the fact that I might not meet this exiled Scot. And yet, as he neared and passed me, I knew that I knew him, that he was familiar; and very presently I was aware that this sense of familiarity was not, as so often happens to a traveller, the awakened memory of a type. This was an individual and a personality. I stopped and stared after him, and suddenly roused myself. Surely this was Robert Louis Stevenson, and this his man. So might the ghosts of Crusoe and Friday pass one on the shore of Juan Fernandez.

I called the "boy" and gave him my card, and asked him to overtake his master. In another moment my literary apparition, this chief among the Samoans, was shaking hands with me. He alighted from his horse, and we walked together towards the town. I fell a victim to him, and forgot that he wrote. His writings were what packed dates might be to one who sat for the first time under a palm in some far oäsis; they were but ice in a tumbler compared with séracs. He was first a man, and then a writer. The pitiful opposite is too common.

I think, indeed I am sure, for I know he could not lie, that he was pleased to see me. What I represented to him then I hardly reckoned at the time, but I was a messenger from the great world of men; I moved close to the heart of things; I was fresh from San Francisco, from New York, from London. He spoke like an exile, but one not discouraged. Though his physique was of the frailest (I had noted with astonishment that his thigh as he sat on horseback was hardly thicker than my forearm), he was alert and gently eager. That soft, brown eye which held me was full of humour, of pathos, of tenderness, yet I could imagine it capable of indignation and of power. It might be that his body was dying, but his mind was young, elastic, and unspoiled by selfishness or affectation. He had his regrets; they concerned the Samoans greatly.

"Had I come here fifteen years ago I might have ruled these islands."

He imagined it possible that international intrigue might not have flourished under him. Never had I seen so fragile a man who would be king. He owned, with a shyly comic glance, that he had leanings towards buccaneering. The man of action, were he but some shaggy-bearded shellback, appealed to him. His own physique was his apology for being merely a writer of novels.

We went on board the steamer, and at his request I bade a steward show his faithful henchman over her. In the meantime we sat in the saloon and drank "soft" drinks. It pleased him to talk, and he spoke fluently in a voice that was musical. He touched a hundred subjects; he developed a theory of matriarchy. Men loved to steal; women were naturally receivers. They adored property; their minds ran on possession; they were domestic materialists. We talked of socialism, of Bully Hayes, of Royat, of Rudyard Kipling. He regretted greatly not having seen the author of Plain Tales from the Hills.

"He was once coming here. Even now I believe there is mail-matter of his rotting at the post-office."

I asked him to accept a book I had brought from England, hoping to be able to give it to him. It was the only book of mine that I thought worthy of his acceptance. That he knew it pleased me. But he always desired to please, and pleased without any effort. When the boy came back from viewing the internal arrangements of the Monowai, he sat down with us as a free warrior. He was more a friend than a servant; Stevenson treated him as the head of a clan in his old home might treat a worthy follower. As there was yet an hour before the vessel sailed I went on shore with him again. We were rowed there by a Samoan in a waistcloth. His head was whitened by the lime which many of the natives use to bleach their dark locks to a fashionable red.

The air was hot and the sea glittered under an intense sun. The rollers from the roadstead broke upon the reef. The outer ocean was a very wonderful tropic blue; inside the reefs the water was calmer, greener, more unlike anything that can be seen in northern latitudes. A little island inside the lagoon glared with red rock in the sunlight; cocoanut palms adorned it gracefully; beyond again was the deeper blue of ocean; the island itself, a mass of foliage, melted beautifully into the lucid atmosphere. Yonder, said Stevenson, lay Vailima that I was not to see. But I had seen the island and the man, and the natural colour and glory of both.

As we went ashore he handed the book which I had given him to his follower. He thought it necessary to explain to me that etiquette demanded that no chief should carry anything. And etiquette was rigid there.

"Mrs Grundy," he remarked, "is essentially a savage institution."

We went together to the post-office. And in the street outside, while many passed and greeted "Tusitala" in the soft, native speech, we parted. I saw him ride away, and saw him wave his hand to me as he turned once more into the dark grove wherein I had met him in the year of his death.

A DAY IN CAPETOWN

I went across the Parade, which every morning is full of cheap-jack auctioneers selling all things under the sun to Kaffirs, Malays, coolies, towards Rondebosch and Wynberg. At the Castle the electric tram passed me, and I jumped on board and went, at the least, as fast as an English slow train. The wind was blowing and the dust flew, but ahead of us ran a huge electricity-driven water-cart, a very water tram, which laid the red clouds for us. Yet in London we travel painfully in omnibuses and horse-trams, and the rare water-cart is still drawn by horses.

The road towards Rondebosch, where Mr Rhodes lived, is full of interest. It reminded me dimly of a road in Ceylon: the colour of it was so red, and the reddish tree trunks and heavy foliage were almost tropical in character. Many of the houses are no more than one-storey bungalows; half the folks one saw were coloured; a rare Malay woman flaunted colour like a tropic bird. Avenues of pines resembled huge scrub; they cast strong shadows even in the greyness of the day. Far above the huge ramparts of Table Mountain lay the clouds, and the wind whistled mournfully from the organ pipes of the Devil's Peak. In unoccupied lands were great patches of wild arum, and suddenly I saw the gaunt Australian blue gum, which flourishes here just as well as the English oak. Two white gums shone among sombrest pines. They took my mind suddenly back to the bush of the Murray Hills, for there they gleam like sunlit lighthouses among the darker and more melancholy timber of the heights.

The houses grew fewer and fewer beyond Rondebosch, and at last we came to Wynberg, a quiet little suburban town. The tram ran through and beyond it, and I got off and walked for a while among the side roads. And the aspect of the country was so quiet, and yet so rich, that I wondered how any could throw doubts upon the wonderful value of the country. Surely this was a spot worth fighting for, and, more certainly still, it was a place for peace. A long contemplative walk brought me back to Rondebosch, and again I took the train-like tram and went back to busy Capetown.

In any new town the heights about and above it appeal strongly to every wanderer. I had no time to spare for the ascent of Table Mountain, and the tablecloth of clouds indeed forbade me to attempt it. But someone had spoken to me of the Kloof road, which leads to the saddleback between the Lion's Head and Table Mountain, so, taking the Kloof Street tram, I ran with it to its stopping-place and found the road. There the houses are more scattered; the streets are thin. But about every house is foliage; in every garden are flowers. As I mounted the steep, well-kept road I came upon pine woods. Across the valley, or the Kloof, I saw the lower grassy slopes of Table Mountain, where the trees dwindled till they dotted the hill-side like spare scrub. Above the trees is a cut in the mountain, above that the bare grass, and then the frowning weather-worn bastions of the mountain with its ancient horizontal strata. It is cut and scarped into gullies and chimneys; for the mountain climber it offers difficult and impossible climbs at every point. Down the upper gullies hung wisps of ragged cloud, pouring over from the plateau 4000 feet above the town.

On the left of the true Table Mountain there is a rugged and ragged dip, and further still the rocks rise again in the sharper pinnacles of the Devil's Peak. That slopes away till it runs down into the house-dotted Cape flats, and beyond it lie Rondebosch, Wynberg and Constantia. Across the grey and misty flats other mountains rise—mountains of a strange shape which suggests a peculiar and unusual geological formation.

Although the day was cool and the southerly wind had a biting quality about it, yet the whole aspect of the world about me was intensely sub-tropical. In heavy sunlight it would seem part of the countries north of the Tropic of Capricorn. The close-set trees, seen from above, appear like scrub, like close-set ti-tree. They are massed at the top, and among them lie white houses. Beyond them the lower slopes of the Devil's Peak are yellow and red sand, but the grey-green waters of the bay, which is shaped like a great hyperbola, are edged with white sand.

Among the pines the rhythmic wind rose and fell; it whistled and wailed and died away. Beneath me came the faint sound of men calling; there was the clink of hammers upon stone.

But suddenly the town was lost among the trees, and when I sat down at last upon a seat I might have been among the woods above the Castle of Chillon, and, seen dimly among the foliage, the heights yonder could have been taken for the slopes of Arvel or Sonchaud. A bird whistled a short, repeated, melancholy song, and suddenly I remembered I had seen no sparrows here. A blackcap stared at me and fled; its triple note was repeated from bush to bush.

The wind rose again as I sat, but did not chill me in my sheltered hollow. It rose and fell in wavelike rhythm like the far thunder of waves upon a rock-bound coast. Then came silence, and again the wind was like the sound of a distant waterfall. There for one moment I caught the resinous smell of pine. It drew me back to the Rocky Mountains, and then to the woods above Zermatt, where I had last smelt that healthiest and most pleasing of woodland odours. I rose again and walked on.

Presently I gained a loftier height, and saw the Lion's Head above me, a bold shield knob of rock rising out of silver trees, whose foliage is a pale glaucous green, resembling that of young eucalypti. Then, turning, I saw Capetown spread out beneath me, almost as one sees greater Naples from the Belvedere of the San Martino monastery. The whitish-grey town is furrowed into cañon-like streets. Beyond the town and over the flats was a view like that from Camaldoli. The foreground was scrub and pine and deep red earth, whereon men were building a new house. May fate send me here again when the sun is hot and the under world is all aglow!

I came at last to the little wind-swept divide between Table Mountain and the Lion's Head. Here Capetown was lost to me, and I stood among sandy wastes where thin pines and whin-like bushes grow. And further still was the cold grey sea with the waves breaking on a rocky point and a little island all awash with white water.

Though beyond this divide the air was cold as death, the slopes of Table Mountain sweeping to the sea were full of colour; deep, strong, stern colour. When the sun shines and full summer rules upon the Cape Peninsula the place must be glorious. Even when I saw it an artist would wonder how it was that with such a chill wind the colour remained. And above the coloured lower slopes this new view of Table Mountain suggested a serried rank of sphinxes staring out across the desert sea. The nearest peak of the mountain is weathered, cracked and scarred, and it in are two chimneys that appear accessible only for the oreads who block the way with their smoky clouds. In the far north-eastern distance the grey headlands melted into the grey ocean. But beneath me were the tender green of the birch-like silver tree and the rich young leaves of the transplanted English oak.

VELDT, PLAIN AND PRAIRIE

Among the problems which remain perpetually interesting are those which deal with the influence of environment on races, and that of races on environment. What happens when the people are plastic and their circumstances rigid? What when the people are rigid and unyielding, and their surroundings fluent and unabiding? And does character depend on what is outside, or does the dominant quality of a race remain, as some vainly think, for ever? These are puzzling questions, but not entirely beyond conjecture for one who has heard the siren songs of the African veldt, the Australian plain, and the American prairie.

He who consciously observes usually observes the obvious, and may rank as a discoverer only among the unobservant. Truth may be looked for, but he who hunts her shall rarely find when the truth he seeks is something not suited for scientific formulæ. The real observer is he who does not observe, but is gradually aware that he knows. Sometimes he does not learn that he is wise till long years have passed, and then perhaps the mechanical maxim of a mechanical eye-server of Nature shall startle him into a sense of deep abiding, but perhaps incommunicable, knowledge. So comes the knowledge of mountain, moor and stream; so rises the Aphrodite truth of the sea, born from the foam that surges round the Horn, or floats silently upon the beach of some lonely coral island; and so grows the knowledge of vast stretches of dim inland continents.

I spent my hours (let them be called months) in Africa seeking vainly after facts that after all were of no importance. Politics are of to-day, but human nature is of eternity. And while I sought what I could hardly find, in one cold clear dawn I stumbled upon the truth concerning the white people of the veldt, whom we call Boers. And yet it was not stumbling; I had but rediscovered something that I had known of old in other lands, far east and far west of Africa. When first I entered on the terraces of the Karroo I tried to build up for myself the character of the lone horsemen who ride across these spaces, and though I was solitary, and saw sunrises, the construction of the type eluded me. I saw the big plain and the flat-topped banded hills that had sunk into their minds. I saw the ruddy dawn glow, and the ruddier glory of sundown as the sun bit into the edge of the horizon, and I knew that here somewhere lay the secret of the race, even though I could not find it. And I knew too that I had discovered sister secrets in long past days; and I saw that, not in the intellect as one knows it, but in some revived instinct, revived it might be by one of the senses, lay the clue to what I sought. What did these people think, or what lay beneath thought in them? It was something akin to what I had felt somewhere, that I knew. But the sun went down and left me in the dark; or it rose clear of the distant hills and drowned me in daylight, and still I did not know. Then there was the babble of politics in my ears, and I spoke of Reform and such urgent matters in the dusty streets of windy Johannesburg.

But one day, as it chanced, I came upon the secret; and then I found it was incommunicable, as all real secrets are. For your true secret is an informing sensation, and no sensation can resolve itself other than by negatives. I had spent a weary, an unutterably weary, day in a coach upon the Transvaal uplands, and came in the dark to the house of a Boer who served travellers with unspeakable food and gave them such accommodation as might be. It was midnight when I arrived, and all his beds were full of those who were journeying in the opposite direction. He made me a couch on the floor in a kind of lumber-room, and, softened child of civilisation that I had become, I growled by myself at what he gave, and wondered what, in the name of the devil who wanders over the earth, I was doing there. And how could he endure it? How, indeed. I fell asleep, and the next minute, which was six hours later, I awoke, and stumbled with a dusty mouth into the remaining night, not yet become dawn. Such an hour seemed unpropitious. My bones ached; I lamented my ancient hardness in the time when a board or a sheet of stringy bark was soft; I felt a touch of fever, my throat was dry, a hard hot day of discomfort was before me. In the dim dusk I saw the mules gathered by the coach, which had yet to do sixty miles. A bucket invited me; I washed my hot hands and face, and walked away from the buildings into the open. Then very suddenly and without any warning I understood why the Boer existed, and why, in his absurd perversity, he rather preferred existing as he was; and I saw that even I, like other Englishmen, could be subdued to the veldt. The air was crisp and chill; the dawn began to break in a pale olive band in the lower east; the stars were bright overhead; the morning star was even yet resplendent. But these things I had seen on the southern Karroo. It was not my eyes alone that told me the old secret, the same old secret that I had known. I knew then, and at once, as an infinite peace poured over me, that all my senses were required to bring me back to nature, and that one alone was helpless. Now with what I saw came what I heard. I heard the clatter of harness, the jingle of a bell, the low of a cow, the trampling of the mules. And I smelt with rapture, with delight, the complex odours of the farm that sat so solitary in the world; but above all the chill moving odour of the great plain itself. This, or these, made a strange, primitive pleasure that I had known in Australia, in Texas, even in a farm upon the edge of a wild Westmorland moor. My senses informed my intellect. I shook hands with the creatures of the veldt, for I was of their tribe. Even my feet trod the earth pounded by the mules, the horses and the oxen, with a sensation that was new and old. Why did not spurs jingle on my heels? I felt strong and once more a man. So feels the Boer, and so does he love, but he cannot even try to communicate the incommunicable. For, after all, the secret is like the smell of a flower that few have seen. Its odour is not the odour of the rose, not that of any lily, not that of any herb; it is its own odour only.

What is the difference, then, in those who ride the high Texan plateaux or scour the sage-bush plains of Nevada, or follow sheep or cattle in the salt bush country of the lingering Lachlan? There is much difference; there is little difference; there is no difference. The great difference is racial, the small difference is human, the lack of any difference is animal and primæval. In all alike, in any country where spaces are wide, the child that was the ancestor of the man arises with its truthful unconscious curiosity and faith in Nature. Here it may be that one gallops, here one trots, here again one walks. But all alike pull the bridle and snuff the air and find it good, and see the grass grow or dwindle, and watch the stars and the passing seasons, and find the world very fresh and very sweet and very simple.

NEAR MAFEKING

To a man who has lived and travelled in the United States of America and the not yet United States of Australia, there is one characteristic of South Africa which is particularly noticeable. It is its oneness as a country. And this oneness is all the more remarkable when we take into consideration its racial and political divisions. A bird's-eye view of America is beyond one; a similar glance at the seaboard of Australia from Rockhampton even round to Albany (which is then only round half its circle) gives me a mental crick in the neck. But in thinking of Africa, south of the Zambesi, there is no such mental difficulty. Even the existence of the Transvaal seemed to me an accident, and, if inevitable, one which Nature herself protests against. Some day South Africa must be federated, but if any politician asks me, "Under which king, Bezonian, speak or die," I shall elect (in these pages at least) to die.

But though this disunited unity seemed to me a salient feature in cis-Zambesian Africa, it was the differences in that natural ring fence which attracted most of my attention as a story-writer even as a story-writer who so far has only written one tale about it. I began to ask myself how it was that, with one eminent exception, our African fiction writers had confined themselves to the native races, and the friction between these races and white men, Boer or English, when there were infinitely more attractive themes at hand. Perhaps it may seem like begging the question to call the political inter-play of the Cape Colony, of the Transvaal, and the Free State more interesting than tales in which the highest "white" interest appears in a love story betwixt some English wanderer and an impossible Boer maiden, or such as relate the rise and fall of Chaka and Ketchwayo. And yet to me the mass of intrigue, the political friction, the onward march of races, and the conflicts above and below board, called for greater attention than the Zulu, even at his best.

To a novelist (who sometimes pretends to think, however much such an unpopular tendency be hidden) environment and its necessary results are of infinite interest. Upon the Karroo, even when in the train, I tried to build up the aloof and lonely Boer, and, though I failed, there came to me in whiffs (like far odours borne on a westerly wind) some suggestions that I really understood deep in my mind how he came to be. The chill fresh air of the morning, before the sun was yet above the horizon, recalled to me some ancient dawns in far Australia: and then again I thought of days upon the Texan plateaux. But still the secret of the lone-riding Boer, who loves a country of magnificent distances, escaped me.

But one early dawn, when I was half-way between Krugersdorp and Mafeking, I came out upon the veldt in darkness, which was a lucid darkness, and in the silent crisp air I stumbled upon the truth. Betwixt sleep and waking as I walked I felt infinite peace pour over me. So had the silent Campo Santo at Pisa affected me; so had I felt for a moment among the ancient ruins of the abbey at Rivaulx. In this dawn hour came a time of reversion. I too was very solitary, and loved my solitude. The necessities of civilisation were necessities no more: I needed luxury even less than I needed news. I cared for nothing that the men of a city ask: there was space before me and room to ride. The lack of small urgent stimuli, the barren growth of civilisation's weedy fields, left me to the great and simple organic impulses of the outstretched world. And in that moment I perceived that this silence is the very life of the wandering Boer, even though he knows it not; for it has sunk so deep into him that he is unaware of it. He belongs not to this age, nor to any age we know.

For one long year, twenty years ago, I lived upon a great plain in Australia, and now I remembered how slowly I had been able to divest myself of my feeling of loneliness. But when I came at last to be at home upon that mighty stretch of earth, which seemed a summit, I grew to love it and to see with opened eyes its infinite charm that could be told to none. I knew that the need of much talk was a false need: as false as the diseased craving for books.

To feel this was true of the widespread wandering folks who once came out of crowded Holland to resume a more ancient type, instructed me in what a false relation they stand to the rolling dun war-cloud of "Progress." They called in the unreverted Hollander to stand between them and the men of mines, and now they love the Hollander as a man loves a hated cousin, who is a man of his blood, but in nothing like him. But anything was, and is, better than to stand face to face with busy crowds. To have to talk, to argue, to explain to the unsympathetic was overmuch. The veldt called to them: it is their passion. As one labours in London and sinks into a dream, remembering the hills wherein he spends a lonely summer, among Westmorland's fells and by the becks, so the Boer, called cityward, looks back upon the wide and lonely veldt which is never too wide and never lonelier to him than to any of the beasts he loves to hunt.

But the fauna disappear, and ancient civilisations crumble. And those who revert are once more overwhelmed by civilisation. It is a great and pathetic story, a story as old as the tales told in stone by the preserved remnants of prehistoric monsters.

Yet, speaking of monsters, what is a stranger monster (to an eye that hates it or merely wonders) than the many-jointed Rand demon crawling along the line of banked outcrop? I saw it first by day, when it seemed an elongated wire-drawn Manchester in a pure air, but I remember it best as I saw it when returning from Pretoria. First I beheld the gleam of electric lights, and remembered the glow of Fargo in Eastern Dakota as I saw it across the prairie. Then the mines were no longer separate: they joined together and became like a fiery reptile, a dragon in the outcrop, clawing deep with every joint, wounding the earth with every claw, as a centipede wounds with every poisoned foot. The white residues gleamed beneath the moon, from every smoke stack poured smoke: the dragon breathed. Then the great white cyanide tanks were like bosses on the beast; the train stopped, and the battery roared. That night, for it was a silent and windless night, I heard forty miles of batteries beating on the beach of my mind like a great sea. And men laboured in the bowels of the earth for gold. But out upon the veldt it was very quiet, "quietly shining to the quiet moon." I understood then that it was no wonder if the simple and stolid Dutchman had a peculiar abhorrence for a town, which, even at night, was never at rest. In Johannesburg is neither rest, nor peace, nor any school for nobility of thought; it destroys the pleasures of the simple, and satisfies not the desires of those whose simplicity is their least striking feature.

Upon the veldt and the Karroo, and even through the Mapani scrub country that lies north of Lobatsi, simplicity is the chief characteristic of the scenery. As I went by Victoria West (I had spent the night talking politics with the civillest Dutchmen) I came in early morning to the first Karroo I had seen. The air was tonic, like an exhilarating wine with some wonderful elixir in it other than alcohol, and though the country reminded me in places of vast plains in New South Wales, it lacked, or seemed to lack, the perpetual brooding melancholy that invests the great Austral island. As I stood on the platform of the car, the sun, not yet risen, gilded level clouds. The light reddened and the gold died: and the sudden sun sparkled like a big star, and heaved a round shoulder up between two of Africa's flat-topped hills, which were yet blue in the far distance. Then the level light of earliest day poured across the plateau, yellow with thin grass, which began to ask for rain. The picture left upon my mind is without detail, and made up of broad masses. Even a railway station, with some few gum trees, and the pinky cloud of peach blossom about the little house, was excellently simple and homely. A distant farm, with smoke rising beneath the shadow of a little kopje, a band of emerald green, where irrigation sent its flow of water, a thousand sheep with a blanketed Kaffir minding them, filled the eye with satisfaction.

Out of such a country should come simple lives. By the sport of fate the cruellest complexity of politics is to be found there.

And yet who can declare that the environment shall not in time exert its inevitable influence on the busy crowding English, and make them or their sons glad to sit upon their stoeps and smoke and look out upon the veldt with a quiet satisfaction which is unuttered and unutterable? The Karroo and the veldt do not change except according to the seasons; they pour their influences for ever upon those who ride across them as the Drakensberg Mountains send their waters down upon Natal beneath their mighty wall. And even now the busy Englishman complains that his African-born son is lazy and seems more content to live than to be for ever working. Each country exacts a certain amount of energy from those who live there; as one judges from the Boer, the tax is not over heavy.

And as in time to come the great centre of interest shifts north, as now it seems to shift, one may prophesy with some hope, certainly without dread of such a result, that a more energetic Dutch race, and a less energetic English one, will fuse together, and look back upon their childish quarrels with mere historic interest. Perhaps the Dutch in those times will become the aristocrats, as they have done in New York; they may even see their chance of going for ever out of politics. For they never yet sat down to the political gaming-table gladly.

BY THE FRASER RIVER

The first experience I had in regard to gold mining was in Ballarat, when a well-known miner and business man in that pretty town took me round the old alluvial diggings and pointed out the most celebrated claims. These (in 1879) were, of course, deserted or left to an occasional Chinese "fossicker," who rewashed the rejected pay dirt, which occasionally has enough gold in it to satisfy the easily-pleased Mongolian. I went with my friend that same day into the Black Horse Mine, and saw quartz crushing for the first time; but, naturally enough, I took far more interest in the alluvial workings that can be managed by few friends than in operations which required capital and the importation of stamping machinery from England; and Ballarat, rich as it once was for the single miner, is now left to corporations.

One of the strangest features of an old gold-mining district is its wasted and upturned appearance. The whole of the surrounding country is, as it were, eviscerated. It is all hills and hollows, which shine and glare in the hot sun and look exceedingly desolate. When, in addition, the town itself fails and fades for want of other means of support, and the houses fall into rack and ruin as I have seen in Oregon, the place resembles a disordered room seen in the morning after a gambling debauch. The town is happy which is able to reform and live henceforth on agriculture, as is now the case to a great extent with Ballarat and with Sandhurst, which has discarded its famous name of Bendigo.

To a miner, or indeed to anyone in want of money, as I usually was when knocking about in Australian or American mining districts, the one painful thing is to know where untold quantities of gold lie without being able to get a single pennyweight of it. I remember on more than one occasion sitting on the banks of the Fraser River in British Columbia, or of the Illinois River in Oregon, pondering on the absurdity of my needing a hundred dollars when millions were in front of me under those fast-flowing streams. Those who know nothing about gold countries may ask how I knew there were millions there. The answer is simple enough. First let me say a few words about one common process of mining.

When it is discovered that there is a certain quantity of gold in the vast deposits of gravel which are found in many places along the Pacific slope, but especially in Oregon and California, water, brought in a "flume" or aqueduct from a higher level, is directed, by means of a pipe and nozzle fixed on a movable stand, against the crumbling bench, which perhaps contains only two or three shillings-worth of gold to the ton. This is washed down into a sluice made of wooden boards, in which "riffles," or pieces of wood, are placed to stop the metal as it flows along in the turbid rush of water. Some amalgamated copper plates are put in suitable places to catch the lighter gold, or else the water which contains it is allowed to run into a more slowly-flowing aqueduct, which gives the finer scales time to settle. This, roughly put, is the hydraulic method of mining which causes so much trouble between the agricultural and mining interests in California; for the finer detritus of this washing, called technically "slickens," fills up the rivers, causes them to overflow and deposit what is by no means a fertilising material on the pastures of the Golden State.

Now, what man does here in a small way, and with infinite labour and pains, Nature has been doing on a grand scale for unnumbered centuries. Let us, for instance, take the Fraser River and its tributary the Thompson, which is again made up of the North and South Forks, which unite at Kamloops, as the main rivers do at Lytton. The whole of the vast extent of mountainous country drained by these streams is known to be more or less auriferous. Many places, such as Cariboo, are, or were, richly so; and there are few spots in that part which will not yield what miners know as a "colour" of gold—that is, gold just sufficient to see, even if it is not enough to pay for working by our slight human methods. I have been in parts of Oregon where one might get "colour" by pulling up the bunches of grass that grew sparsely on a thin soil which just covered the rocks. But the united volumes of the Fraser and the two Thompsons and all their tributaries have been doing an enormous gold-washing business for a geological period; and all that portion of British Columbia which lies in their basin may be looked upon as similar to the bench of gravel which is assaulted by the hydraulic miner. And just as the miner makes the broken-down gold-bearing stuff run through his constructed sluices, Nature sends all her gold in a torrent into the natural sluice which is known as the Fraser Cañon.

This cañon, which is cut through the range of mountains known erroneously as the Cascades, is about forty miles long, if we count from Lytton and Yale. In its narrowest part, at Hell Gate, a child may throw a stone across; and its current is tremendous. So rapidly does it run, that no boat can venture upon it, and nothing but a salmon can stem its stream. It is full, too, of whirlpools; and at times the under rush is so strong that the surface appears stationary. What its depth may be it is impossible to tell. But one thing is certain, and that is, that in the cracks and crannies of its rocky bed must be gold in quantities beyond the dreams of a diseased avarice. But is this not all theory? No, it is not. At one part of the river, in the upper cañon, there is a place where the current stayed, and, with a long backward swirl, built up a bar. If you ask an old British Columbian about Boston Bar, he will, perhaps, tell stories which may seem to put Sacramento in the shade. Yet there will be much truth in them, for there was much gold found on that bar. Again, some years ago, at Black Cañon, on the South Fork of the Thompson, when that clear blue stream was at a low stage, there was a great landslip, which for some eighty minutes dammed back the waters into a lake. The whole country side gathered there with carts and buckets, scraping up the mud and gold from the bottom. Many thousands of dollars were taken out of the dry river bed before the dam gave way to the rising waters. And, if there was gold there, what is there even now in the great main sluice of the vastest natural gold mining concern ever set going, which has never yet since it began indulged in a "cleanup?"

I have been asked sometimes, when speaking about the Fraser and other rivers, which are undoubtedly gold traps, why it was that nobody attempted to turn them. Of course, my questioners were neither engineers nor geographers. Certainly an inspection of the map of British Columbia would show the utter impossibility of such a scheme. To dam the Fraser would be like turning the Amazon. Yet once I do not doubt that it was dammed, and that all the upper country was a vast lake, until the waters found the way through the Cascades which it has now cut into a cañon. Otherwise I cannot account for the vast benches and terraces which rise along the Thompson. Indeed, the whole of the Dry Belt down to Lytton has the appearance, to an eye only slightly cognisant of geological evidence, of an ancient lacustrine valley.

Yet much work of a similar kind to damming this river has been done in California; and even now there is a company at the great task of turning the Feather River (which is also undoubtedly gold bearing) through a tunnel in order to work a large portion of its bed. Whether they will succeed or not is perhaps doubtful; but if they do, the returns will probably be large, as they would be if anyone were able to turn aside the Illinois in Southern Oregon, or the Rogue River, which has been mining in the Siskiyou Range for untold generations.

I feel certain that all human gold discovering has been a mere nothing; that our methods are only faint and feeble imitations of Nature, and that only by circumventing her shall we be able to reach the richer reward. But by the very vastness of her operations we are precluded from imitating the sluice robber, who does not work himself, but "cleans up" the rich boxes of some mining company which has undertaken a scheme too large for any one man.

OLD AND NEW DAYS IN BRITISH COLUMBIA

The whole of this vast country—this sea of mountains, as it has very appropriately been called—used practically to belong to the Hudson's Bay Trading Company, and they made more than enough money out of it and its inhabitants. The Indians, though never quite to be trusted, were, and are, not so warlike as their neighbours far to the south of the forty-ninth parallel, such as the Sioux and Apaches, and naturally were so innocent of the value of the furs and skins they brought into the trading ports and forts as to be vilely cheated, in accordance with all the best traditions of white men dealing with ignorant and commercially unsophisticated savages. Guns and rifles being the objects most desired by the Indian, he was made to pay for them, and to pay an almost incredible price, as it seems to us now, for the company made sure of three or four hundred per cent, at the very least, and occasionally more; so that a ten shilling Birmingham musket brought in several pounds when the pelts for which it was exchanged were sold in the London market.

Their dominion of exclusion passed away with the discovery of gold in Cariboo, and the consequent assumption of direct rule by the Government. The palmy days of mining are looked back on with great regret by the old miners, and many are the stories I have heard by the camp fire or the hotel bar, which explained how it was that the narrator was still poor, and how So-and-so became rich. There were few men who were successful in keeping what they had made by luck or hard work, yet gold dust flew round freely, and provisions were at famine prices. I knew one man who said he had paid forty-two dollars (or nearly nine pounds) for six pills. They were dear but necessary; and as the man who possessed them had a corner in drugs, he was able to name his price. At that time, too, some men made large sums of money by mere physical labour, and for packing food on their backs to the mines they received a dollar for every pound weight they brought in.

An acquaintance of mine, who is now an hotel-keeper at Kamloops, was a living example of the strange freaks fortune played men in Cariboo. He was offered a share in a mine for nothing, but refused it, and bought into another. Gold was taken out of the first one to the tune of 50,000 dollars, and the other took all the money invested in it and never returned a cent. He was in despair about one mine, and tried to sell out in vain. He was thinking of giving up his share for nothing, when gold was found in quantities. I think he makes more out of whisky, however, than he ever did at Cariboo, though he still hankers after the old exciting times and the prospects of the gold-miner's toast, "Here's a dollar to the pan, the bed-rock pitching, and the gravel turning blue."

Nowadays there are still plenty of men who traverse the country in all directions looking for new finds. They are called "prospectors," and go about with a pony packed with a pick, a shovel, and a few necessaries, hunting chiefly for quartz veins, and they talk of nothing but "quartz," "bed-rock," "leads," gold and silver, and so many ounces to the ton. It is now many years ago since I was working on a small cattle ranch in the Kamloops district, when one of these men, a tall, grey-haired old fellow named Patterson, came by. My employer knew him, and asked him to stay. He bored us to death the whole evening, and showed innumerable specimens, which truly were not very promising, as it seemed to us. His great contempt for farming was very characteristic of the species. "What's a few head of rowdy steers?" asked Mr Patterson; "why, any day I might strike ten thousand dollars." "Yes," I answered mischievously; "and any day you mightn't." He turned and glared at me, demanding what I knew about mining. "Not a great deal," said I; "but I have seen mining here and in Australia, and for one that makes anything a hundred die dead broke." "Well," he replied, scornfully "I'd rather die that way than go ploughing, and I tell you I know where there is money to be made. Just wait till I can get hold of a capitalist."

That is another of the poor prospector's stock cries; but as a general rule capitalists are wary, and don't invest in such "wild cat" speculations.

Next morning Mr Patterson proposed that I should go along with him and he would make my fortune. "What at?" said I. "Quartz mining?" "Not this time," was his answer; "it's placer" (alluvial). I was not in the least particular then what I did if I could only get good wages, so I wanted to know what he proposed giving me. "Bed-rock wages," said he. Now that means good money if a strike is made, and nothing if it is not. So I shook my head, and he turned away, leaving me to wallow in the mire of contemptible security. I can hardly doubt that he will be one day found dead in the mountains, and that his Eldorado will be but oblivion.

Just as I was about to leave British Columbia for Washington Territory there were very good reports of the new Similkameen diggings, and for the first and only time in my life I was very nearly taking the gold fever. But though I saw much of the gold that had been taken out of the creek, I managed to restrain myself, and was glad of it afterwards, when I learned from a friend of mine in town that very few had made anything out of it, and that most had returned to New Westminster penniless and in rags.

Railroads and modern progress are nowadays civilising the country to a great extent, though I am by no means sure that civilisation is a good thing in itself. However, manners are much better than they used to be in the old times, and it might be hard now to find an instance of ignorance parallel to one which my friend Mr H. told me. It appears that a dinner was to be given in the earlier days to some great official from England, and an English lady, who knew how such things should be done, was appointed manager. She determined that everything should be in good style, and ordered even such extravagant and unknown luxuries as napkins and finger-glasses. Among those who sat at the well-appointed table were miners, cattle-men, and so on, and one of them on sitting down took up his finger-bowl, and saying, "By golly, I'm thirsty," emptied it at a draught. Then, to add horror on horror, he trumpeted loudly in his napkin and put it in his breast pocket.

The progress of civilisation, however, destroys the Indians and their virtues. One Indian woman, who was married to a friend of mine—and a remarkably intelligent woman she was—one day remarked to me that before white men came into the country the women of her tribe (she was a Ptsean) were good and modest but that now that was all gone. It is true enough. This same woman was remarkable among the general run of her class, and spoke very good English, being capable of making a joke too. A half-bred Indian, working for her husband, one day spoke contemptuously of his mother's tribe, and Mrs ——, being a full-blooded Indian, did not like it. She asked him if he was an American, and, after overwhelming him with sarcasm, turned him out of doors.

As a matter of fact, most of the Indians are demoralised, especially those who live in or near the towns, and they live in a state of degradation and perpetual debauchery. Though it is a legal offence to supply them with liquor, they nevertheless manage to get drunk at all times and seasons. When they work they are not to be relied on to continue at it steadily, and when drunk they are only too often dangerous. Their type of face is often very low, and I never saw but one handsome man among the half-breeds, though the women, especially the Hydahs, are passable in looks. This man was a pilot, and a good one, on the lakes; but he was perpetually being discharged for drunkenness.

The lake and river steamboats are not always safe to be in, and some of the pilotage and engineering is reckless in the extreme. The captains are too often given to drink overmuch, and when an intoxicated man is at the wheel in a river full of the natural dangers of bars and snags, and those incident on a tremendous current, the situation often becomes exciting. I was once on the Fraser River in a steamer whose boiler was certified to bear 80 lb. of steam and no more. We were coming to a "riffle," or rapid, where the stream ran very fiercely, with great swirls and waves in it, and the captain sang out to the engineer, "How much steam have you, Jack?" "Eighty," answered Jack.

"Fire up, fire up!" said the captain, as he jammed the tiller over; "we shall never make the riffle on that."

The firemen went to work, and threw in more wood, and presently we approached the rapid. The captain leant out of the pilot house.

"Give it her, Jack," he yelled excitedly.

The answer given by Jack scared me, for I knew quite well what she ought to bear.

"There's a hundred and twenty on her now!"

"Well, maybe it will do;" and the captain's head retreated.

On we went, slowly crawling and fighting against the swift stream which tore by us. We got about half-way up, and we gradually stayed in one position, and even went back a trifle. The captain yelled and shouted for more steam yet, and then I retreated as far as I could, and sat on the taffrail, to be as far as possible from the boiler, which I believed would explode every moment. But Jack obeyed orders, and rammed and raked at the fires until the gauge showed 160 lb., and we got over at last. But I confess I did feel nervous.

This happened about ten miles below Yale, and at that very spot the tiller-ropes of the same boat once parted, and they had to let her drift. Fortunately, she hung for a few moments in an eddy behind a big rock until they spliced them again; but it was a close call with everyone on board. A steamer once blew up there, and most of the crew and passengers were killed outright or drowned.

Above Yale the river is not navigable until Savona's Ferry is reached. That is on the Kamloops Lake, and thence east up the Thompson and the lakes there is navigation to Spallamacheen. Once the owners of the Peerless ran her from Savona down to Cook's Ferry, just in order to see if it could be done. The down-stream trip was done in three hours, but it took three weeks to get her back again, and then her progress had to be aided with ropes from the shore; so it was not deemed advisable to make the trip regularly.

As for the river in the main Fraser cañon, it is nothing more nor less than a perfect hell of waters; and though Mr Onderdonk, who had the lower British Columbia contract for the Canadian Pacific Railroad, built a boat to run on it, the first time the Skuzzy let go of the bank she ran ashore. She was taken to pieces and rebuilt on the lakes. The railroad people wanted her at first on the lower river, and asked a Mr Moore, who is well known as a daring steamboatman, to take her down. He said he would undertake it, but demanded so high a fee, including a thousand dollars for his wife if he was drowned, that his offer was refused. Yet it was well worth almost any money, for it would have been a very hazardous undertaking—as bad as, or even worse than, the Maid of the Mist going through the rapids below Niagara.

A TALK WITH KRUGER

It was a warm day in the end of September 1898 when I put my foot in Pretoria. There was an air of lassitude about the town. President Steyn, of the Orange Free State, had been and gone, and the triumphal arch still cried "Wilkom" across Church Square. The two Boer States had ratified their secret understanding, and many Boers looked on the arch as a prophecy of victory. Perhaps by now those who were accustomed to meet in the Raadsaal close by are not so sure that heaven-enlightened wisdom brought about the compact. As for myself, I thought little enough of the matter then, for Pretoria seemed curiously familiar to me, though I had never been there, and had never so much as seen a photograph of it until I saw one in Johannesburg. For some time I could not understand why it seemed familiar. It is true that it had some resemblance to a tenth-rate American town in which the Australian gum-trees had been acclimatised, as they have been in some malarious spots in California. And in places I seemed to recall Americanised Honolulu. Yet it was not this which made me feel I knew Pretoria. It was something in the aspect of the people, something in the air of the men, combined doubtless with topographical reminiscence. And when I came to my hotel and had settled down, I began to see why I knew it. The whole atmosphere of the city reeked of the very beginnings of finance. It was the haunt of the concession-monger; of the lobbyist; of the men who wanted something. These I had seen before in some American State capitals; the anxious face of the concession-hunter had a family likeness to the man of Lombard Street: the obsession of the gold-seeker was visible on every other face I looked at.

In the hotels they sat in rows: some were silent, some talked anxiously, some were in spirits and spoke with cheerfulness. It pleased my solitary fancy to label them. These had got their concessions, they were going away; these still hoped strongly, and were going to-morrow and to-morrow; these still held on, and were going later; these again had ceased to hope, but still stayed as a sickened miner will hang round a played-out claim. They were all gamblers, and his Honour the President was the Professional Gambler who kept the House, who dealt the cards, and too often (as they thought) "raked in the pot," or took his heavy commission. And I had nothing to ask for; all I wanted was to see the tables if I could, and have a talk with him who kept them.

The President is an accessible man. He does not hide behind his dignity: he affects a patriarchal simplicity, and is ever ready to receive his own people or the stranger within his gates. His unaffected affectation is to be a simpleton of character: he tells all alike that he is a simple old man, and expects everyone to chuckle at the transparent absurdity of the notion. Was it possible, then, for me to see him and have a talk with him? I was told to apply to a well-known Pretorian journalist. As I was also a journalist of sorts, and not wholly unknown, it was highly probable he would assist me in my desire not to leave Pretoria without seeing the Father of his people. But my informant added: "The President will say nothing—he can say nothing in very few words. If you want him to talk, say 'Rhodes.'" I thanked my new hotel acquaintance and and said I would say "Rhodes" if it seemed necessary. And next afternoon I walked down Church Street with the journalist W—— and came to the President's house. We had an appointment, and after waiting half-an-hour in the stoep with four or five typical and silent Boers, Mr Kruger came out in company with a notorious Pretorian financier, for whom I suppose the poor President, who is hardly worth more than a million or so, had taken one of his simple-hearted fancies. And then I was introduced to his Honour, and we sat down opposite to each other. By the President's side, and on his right hand, sat W——, who was to interpret my barbarous English into the elegant taal.

If few of our caricaturists have done Mr Kruger justice, they have seldom been entirely unjust. He is heavy and ungainly, and though his face is strong it is utterly uncultivated. He wears dark spectacles, and smokes a long pipe, and uses a great spittoon, and in using it does not always attain that accuracy of marksmanship supposed to be characteristic of the Boer. His whiskers are untrimmed, his hands are not quite clean; his clothes were probably never intended to fit him. And yet, in spite of everything, he has some of that dignity which comes from strength and a long habit of getting his own way. But the dignity is not the dignity of the statesman, it is that dignity which is sometimes seen under the blouse of an old French peasant who still remains the head of the family though his hands are past work. I felt face to face with the past as I sat opposite him. So might I have felt had I sat in the kraal of Moshesh or Lobengula or the great Msiligazi. Though the city about me was a modern city, and though quick-firers crowned its heights, here before me was something that was passing away. But I considered my audience, and told the President and his listening Boers that I was glad to meet a man who had stood up against the British Empire without fear. And he replied, as he puffed at his pipe, that he had doubtless only done so because he was a simpleton. And the Boers chuckled at their President's favourite joke. He added that if he had been a wise man of forethought he would probably have never done it. And so far perhaps he was right. All rulers of any strength have to rely rather on instinct than on the wisdom of the intellect.

Then we talked about Johannesburg, and the President puffed smoke against the capitalists, and led me to infer that he considered them a very scandalous lot, against whom he was struggling in the interests of the shareholders. I disclaimed any sympathy with capitalists, and declared that I was theoretically a Socialist. The President grunted, but when I added that he might, so far as I cared, act the Nero and cut off all the financial heads at one blow, he and his countrymen laughed at a conceit which evidently appealed to them. But his Honour relapsed again into a grunt when I inquired what he considered must be the upshot of the agitation. On pressing him, he replied that he was not a prophet. I tried to draw him on the loyalty of the Cape Dutch by saying that they had even more reason to be loyal than the English, seeing that if England were ousted from the Continent the Germans would come in; but he evaded the question at issue by asserting that if the Cape Dutch intrigued against the Queen he would neither aid nor countenance them. Then, as the conversation seemed in danger of languishing, I did what I had been told to do and mentioned Rhodes.

It was odd to observe the instant change in the President's demeanour. He lost his stolidity, and became voluble and emphatic. Rhodes was evidently his sore point; and he abused him with fervour and with emphasis. All trouble in this wicked world was due to Rhodes; if Rhodes had not been born, or had had the grace to die very early, South Africa would have been little less than a Paradise. Rhodes was a bad man, whose chief aim was to drag the English flag in the dirt. Rhodes was Apollyon and a financier, and the foul fiend himself. And as the old man worked himself into a spluttering rage, he emphasised every point in his declamation by a furious slap, not on his own knee, but on the knee of the journalist who was interpreting for me. Every time that heavy hand came down I saw poor W—— wince; he was shaken to his foundations. But he endured the punishment like a martyr, and said nothing. I dropped ice into the President's boiling mind by asking him if he thought it would remove danger from the situation if Mr Rhodes and Mr Chamberlain were effectually muzzled by the Imperial Government. His peasant-like caution instantly returned; he smoked steadily for a minute, and then declared he would say nothing on that point. It was not necessary; he had showed, without the shadow of a doubt, that he was an old man who was, in a sense, insane on one point. Rhodes was his fixed pathological idea. This Tenterden steeple was the cause of the revolutionary Goodwin Sands.

As a last question about the Cape Dutch, I asked if, when he declared he would not aid them against the Queen, he would act against them; he replied denying in general terms the right to revolt. I said, "But the right of revolution is the final safeguard of liberty"; and his Honour did nothing but grunt. From his point of view he could neither deny nor affirm this safely, and so our interview came to an end.

TROUT FISHING IN BRITISH COLUMBIA AND CALIFORNIA

At that time I acknowledge that trout-fishing as a real art I knew nothing of; whipping English waters had been almost entirely denied me, and with the exception of a week on a river near Oswestry, and a day in Cornwall, I had never thrown a fly over a pool where a trout might reasonably be supposed to exist. But in British Columbia I used to catch them in quantities and with an ease unknown to Englishmen. I am told (by an expert) that using a grasshopper as a bait is no better than poaching, and that I might as well take to the nefarious "white line," or Cocculus indicus. That may be so according to the deeper ethics of the sport, but I am inclined to think many men would have no desire to fish at all after going through the preliminary task of filling a small tin can with those lively insects.

Owing to the fact that I was working for my living on a ranch at Cherry Creek, I had no chance of fishing on week-days, but on Sundays, after breakfast, I used to take my primitive willow rod from the roof, where it had been for six days, see that the ten or twelve feet of string was as sound at least as my frayed yard of gut, examine my hook, and then start hunting grasshoppers. That meant a deal of violent exercise, especially if the wind was blowing, for they fly down it or are driven down it with sufficient velocity to make a man run. Moreover, near the ranche they were mostly of a very surprising alertness, owing, doubtless, to the fact that the fowls, in their eagerness to support Darwin's theory of natural selection, soon picked up the slow and lazy ones. But after an hour's hard work I usually got some fifty or so, and that would last for a whole day, or at anyrate for a whole afternoon. Then I went to the creek, fishing up it and down it with a democratic disregard of authority.

Cherry Creek was only a small stream; here and there it rattled over rocks, and stayed in a deep pool. Now and again it ran as fast as the water in a narrow flume; and then the banks grew cañon-like for fifty yards. But for almost the whole of its length it went through dense brush, so dense in parts that it defied anyone but a bear to get through it. But when I did reach a secluded pool and manage to thrust my rod out over the water and slowly unwind my bait, I was almost always rewarded by a lively mountain trout as long as my hand, for they never ran over six inches. The grasshopper was absolutely deadly; no fish seemed able to resist it, and sometimes in ten minutes I took six, or even ten, out of a pool as big as an ordinary dining-room table. The fact of the matter is that the greatest difficulty lay in getting to the water. When I fished up stream into the narrow gorge through which the creek ran, I often walked four or five miles before I got the small tin bucket, which was my creel, half full; yet I knew that if I could have really fished five hundred yards of it I might have gone home with a full catch.

But it was not so much the fishing as the strange solitude, the thick, lonely brush, that made such excursions pleasant. Every now and again I came to a spur of the mountains, and climbed up into the open and lay among the red barked bull-pines. If I went a little higher I could catch sight of the dun-coloured hills which ran down, as I knew, to the waters of Kamloops Lake, only five miles distant. If I felt hungry, I could easily light a fire and broil the trout; with a bit of bread, carried in my pocket, and a draught from a spring or the creek itself, I made a hearty meal. And all day long I saw no human being. Every now and again I might come across a half-wild bullock or a wilder horse, or see the track of a wolf, but that was all, save the song of the birds, the wind among the trees, and the ceaseless murmurs of the creek. In the evening I made my way back in time to give the cook what I had caught.

In California I used to fish in the small creek running at the back of Los Guilucos Ranch, Sonoma County, and, though the trout were by no means so plentiful there as in British Columbia, I often caught two or three dozen in the afternoon. But there I had to use worms, and they seemed far less attractive than the soft, sweet body of the grasshopper. Yet once I caught a very large fish for that part of the country. He was evidently a fish with a history, as I caught him in a big tank sunk in the earth, which supplied the ranch, and was itself supplied by a long flume. As I went home past this tank one day I carelessly dropped the bait in, and it was instantly seized by a trout I knew to be larger than I had yet hooked. But, though he was big, he had very little chance. The smooth sides of the tank afforded him no hole to rush for, and, after a short struggle, I hauled him out. My only fear was that my rotten line would part, for he weighed almost a pound, and I was accustomed to fish of less than seven ounces.

I often wondered in British Columbia why so few people fished. In some of the creeks running into the Fraser River, near Yale, I have seen splendid trout of two or three pounds; there would be a dozen in sight at once very often. They always seemed in good condition, too, which was more than could be said for the salmon, for those were half of them very white with the fungus, as one could easily see on the Kamloops or Shushwap Lakes from the bows of the steamer if the water was smooth.

Perhaps the reason there are no trout-fishers out there is that those who care sufficiently for any kind of sport find it more to their taste to hunt deer, bear or cariboo. When these have disappeared, as they must, seeing the ruthless manner in which they are slaughtered, many may be glad to take to the milder and less ferocious trout. The country certainly affords very good fishing, and the spring and summer climate is perfect. If it were only a little nearer they might be properly educated, until they were far too wary to fall into the simple traps laid for them by a man who fished with a piece of string and carried a bucket for a creel. It may have been my brutal ignorance of tying flies, but when I tried them with what I could furbish up, they seemed to resent the thing as an insult. So there seems some hope of their being capable of instruction.

ROUND THE WORLD IN HASTE

When I went to New York in the spring I meant going on farther whether I could or not. Australia and home again was in my mind, and in New York slang I swore there should be "blood on the face of the moon" if I did not get through inside of four months. Now this is not record time by any means, and it is not difficult to do it in much less, provided one spends enough money; but I was at that time in no position to sling dollars about, and, besides, I wanted some of the English rust knocked off me. Living in England ends in making a man poor of resource. I hardly know an ordinary Londoner who would not shiver at the notion of being "dead broke" in any foreign city, to say nothing of one on the other side of the world; and though it is not a pleasant experience it has some charms and many uses. It wakes a man up, shows him the real world again, and makes him know his own value once more. So I started for New York in rather a devil-may-care spirit, without the slightest chance of doing the business in comfort. And my misfortunes began at once in that city.

To save time and money I went in the first quick vessel that crossed—the Lucania; and I went second-class. It was an experience to run twenty-two knots an hour; but it has made me greedy since. I want to do any future journeys in a torpedo-boat. As to the second-class crowd, they were, as they always are on board Western ocean boats, a set of hogs. The difference between first and second-class passengers is one of knowing when and where to spit, to put no fine point on it. I was glad when we reached New York on that account.

I meant to stay there three days, but my business took me a fortnight, and money flowed like water. It soaked up dollars like a new gold mine, and I saw what I meant for the Eastern journey sink like water in sand. But I had to get to San Francisco. I took that journey in sections. All my trouble in New York was to get across the continent. I let the Pacific take care of itself, being sure I could conquer that difficulty when the time came. I recommend this frame of mind to all travellers. I acquired the habit myself in the United States when I jumped trains instead of paying my fare. It is most useful to think of no more than the matter in hand, for then we can use one's whole faculties at one time. Too much forethought is fatal to progress, and if I had really considered difficulties I could have stayed in England and written a story instead, a most loathsome pis aller.

I do not mean to say that I was without money. All I do mean is that I had less than half that I should have had, unless I meant to cross the continent as a tramp in a "side-door Pullman," as the tramping fraternity call a box car, and the Pacific in the steerage. As a matter of fact, I proposed to do neither. I wanted a free pass over one of the American railroads, and if there had been time I should have got it. I tackled the agents, and "struck" them for a pass. I assured them that I was a person of illimitable influence, and that if I rode over their system, and simply mentioned the fact casually on my return, all Europe would follow me. I insinuated that their traffic returns would rise to heights unheard of: that their rivals would smash and go into the hands of receivers. It was indeed a beautiful, beautiful game, and reminded one of poker, but the railroad birds sat on the bough, and wouldn't come down. They are not so easy as they used to be, and I had so little time to work it. Then the last of the cheap trains to the San Francisco Midwater Fair were running, and if I played too long for a pass and got euchred after all, I should have to pay ninety dollars instead of forty-five. Then I should be the very sickest sort of traveller that ever was. In the end I bought a cheap ticket on the very last cheap train. By the very next post I got a pass over one of the lines. It made me very mad, and if I had been wise I should have sold it. I am very glad to say I withstood the temptation, and kept the pass as a warning not to hurry in future. I started out of New York with twenty-two pounds in my pocket. For I had found a beautiful, trustful New Yorker, who cashed me a cheque for fifteen pounds with a child-like and simple faith which was not unrewarded in the end.

My affairs stood thus. I had to stay in San Francisco for a fortnight till the next steamer, and as I have said even a steerage fare to Sydney was twenty pounds. I had two pounds to see me through the transcontinental journey of nearly five days and the time in the city of the Pacific slope. I looked for hard times and some rustling to get through it all. I had to rustle.

As a beginning of hard times I could not afford to take a sleeper. I was on the fast West-bound express, and the emigrant sleepers are on the slow train, which takes nearly two days more. The high-toned Pullman was quite beyond me, so I stuck to the ordinary cars and put in a mighty rough time. After twenty-four hours of the Lehigh Valley Road, which runs into Canada, I came to Chicago. There I had to do a shift from one station to another, and after half-an-hour's jolting I was landed at the depôt of the Chicago and North-Western Railroad. I hated Chicago always; I had starved in it once, and slept in a box car in the old days. And now I didn't love it. I tried to get a wash at the station, for I was like a buried city with dust and cinders.

"There used to be a wash-place here a year or two back," said a friendly porter, "but it didn't pay and was abolished."

Of course they only cared about the money. The comfort of passengers mattered little. This porter took me down into a rat-and-beetle-haunted basement, and gave me soap and a clean towel. I sluiced off the mud, and discovered somebody underneath that at anyrate reminded me of myself, and hunted for the porter to hand him twenty-five cents. But he had gone, and the train was ready. I had to save the money and run.

From thence on I had no good sleep. I huddled up in the narrow seats with no room to stretch or lie down. Once I tried to take up the cushions and put them crossways, but I found them fixed, and the conductor grinned.

"You can't do it now; they're fixed different," he said.

So I grunted, and was twisted and racked and contorted. In the morning I knew well that I was no longer twenty-five. Twelve years ago it wouldn't have mattered, I could have hung it out on a fence rail, but when one nears forty one tries a bit after ordinary comforts, and pays for such a racket in aches and pains, and a temper with a wire edge on it. But I chummed in after Ogden with a young school ma'am from Wisconsin who was going out to Los Angeles, and we had quite a good time. She assured me I must be lying when I said I was an Englishman, because I did not drop my H's. All the Englishmen she ever met had apparently known as much about the aspirate as the later Greeks did of the Digamma. This cheered me up greatly, and we were firm friends. In fact, I woke up in the Sierras and found her fast asleep with her head on my shoulder. It was an odd picture that swaying car at midnight in the lofty hills. Most of the passengers were sleeping uneasily in constrained attitudes, but some sat at the open windows staring at the moon-lit mountains and forests. The dull oil lights in the car were dim, so dim that I could see white sleeping faces hanging over the seats disconnected from any discoverable body. Some looked like death masks, and then next to them would be the elevated feet of some far-stretching person who had tried all ways for ease. It was a blessing to come to the divide and run down into the daylight and the plains. Yet even there, there was something ghastly with us. At Reno a young fellow, trying to beat his way, had jumped for the brake-beam under our car and been cut to pieces. He died silently, and few knew it. I was glad to get to San Francisco. I went to a third-class hotel on Ellis Street, and had a bath, which I most sorely needed. I went out to inspect the city.