ated noises of the clarionet, cockatoo noises, noises like chopping wood, and occasionally an ear-splitting crow. . .

...

A week later, Crooke and Macmillan returned to the stockade from a visit to neighbours. They were met at the gate by the old Subadar. "A sahib has come." Wha's that, Subadar Sahib ? "A sahib has come. He is a strange sahib, talking only Angrézi, and brings a Madrassi servant, very sick, who will answer no questions. The sahib is in the Mess-kôt." They exchanged glances fraught with weighty understanding. "Subadar Sahib, this was foreseen. I will attend to it." And to Macmillan, "He's arrived. Never mind. Pull up your socks. Here beginneth the first lesson, ," and he strode in under the gateway.

They found a little, fussy, undersized man, who rose from a chair in the verandah and introduced himself as Major Alexander Grant, recently of the Madras Presidency, and, more remotely, of Inverness. Despatched on a special mission and "services placed at the disposal of the Local Government for purposes of archæology." Also-and here the least little touch of de haut en bas peeped through-the bearer of a letter.

He presented it with an air.

Pardon - Howe's rarely used red-crested stationery became

nothing was to be lacking in the induction of Athene to the land of Boeotia.

Crooke and Macmillan, wise in their all-weather knowledge of men, took the whole thing with a grave courtesy. For all their grimy and unbuttoned daily existence, and this utterly unusual responsibility which had been thrown upon them, they rose to the occasion. The meeting might have been that of diplomats on a Persian carpet, with a ramrod-backed footman standing by the door, instead of three soaked and sodden officers forgathering in the dingiest and most recently mapped corner of the Indian Empire. Besides, the man was obviously clean-bred, a fact not even obscured by the unnecessarily polysyllabic phrases in which he explained his arrival ; and to one, at least, of them he was a fellow-countryman. Also, he looked damned tired, poor chap. Wonder when he last had a meal?

Crooke, in chosen phrases and a punctilious hospitality, began to inquire as to his creature comforts. In five minutes all pretence and any pretentiousness broke down. The grand seigneur manner thawed under the pressure of admitting that he had come lamentably ill-equipped for jungle travel; that his Madrassi bearer was worse than useless; that he had marched too far and too fast; had lain awake all the previous night with a bad dose of fever and no quinine; and

Crooke and Macmillan stared at him.

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"Look here, old thing. don't want to be rude and all that; but we've been talking like Boston schoolmarms while you ought to have been in bed. Come along."

He took him firmly by the upper arm and led him gently down the verandah to the sleeping quarters. Here he literally stripped him, put him in a warm bath, and examined him all over for leeches, Grant submitting with gradually weakening protests. Thereafter, clean pyjamas lent for the occasion, a comprehensive wrap in a woolly blanket (the poor devil was shivering and be

things), and a tuck-up under a mosquito curtain. He woke him ten minutes later for a bowl of hot soup and twenty grains of quinine, both watched to destination, and, "Now then, don't you bother about anything else; we'll look after you," as the shaking hand passed out the empty basin and he whispered a half-finished thanks into the pillow.

Here or hereabouts let us take leave to digress, and see the scope of the Problem-the muddy pool which the stick of Inquiry was to stir, and the results to be hoped from the stirring.

The junglis, as found in the part of the world with which we deal, are those who fell by the way when the big Tibetan Drift, countless unrecorded ages ago, oozed southward, the outermost waves of the drift reaching Borneo by way of Assam, Burma, and Siam. Their ancestors must, even then, have carried in them the seeds of a VOL. CCXXIII.-NO. MCCCXLVII.

laziness apparent to this day, and have failed to keep the virile impulses of the Main Drift, thereafter getting bogged in the dense jungles and adapting themselves to submersion by their surroundings. The laziness must have been moral rather than physical, in that it produced that most un virile state of affairs-a thoroughgoing democracy in which all discipline and leadership were lost and the habit of massed chinwag was allowed to harden into an institution. The entire vocabulary consists of some three hundred words, wherein,

A 2

though there may be ten words for rice between the time when it goes into the ground and the day it comes to table, yet they cannot express a non-concrete idea even by a circumlocution. Arithmetic reaches a dozen, and thereafter vagueness of many, much, or little. Why a dozen ? The jungli is a secretive bird, even in his family circle. You and I count openly, in tens, on our fingertips. The jungli, with halfclosed left hand, calculates with his thumb-tip against the four sets of three inner phalanges of his fingers, where the eye may not follow.

Withal, he is a mean fellow, with a hole-and-corner mentality. He never looks you in the face when he speaks; he has seven different underhand ways of slaying game; and his untrustworthiness gives rise to the saying that in all his statements the jungli sticks so closely to the truth that it is impossible to get it from him.

And

Their war system is no system, in that it is the antithesis of any organisation. though any one village might at any moment, and for reason good or bad, rise with a whoop like a flock of starlings and go bald-headed at the enemy of the moment, yet (and it was our great asset) inter-village liaison or cohesion was impossible in warfare conducted on the principles of hysteria. All the same, they were dangerous, damned dangerous. Theirs was the instability of nitro-glycerine

or of fulminate of mercury. If you put your hat down carelessly on either, you'd go through the roof.

This communal system-to get it within the four corners of a definition-seems, on the whole, to be less a Democracy than a negation of any form of discipline, since discipline is not the fact of putting men up in a row and shouting at them, but is, by definition, Organised Self-control. With them there is no public opinion to limit wrongfulness of action, and active misbehaviour is only kept in check by fears of retaliation. Their only virtues are their splendid physique and their undeniable personal courage; while the only limitation on an openly vicious life seems to be either immaturity or anno domini.

There is, however, in all this a praiseworthy consistency, in that it is the most complete and final expression of individualism and self-determination, and the working out of the principles of a pandemic democracy to a logical conclusion. The interest of the individual is paramount, to the eventual exclusion of the good of the community. They are impenitent and, hitherto, uncorrected. Their isolation

both physical, on account of their jungle setting, and moral, due to the reluctance of other tribes to have dealings with a people as explosive and untrustworthy as a badly made firework-has so far prevented their indisciplined and non

To such a people came the linguo historico- ethnological brainstorm - merchant, Major Alexander Grant (sometime of Inverness, but now recovering from a bad go of quartan ague in Labêk stockade). He proposed to put them neatly into a volume of records, with a foundation of Tibeto-Burman lore and collateral excursions into totemism, Buddhism, animism, and a dozen other learned by-products and definitions. Summarised, in simple language the question seemed to be, What are their Manners and Customs?" The answer, to us who knew them, was too easy. They had neither. They seemed, indeed, to have replaced this almost universal duality by Habits and by Impulses, from the examination of which, in the end, neither profit nor edification resulted.

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Grant, full of enthusiasm and energy, was cheerfully ignorant of all this. Nor were we, with our definite orders to give him all the rope he wanted, the people to enlighten him. The Doomworm, who only groused at the smaller worries of life, set his loyal old headpiece to the carrying out of PardonHowe's orders, and at the same time kept a wary eye on the possibilities of tribal explosions. Macmillan, inscrutable and silent, surveyed the problem with steely grey eyes through sandy eyelashes. The two of them together-aye, and every man

spring; and the mechanism which held it tight-coiled was our utter and unswerving loyalty to the great bald head of Pardon-Howe, whom, as you may by now have gathered, we worshipped.

Grant got to work. We gave him, as orderly, our most intelligent Gurkha, one Ranbir Gurung, one of our few who had a smattering of tongues; the Madrassi bearer, helpless and inefficient in these new and virile surroundings, retired into the background. We trotted out the kotoki, or local interpreter, and sat him on the verandah while Macmillan expounded to his reluctant ear the whole duty of intercommunication between Grant and jungledom. We made all as smooth as we could, but the Doomworm exacted only one rigid condition: there must be no visiting of villages in the hunt for information, all people to be interviewed must come to the stockade. Nor was Grant, un versed in pathless jungles, to go anywhere without an adequate and intelligent escort of our providing. For the rest, he had a free hand; and after he had discovered that we, perfectly politely, were unable to enlighten him on any question of ethnology, history, language, or any alleged manner or custom, we gave him a rough list of meal-hours, and turned again to our daily tasks.

There was much coming and going. There were interviews. Grant, the kotoki, and the leading local gam held interminable tête-à-têtes in a hut outside the main gate. Grant scribbled voluminous notes, while Ranbir squatted in silence in the background. There were hours on hours when Grant wrote furiously on the mess table, sheet after sheet of loose foolscap, and as furiously tore them up again. The wind blew them about. The Doomworm, painfully faddy about the cleanliness of his stockade, would presently call the Madrassi and make him clear up the mess before meal-times. The Madrassi objected. He was, I think, the laziest and sulkiest rotter who ever emerged from the Benighted Presidency. He had a name as long as a goods train-Anantaswami Venkatachellam Mudalliar, to be exact, -but at the end of a week Macmillan christened him The Erg, and the name stuck (an erg apparently being a unit of horse-power in the movements of molecules, and therefore the smallest known force in Nature). And he was dirty-dirty in a land where, to white man or brown, neglect of cleanliness was the shortest of steps to the hospital.

The interviews went on. But now definite hitches commenced to show up. One morning the gam was not forthcoming, and

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a message, through Ranbir, to the village, elicited the unconvincing fact that he had gone on a journey, for many days, and that his return was problematical. But Ranbir, resourceful chap, brought back the female oldest inhabitant, white-haired, skinny and astonishingly dirty, and dumped her down in the hut. There, sahib; try her with a few questions!" Grant, joyful at this new departure, did so. What he asked her in the interests of science must have astonished a dame who, for the past thirty years, had probably ceased to think of such things. Anyhow, so Ranbir told us, the effect was remarkable. The old puss reached out a skinny and begrimed paw and deliberately stroked Grant's face, straight down from his hair, over his nose, and down his chin, what time she murmured 'ka-linga," or, as one might say, "tootsy-wootsy!" Grant fled.

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That night the kotoki got suddenly and most surprisingly drunk, was bunged into the Quarter Guard, and woke with a muzzy explanation of mental confusion produced by his new duties and the necessity for some such relief.

One way and another there was a hitch, and Grant took a breathing-space-from interviews, at any rate. He never ceased scribbling, however,