man.

Permission is most gratefully accorded. Dress does not hamper them in the performance of their arduous labours, their sole adornments being brass anklets and a string of beads with a diminutive fringe. Inwardly the officer promises them cloth or beads galore, or whatever their innocent hearts most desire. After a helpless delay of over two hours during the best part of the morning, a start is at last made towards the next camp.

And so the tale runs on, da capo, from day to day. Where there was plain sailing yesterday, is rough weather to-day. The natives play up beyond his utmost expectations, and the joy is cross-grained by the exceeding imperfection of the boys. March succeeds march and adds to the lengthening leagues behind, till civilised haunts seem veiled in a mist and the present life is the only one he has ever lived. Here and there, like lighthouses seen on a coasting trip, are the stations marking the journey's stages. Here a longer halt is called, and there is the luxury of the mother tongue and a friendly face to greet the toiler on his way.

This porter question, and the buying of supplies, is the bane of one's pleasure in the Equatorial Provinces. If the native side of the question is looked at, who blames their attitude? The work of their wives will produce, with little or no trouble, three crops in the year. On the hill at the back of Dufilé they can scrape out enough iron to bring home to make at the village forge all the tools they desire. Cloth they get from wild cotton, spinning it into thread and then weaving in the way Emin taught his soldiers. It is little they do make, and that they do not really want. If in need of a covering, there are skins of antelope to be got for the stalking, or from the flocks of sheep and goats, and there is every variety of colour to be got. Beads are useful for personal adornment and for barter, but where so little is required and that little so easily raised, why buy?

Such is a fair sample of the attendant vexations of travel in Africasometimes worse, sometimes better. Life is full of contrariness out here. One day's march is twenty miles, the next five. For a week no milk is obtainable, then the Sheikh of the village where your day's halt is fills the bucket full to the brim. Then is the soup made with milk, the sweet potatoes mashed in milk, drink is hot milk and cold milk, and omelette puddings galore. There is too much to boil to preserve it, so, grudgingly, it is allowed to go sour, for the boys next day to sit around and shake in gourds of every size and shape in the hopes of producing a microscopic amount of sour cream cheese butter. And the delights of a new vegetable when a native suddenly springs a basket of small unripe tomatoes! At home one has considered tomatoes as only fit to lend a touch of colour to a salad, but here, in this desert of fruitlessness, it rivals all the taste and flavour of the finest hot-house grapes.

Many are the incidents met with in the course of the journeyings

through these lands. The headman of the village of the bucketful of milk-long pleasantly remembered-was attached to Gordon when he halted there in those parts. The Chief's father is too old to come and see the white man. He was a great man years ago, though now aged and decrepit, and, being in an idle mood, the traveller elects to go up and see him, being escorted in state to the village. Tottering and half blind he crawls out of the funereal darkness of his house into the sunlight, blinking stupidly at the present of cloth placed in his hands, asking if it is a white cow. Then, becoming aware who it is who is before him, asks anxiously if it is Baker Pasha. Hearing he is dead, he asks next if Cid' is in Kampala, because if she is, old as he is he will go there to see her. 'Cid,' it is explained, is Matadi for 'Sultaness,' and the old chap means Lady Baker. Having started a congenial topic, another village elder is produced to continue the conversation, as the old Chief evinces a desire to crawl back into his hut, through the door of which already are stretched the brawny arms of numerous wives, jingling with ivory and native-made chain-iron bracelets. And it is told to the traveller how quick and deft Cid was in loading and handling her husband's guns. Now, near this village the Pasha 'stayed two months; the third he went away.' Sure enough, next day the site is shown on the banks of a river running into the Nile nearly opposite Dufilé, with its unfilled holes, certain evidence of a white man's occupation. In connection with this district, now quite deserted, the natives tell how flourishing and prosperous it used to be till the Dervishes came up devastating, and how all the inhabitants ran away inland. Close to Baker's camp, under the trees on the opposite side of the river, was where they encamped, doubtless some large party of Arab slave traders. There is one, at least, well authenticated inroad of Dervishes, who came up and fought Emin Pasha first at Lado and then at Dufilé. In the remains of his fort at Dufilé there still remain the clearly defined earthworks and the deep and broad ditch, now overgrown with shrubs and weeds. Most interesting, perhaps, is the brick-built gateway where, the Nubian escort tell-such as are old enough to remember and were therewere piled up the skulls of the Nubian soldiers and Dervish dead, in that last great fight after the Soudanese had refused to follow Emin to Kevallis; this resulted in their then going across to the west bank of the Nile. Here may be seen the roofless walls of the Magazine, still smoothly faced with mud plaster; the big tree under which the Pasha sat, the harbourage for the two steam launches; the bastion for the big gun commanding the inland country along which the foe came. Another Chief points out a low hill on which two companies of Soudanese under an Abyssinian colonel fought the combined forces of Thali and Mahdi tribesmen, in which the natives say the Nubians were beaten and all their wives and children taken.

Perhaps this was the company that forsook Dufilé and fled inland. He also tells that a detachment of those same Nubian soldiers fled east-vaguely pointing-and are settled somewhere on the borders of the Somali country. Talking of the Dervishes, there was a little Chief who, intoxicated by his own present of arragao' (arrack) which he had brought into camp, told how his father when dying clutched hold of his hands and said, 'Son, if the Arab comes from there'-pointing north to the slave route-take to the jungle. But,' he added, 'there are some people there,' pointing south, called Ingleeza; if they come into this country, go to them and listen to their words.' And,' the son added in an excess of drunken enthusiasm, the Ingleeza are good people.' Truly, walking day after day north along the route of the slave trade, past the fort of Laboré, perched like an eyrie overlooking the peaceful strath of the Nile, down to Lado and Regiaf, it is borne home to one what slavery means. Now the road runs through a deserted valley, literally through village site after site, nothing now remaining but the eloquent circlets of stones betokening where the cheery little huts used to be, and the feeble stone stockade, too slight to resist the ravages of the unholy hordes coming up out of the North. One passes hundreds of them, now the haunt of waterbuck, hippo and elephant, roaming at will through the deserted hearthstones.

The Nubian soldiers forming the escort of the officer could tell many tales of those old days. The Effendi (or native officer) was a corporal under Gordon, and speaks almost affectionately how Gordon never would fight the natives unless he couldn't help it. He would fill his pockets with beads, and walk out alone to the crowd, flinging beads first out of one pocket and then out of the other, till they were all following in his train, laughing and shouting. Gordon, after he built a fort, was never content till the natives came in with their women and children to sell, and yet there was the other side to his character when need arose, as witness the fort at Laboré, whose huge breast-high stonework was thrown up in two days while under fire—one half of his men fought while the other half built. This one heard under the big tree in the fort close to where Gordon's house must have been.

One more incident and then these gleanings close. The caravan had been delayed several days at the village of a big Chief in order to buy flour and raise porters to take their bags on. 'The Sheikh was ill,' was quite enough to put a complete stopper on all trade. Fortunately a liberal application of iodoform and bluestone was beginning to tell, and a threat that there would be no more free treatment unless flour came in for sale produced the desired result, and the sacks were rapidly filled. One evening towards dark from the village rose a great cry and lamentation, and word was quickly passed round that the Chief had died. It made one smile in spite

of the aggravation of the situation-for goodness knows how long the funeral obsequies would have lasted, and meanwhile no chance of porters to hear the Effendi softly remark in the Swaheli tongue, 'Aio! the Sheikh is dead; the Sheik is come'- 'Le Roi est mort; Vive le Roi!' So may one hope that the old order has changed for the last time, and that a new era of peace will arise for these distressful Provinces now that Khartoum and its power and all that means have fallen, while from Uganda comes the advent of the 'Ingleeza,' let us trust to join hands with Khartoum.

Dufilé.

ARTHUR D. MILNE.

6 THE HUMOURS OF TER-NA-NOG1

THE land of Ter-na-nog is always looked upon as a veritable Tom Tiddler's ground for humour. Our legislators visited it lately, hoping to pick up gold and silver of native wit.

But, to find these precious metals of every day existence in Ireland, we need to live among the people and be of them. Like children, the inhabitants of this 'Land of the Young' do not 'show off' well before strangers. Like children, too, they are wholly incapable of talking for effect. Celtic wit is entirely spontaneous. It is also closely allied to tenderness. When we get to the heart of life in Ireland we see its beautiful broidery of humour and imagination. Not till then. The average Saxon has little idea of the brightness which enlivens everything and every one in the Emerald Isle. To him, and to any casual passer-by, existence here is a frieze mantle. Its fringe of gold is only touched by those who nestle beneath its folds.

St. Patrick is said to have banished toads and snakes from the Island of Saints. He did not banish wit and repartee. Yet it is as hard to classify these 'gems' as it is to set uncut jewels in fragile filagree. In this paper I merely pass on a few of the humorous sayings and doings I have heard and seen, in this beautiful island, during a long course of residence therein.

My dispensary district extends over a wide sweep of moorland and mountain. Hours are long. Work hard. Pay small. What should I do without a sense of the ludicrous-that sense which can hardly lay claim to being a virtue, but is surely a most valuable possession?

6

For instance, suddenly to hear this prayer breathed after a gouty old gentleman of miserly habits, The Lord make your heart as tender as your toes!' quite makes up for a too small cheque pocketed by his medical attendant. Or a porter's answer, 'There is no first train, at all at all; they are all evenin' wans here,' is almost enough to compensate for long detention at a wayside

station.

1 Or 'Land of the Young' (ancient name for Ireland).