by the Author of All The Mischief. I think Barron realised that the situation was too big for him, and he had-thank God!—the sense to keep away. In silence, day by day, we worked northward.

Pardon-Howe found the messengers arriving too slowly. He packed a rucksack and rucksack and stalked after us, unescorted; his great tall bulk swung out up the path as he pushed the miles behind him. He had grown grimmer than ever in these days; more silent, were that possible.

Five miles out he turned a corner and ran into Toyo, Gam of 'Srosheng, the old and valued colleague of the Kitai-hunt. Toyo rose from the path, his grotesque little face broken up into a grin of a thousand wrinkles at the sight of the Bor Shap, who was more than his gods to him.

"Give ye good hap, Gam," grinned Pardon - Howe.

The

Watch it, Shap; there are two of them; fine big men, and armed. Better wait till we can get some Gurkhas he spoke to Pardon-Howe's back view, as he found himself following, and not an answer did he get. "Anyhow, I'm coming too." He slung his dao handy, and ran alongside with pace quickened by the merry prospect of a scrap. PardonHowe turned on him and pointed back to the path. Stay you here, Gam; watch my things for me," and sprang lightly into the jungle.

Toyo subsided in his tracks. There was no gainsaying that grim voice. His heart sank like a dropped stone as he listened to the last sounds of the great bulk pushing through the jungle. "Ai-e-e-ee. The Bor Shap. And he unarmed. He's gone to fetch 'em." With eyes glued on where he had last seen his deity, he squatted beside the cast rucksack, gazing and gazing, and listening, like

How long he sat there he doesn't know. He woke to a sound of crashing and bumping; and, through the screen of the jungle edge, emerged a strange trio. Bomlaw and Lapok, helmetless, daoless, and dishevelled, their bullet heads craning forward and their piggy eyes goggling, panting for breath. They came in jerks and snatches, stumbling; for, big as they were, between them towered Pardon-Howe, an immense hairy paw gripping each by the nape of the neck, and the tense muscles standing out on his powerful forearms like ship's cable. His clothes, from right armpit to knee, were a sloppy mess of blood.

He impelled them along by jerks; he swung them on to the path, and in complete silence he marched them back the five miles to Headquarters. The iron grip never relaxed, the slow long stride never slackened; no, not when he, sore wounded though he was, had almost to hold up on their feet his two exhausted and panting prisoners; clenched in that vice, they tottered along, all stiltily and a-grog, as it might be sick hens.

Toyo, with the rucksack, trotted along behind, crooning

Now Pardon-Howe, Political Officer of the Jungle Tracts and Plenipotentiary in the Areas North of the River, held the high, the low, and the middle Justice. He held-and very rightly held-the power of life and death throughout his province. He exercised it with the unhurried judgment and calm sense of fairness which was, and ever will be, head and shoulders above Codified Law. So that when we, recalled at length by runners, arrived at Headquarters, it was to find Bomlaw and Lapok squatting behind bars in the Quarter Guard, very stiff in the neck, refusing all food, and looking an impending death full in the face.

The trial was full and formal, but simplified by the frank and obvious truthfulness of the two scoundrels. They gave the history of it all, and their reasons, and how, and why, and where they did it. Throughout the proceedings, the non- moral jungli mentality was apparent in that they viewed their fate more as punishment for their hardihood in slicing a hole in the great, though interfering, Bor Shap, than as retribution for killing Grant. We could not get them to see that they had done anything wrong in murdering him. "Yes, we did it. The villagers brought the shap to the Rami tree, and left him. We stood him up before the tree. Lapok came behind

And

A week they went thus, and not a fearful gam of the party but hedged in the two prisoners and pressed close on them, lest they should make a bolt for it. A week through the jungle, climbing and descending; through villages where the owners were beginning to dribble back, and gazed at the fearsome cortége in awed silence; up and up, into the unmapped beyond.

On the evening of the seventh day they reached the Rami tree by Mu Fereang village; and there, to the big overhanging bough which had shaded Grant's last moments, he well and truly hanged Bomlaw and Lapok, the fifteen gams tallying on to the cane ropes.

They made all fast, coiled up the slack neatly, and left them there.

THE war to end war has one achievement to its credit rarely mentioned. It disposed of the enormous number of obsolete tramp steamers which rising freights had kept from the breaking-up yards year after year. The sea-going engineer of these later days can neither imagine nor believe the nature of the toil involved in a voyage to the Cape or to India in one of those vessels. They were not, in the vernacular of the craft, "kept up." They were given the irreducible minimum of repairs, and the engineer with a name to make was disposed to run his engines on the irreducible minimum of stores with a maximum of back-breaking manual labour. Britain is rightly proud of her long maritime supremacy. Blood, however, is the price of admiralty, and when "the white wings of commerce "were folded and the unkempt tramp began to smear the blue heavens with her smoke-trails, it would be tactless to say whose blood and sweat was spent to keep ten thousand ships at sea.

It must not be supposed that grim tales of rascally owners and grafting characters are about to be unfolded. The Plimsoll Mark and the Board of Trade, the underwriters and the general rise in commercial probity, made lurid criminality unlikely and infrequent.

But

the British ship which carried a load-line had to compete with foreign vessels which were loaded to the master's discretion. I have seen a Danish vessel of less tonnage register than my own ship leave port with her coal ports awash, with two hundred tons more cargo aboard than we under British registry could allow. And the rate for that particular cargo was a pound a ton for a twelve-day voyage. To keep in commission and show a profit the British tramp had to run on nothing at all. There was no money for paint or for tools. And the auxiliary machinery was only induced to function by the never-ending toil of short-handed crowds working and watch - keeping eleven hours a day. It was "glorious and obscure toil." It was poorly paid and poorly victualled by modern standards. The perplexing feature of the period in retrospect is that it evokes neither resentment nor bitterness in the survivor's breast.

Indeed, it is very much the other way. The idealist, no doubt, is an exception. His starry vision shows him a perfect world whose smooth rondure enables it to roll sweetly through the years-a world on whose ever-placid oceans enchanted ships steam towards Paradise Port, their captains

song and story and with potations of fabulous rum, where no trouble or folly ever mars the beauty of the day. But to those of us who have accepted the austere conditions of life on earth and sea, who have abandoned the theory that men and materials are ever perfect, and who have got used to facing a day's work without flinching, the memory of those old ships is mellowed by time to true proportions.

Leaving for a moment the inevitable miseries of machinery too old or too neglected to run as it should, let us contemplate the Inventor of Gadgets. Inventors of the calibre of Stevenson, Watt, and Rudolf Diesel are in a different category. The person alluded to now is usually a draughtsman by profession and a theorist at heart. He invents pumps which, on paper, are miracles of simplicity and paragons of reliability. Gadgets are his dish. He does not comprehend why existing pumps, reducing valves, escapes, evaporator coils, and generator-engines are so complicated and costly. He sees where he can design them more simply and economically. He objects, when brooding over the lay-out of an engine-room, to vacant corners. Has he been to sea? It is safe to assume that he made a voyage to the Mediterranean and back. He knows all about it. You will hear about that voyage the moment the faintest doubt of his experience creeps into your voice. His opinion of

are an ignorant, shiftless, drunken, and inefficient crowd of impostors. They cannot do the simplest problem involving the calculus, and they have no other term in their vocabulary more scathing than to call a man a draughtsman.

Now such a person-tall, spare, and and wearing rimless glasses-is not allowed to monkey with the general design of engines and ships. He gets his work in on the gadgets, the auxiliary contraptions which make or mar a man's life on board of a ship. Patents, in a general way, are the curse of the sea-going engineer. Anyone who is interested in the little known psychology of invention will find food for thought in the great museum of arts and sciences in London, where models of all the amazing mechanisms of the past fifty or sixty years are gathered in chambers of horrors for the instruction and warning of modern youth. There he will behold engines animated by all the prime movers, including some that have solved (for a minute or two) the problem of perpetual motion. He will see the engine devised by the man who wanted quick compression in his internal combustion motor, and substituted for the cylinder head another piston advancing stealthily upon the unwitting gas from behind. Whereupon the explosion drove the pistons apart, and power, oodles of power, was transmitted by huge clonking bell-crank levers to the