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in a way which showed the and of course you weren't, as sentiment was not assumed. I might easily have antici"For the first time in my pated." life to-day I found a woman who was anxious to dislike me!"

"Nonsense, my dear!" cried Norah. "Miss Birrell is the dear good friend of all of us."

"I'm not mistaken," firmly insisted Pen. "She was quite nice till you gave her the impression that I was seriously of some importance, which is nonsense. At every other revelation of my influence (which was really yours) she grew colder to me. I should say it takes something very serious to annoy so naturally jolly a little woman as Miss Birrell. She thinks I'm a meddlesome upstart, and I know her feeling. She is so loyal to you all that she resents my interference. It's very natural. She's quite right."

She could have told them more of a recent hauteur, sometimes, on the part of Miss Amelia; but on that she was discreetly dumb.

"My dear Pen," said the baronet, hastily jumping to his feet and turning down his sleeves, "I've been an ass as usual. I ought to have known that the Elizabethan joke is no longer practicable without involving somebody in trouble, and I'm sorry. I looked for its development on other lines; I wanted to see if you were really going to be hard and cruel, as you feared you would be, in such a position as you have figured in for the past few weeks;

"I really feared it!" she exclaimed.

"Yes, yes!" he said, "I know! Upon a horse. The thing's proverbial. Set a begHow does it go,

now? I forget; but but the philosophy of it is, that we all of us have only to go thirteen hands higher than our fellow - men along the highway to feel ourselves their masters. Heaven help us all! I know you better than that." He put his hand upon her shoulder-the first time he had ever touched her, save upon the fingers, since the evening he had raised her from the grass beside the treacherous ice. "Thirteen hands, Penelope, just thirteen hands, and think upon the height of the nearest stars! There's not much danger that the like of you and I will ever gallop down the multitude on foot from any poor delusion of our own importance."

"My people," said Penelope, "have always gone on foot."

So the mummery of the Mistress of the Keys abruptly ended, but not before Penelope, at Captain Cutlass's desire, had chosen one last self-indulgence, this time really for herself, with none of Norah's prompting. The two companions went to Mr Divvert's school; broke in, impetuous and resplendent, on the serried ranks of youthwho love resplendence-humming sleepily like bees among the lindens.

"We think of giving a children's garden-party," intimated Norah. "The berries

are over, so there isn't any danger."

It was a fête to charm the heart of Captain Cutlass, who devised details whose fantasy discounted, for his neighbours, all the recent symptoms of his change to sanity. "We want the thing at night," he said; "that is the time for children's fêtes champêtres, for the whole of the day is gained additionally in the joy of anticipation. Beds, dear aunt! Pooh! I've been a boy myself, and I haven't even yet got out of the way of it; bed-time's an adult tyranny, and who ever heard of fairies getting up for a daylight garden-party?"

"Fairies?" said Miss Amelia helplessly. "I hope you don't expect me to be a fairy?"

He laughed good-humouredly. "You'll be expected to be nothing, aunt, but what's hygienic and respectable; the night air's chilly, and I only thought of fairies of the mind. There are! you know; there are! and

'... the trumpeter, Gadfly, shall

summon the crew,

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"I know," said Captain Cutlass. "It isn't a crack exactly,

merely a little chink, and it's rather useful, for it lets the light in."

The night was star-bestrewn and warm, but the very heavens paled their splendour in the rivalry of lanterns that were blooming on the trees and by the borders of the paths round Fancy Farm. The house itself seemed filled with radiance that escaped from every window; young fragile moons of gorgeous colour hung suspended over tables on the lawn. The children stood at first in groups, abashed, within the gates, and stared incredulously: it seemed unreal and magical, a scene deserted. Only the rivals of the stars were there, and the plash of the little burn that ran behind the dairy, sole familiar thing; they heard it every morning that they came for milk. They stood abashed and dubious till a rocket leaped from behind the shrubbery, seeking to reach that pale fraternity of stars but failing in the effort and expiring in a rain of emerald and gold, and the bairns all laughed a moment after, with hearts relieved, and the night made friendly by the chuckle of Captain Cutlass, standing with Penelope and Norah, fiery spirits, in the blaze of Roman candles.

(To be continued.)

VOL. CLXXXVIII.—NO. MCXXXVII.

F

IN KAMBODIA.-II.

BY SIR HUGH CLIFFORD, K.C.M.G.

V.

ON BOARD A CHALOUPE.

"I've hustled round and sparred, hustled round, hustled round,
I've fit and tore and scratched, and hustled round,
Till I'd like to take a berth in the cemetery earth
And sleep for all I'm worth-under ground!"

It is the custom of the robust and independent Britisher engaged in foreign travel to to complain that on the Continent he is deprived of the measure of personal liberty which is his birthright. He declares with indignation, and in language that is not always publishable, that he is treated like a qualified infant, that he is penned into folds at railway stations like a pack of unmentionable sheep, that he is separated from his precious luggage, that he is not suffered to assure himself that it has even an average chance of reaching its destination, and that generally he is subjected by an over-officialised population to treatment at which honest, beef-bred blood boils in his swollen veins. Anybody who trusts himself in Indo-China to the by no means tender care of men and ships need be under no sort of apprehension that he will be looked after too particularly.

You clamber on board the chaloupe, as the steamers which ply upon the Mekong are locally called, across the decks of one or more moored vessels, shouldering your way as best you can through clamorous

-Sleep Enough.

mobs of natives, and deposit your coolie-borne gear upon the toes of the wailing passengers. There is cabin accommodation of a sort for about a dozen white folk, and more than double that number of Europeans are on board. If you are big, resolute, can stamp hard and have no care for other folks' toes, you can find sufficient standing-room. Native families will camp contentedly about and on your feet; native brats, with hands awfully smeared with sticky substances, will climb up your legs; your boxes will be flung into a heap among the firewood. Somewhere, mysterious, veiled, majestic, a presiding deity, called a Commissaire, occupies a hidden shrine. If you ask to have him produced, Chinese servants will lay their cheeks on the palms of their hands, close their eyes, and simulate slumber. If you penetrate to his tabernacle, you will see the substantial hindquarters of this divinity clothed in close-fitting duck. His face is to the wall: you can hear him sleeping. To wake him is to make bad worse-very much worse. To wait for him to awake is tedious, but the

beginning of all wisdom on a chaloupe plying on these Eastern rivers. Some time during the morning he will lounge up on deck, clear a space for the European passengers by sweeping the native camps into little heaps with his foot, will take your money or look at your ticket, and will thereafter be comfortably conscious that the whole duty of man has been triumphantly performed. Then he will go to sleep again, till next day.

Twice a-day you will be fed, much as beasts are fed, in droves. If you are persistent and clamorous, you may raise in the course of time a pale liquid and some unappetising appurtenances which masquerade as afternoon tea: but this is an innovation, and by no means to be encouraged. Finding somewhere to sleep is an operation which stimulates every inventive and combative instinct that may be latent in you. Of course, you have your camp-bed. If this is so constructed as to open with a spring and a bound, you must take full advantage of its possibilities as a weapon of offence, for now you have to battle, not for standing- but but for sleeping-room. In a space the size of a cock-pit a dozen fevered Frenchmen are struggling with the mysteries of patent camp-beds,-camp-beds that fit into a sponge-bag and elongate, telescope fashion, till they stretch half across the deck; camp - beds that open nicely, but let their owners' heads fall bang upon the planks, like the head of the unfortunate Mantellini; camp

beds that will not open at all; camp - beds that open reluctantly and thereafter assume shapes of fantastic and obstinate crookedness; camp - beds that render their owners hot or cold, ejaculatory or blasphemous, stonily dumb with rage or luridly eloquent. There are some, too, which seem to bite like dogs, for now and then a scream arises, and into the heart of the confusion dances an agonised figure, with its fingers in its mouth, and a face distorted by pain above fluttering pyjamas.

I was fortunate enough to get my bed fixed first of all; so I wedged it somehow into the centre of the struggle, stowed everything in my immediate possession under it, and lay down upon it, to keep it in place as nearly as might be.

With outstretched hands and feet I warded off the assaults of other camp - beds which threatened every moment to obliterate me. It afforded me an active and exciting quarter of an hour, and reminded me of the sensations one experiences when one lies on one's back and shoots a rapid foot - foremost after being upset in the first flight. Eventually the battle waned, and, drawing a long breath, I looked out upon the scene around me. Camp-beds were heaped up all over the narrow space of deck, exactly like drift-timber on a sand-spit when a big flood has subsided and stranded it, and on the top of each of them a veiled and ghostly figure was discernible entangled dreadfully in yards and yards of butter

muslin. The occupants were warring with mosquito - nets, not because here in the centre of the big lake there were any mosquitoes, but because fresh air, especially at night, is held by local superstition to be a deadly thing. There are two enemies of which in IndoChina every Frenchman goes in mortal terror, fresh air and the sun. To exclude the former every sort of precaution is taken, including such devices as placing the bath - room in the window - space, to the

scandal of the onlooking populace, and the bedroom in the airless alcove where the bathroom ought to be. Protection from the latter is sought by wearing a pith helmet under a double-awning on board ship, or even in the house, if a ray of sunlight seems likely to penetrate into its stuffy interior. The tropical 'sun is something which requires to be treated with respect; but to the Anglo-Asiatic the reverence here paid to him is sheer slavish servility.

VI.

FROM PHNOM PENH TO ANGKOR.

"There's nae place like our ain home,
O, I would that I were there!
There's nae home like our ain home
To be met with onywhere.

And O, that I were back again

To our farm and fields sae green, And heard the tongues of our ain folk, And was what I hae been !"

The run up through Kambodia to the mouth of the little Siam Reap river takes you through pretty country, and country too which is somewhat more thickly inhabited than any hitherto traversed. Native villages abound. Udong, which was the capital of the kingdom until Norodom migrated down river to Phnom Penh, is seen some miles inland with graceful dagobas and pagodas crowning its conical hills. Just before dusk we reached Kompong Chnang, the most amphibious place in all this amphibious land. The village-it is a very sizeable village, though it hardly amounts to a townis moored to the submerged mud-banks at a little distance

from the point whence the river flows out of the great lake. It consists of thatched houses built upon rafts, of boats, of huge fantastic junks, of huts riding straddle-legged upon a couple of tree - trunks saved from the drift of last year's flood, of everything that will float and allow of some sort of structure being rigged upon it above water-level. Several acres of water covered in this manner, with narrow alleys separating one line of floating structures from its nearest neighbours. Tiny sampans and dug-outs shoot hither and thither; waterlogged rafts, made of half a dozen broached bamboos tied together anyhow, are valuable

are

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