Among the people of Dahomey, as among all the blacks, totemism is universal. The lion and the leopard have their cults and priests. The peace of the country is still frequently broken by the mysterious crimes of leopardmen, werewolf fetish-priests disguised in leopard skins and armed with claws, - who attack solitary travelers and strangle them or scratch them to death. These are ritual crimes designed to impress the vivid imagination of the Negro, to increase the authority of the fetish-priests, and doubtless at times to conceal ordinary robbery.

But the great animal-fetish of Dahomey is Daugbay, the python, the 'good serpent,' whose cult originated in the Savi kingdom. Every town and village has a temple to him. The most celebrated of these is at Wida, and has long been known to Europeans. This temple is built like all the native structures, and it is surrounded by a tall palisade enclosing two magnificent trees, one a fig and the other a bombax, which shade the whole enclosure. Pythons run at large all over the place. They sleep coiled on the branches of the trees, lying along the tops of the walls, or hidden in the thatch of the roof. But the temple is not a prison. The serpents have free run of the jungle and circulate through the village; but they always return to the temple for food, which the priests give them at fixed hours. If one of them invades a private house a fetish-priest must be summoned to get him and to take him back with many pious precautions to his temple home.

From Wida we took the train along the coast to Kotonou, where the Marshal was given a delightful reception at the French Club. At this seaport our African journey ended.

From Wida we went by train to Kotonou, and then by launch several hours' journey through a desolate lagoon to Porto Novo. As we ap

proached the metropolis great fleets of canoes packed to the gunwales with natives beating their tom-toms and chanting the fishers' greeting, A-laraKiri oh! oh! A-lara-Kiri oh! oh! came to meet us.

Porto Novo is the capital, the largest city, and the principal business-centre of this portion of Dahomey. It has thirty thousand inhabitants, or, including its suburban villages, one hundred and fifty thousand, and is growing rapidly. The colony exports large quantities of oil nuts and oil, — two fifths of which go to Hamburg and the greater part of the remainder to the United States and Italy, corn, cotton, a rapidly increasing product, kapok, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, and smoked fish. It imports most of its miscellaneous manufactures from Austria, its cottons from England, its tobacco from America. France has only the leavings of this trade.

It was like an abrupt return to civilization to see the big warehouses, shops, office buildings, and banks; the Government buildings, the clubs, the court house, the post office, the cathedral, and the school buildings. Catholic missionary-schools have eleven hundred pupils, Protestant missionary-schools seven hundred, and the Government schools eight hundred. The streets are thronged from morning to night with peddlers and perambulating street-restaurants that fill the air with the odor of hot palm-oil and the smoke of burning grease. Porto Novo is the only large city that has its 'King of the Night,' or Zounon - a king who reigns only between the setting and the rising of the sun.

On the morning of December 10 we were swung aboard the steamship Asia in an embarking-cage; anchor was lifted; and little by little the land grew dimmer until it was lost in a rosy mist. Our journey was finished.

WHEN Alfred Tennyson in December 1850 stayed in our house, the Vicarage at Shiplake, half a year after his marriage, I trotted down the kitchengarden walk one morning between the finish of our nursery breakfast and the beginning of that downstairs, and asked questions of him, and, most gratifying to the childish mind, was talked to as if I were a companion and not a little ignorant child. He picked the leaves of the sage, rubbed his teeth with them, and said: "That is the best thing in the world to take away the stain of tobacco'; for he was a great smoker, and I was turned out of my little bedroom when he visited us so that he might have a place to write and smoke in at pleasure, for my mother would not allow him to smoke in her best bedroom. Many years later he told me how he began to smoke. 'Jackson, the saddler at Louth, once gave me one of his strong cigars when I was a boy of twelve, and I smoked it all and flung the stump into a horsepond, and was none the worse for it, so I was bound to be a smoker.'

It was in the previous year that I first made acquaintance, at Shiplake, with Emily Sellwood, my mother's cousin. On June 13, 1850, just twenty years after their first meeting in the Fairy Wood at Somersby, Emily and Alfred were married by my father. Few people were present, and the relatives walked over from the Vicarage, which

1 From Nineteenth Century and After (London Conservative monthly), January and February

Publication rights in America controlled by the Leonard Scott Publishing Company

was separated from the churchyard only by a lane. I followed them as a page, a bit of syringa in my buttonhole.

On his revisiting Shiplake in December he added two stanzas to the four which he wrote on the wedding-day, and which are in the Memoir. After the end of stanza two, 'You have given me such a wife,' he continues thus:

Have I found in one so near
Aught but sweetness aye prevailing?
Or through more than half a year
Half the fraction of a failing?
Therefore bless you, Drummond dear.

Good she is and pure and just.
Being conquered by her sweetness
I shall come, through her, I trust,
Into fuller-orbed completeness,

Though but made of erring dust.

Tennyson read Matthew Arnold's 'Merman' aloud to us at Shiplake, and I heard him say as he finished it, I should like to have written that.' The sound of a line of poetry (for poetry, to be fully understood, should be read aloud) was very much to him; and he certainly was unmatched in his use of vowels and in the melody of his verse. In speaking of Browning, he once said to me: 'I don't think that poetry should be all thought: there should be some melody'; and he carried his objection to a jingle so far that when, after publishing his first four Idylls of the King, he learned that 'Enid' was properly pronounced 'Ennid,' he changed his line beginning 'Had wedded Enid' to 'Had married Enid'; the jingle of 'wedded Ennid'

was to his ear quite impossible. He instanced to me as fine-sounding lines and some of his best (and he made them all the finer by his magnificent way of rolling them out) the lines about the burial of Elaine:

The maiden buried, not as one unknown Nor meanly, but with gorgeous obsequies And mass and rolling music like a queen. Many years later, walking with my wife over the heather on Blackdown, just outside Aldworth, he sat down on the edge of a deep cart-track and recited in his magnificent voice:

Go fetch to me a pint o' wine,
And fill it in a silver tassie,
That I may drink before I go
A service to my bonnie lassie.

The trumpets sound, the banners fly,
The glittering spears are ranked ready,
The shouts o' war are heard afar,
The battle closes thick and bloody.

He repeated the last two lines, rolling them out with delighted admiration, and said: 'I would have given anything

to have written that.'

A line that he thought one of his

best was

The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm.

The richness of the bird's note is expressed by the 'u' sound in two consecutive words, and the 'el' in two other words gives a liquid tone which makes the line perfect. 'And yet,' he said, 'nine tenths of the English readers would have been just as well pleased if I had written

'The merry blackbird sang among the trees. Besides the well-known 'moan of doves in immemorial elms and murmuring of innumerable bees,' another of his best lines he thought to be that which describes the sound of the bells in the poem 'Far, Far Away':

The mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells. He told my sister that the most beautiful and touching lines he knew

were in the anonymous poem 'Forsaken':

O waly waly up the bank,

And waly waly down the brae,
And waly waly yon burn-side,
Where I and my love wont to gae,

ending with

And O! if my young babe were born
And set upon the nurse's knee,
And I myself were dead and gone,

And the green grass growing over me!

But to return to Elaine. Elaine's brother could not conceal his admiration for what he called 'the great Lancelot,' but Lancelot answers him:

Me you call great: mine is the firmer seat, The truer lance: but there is many a youth Now present who will come to all I am And overcome it; and in me there dwells No greatness, save it be some far-off touch Of greatness to know well I am not great: There is the man

pointing to the king. About this passage Tennyson once said to me: 'When I wrote that I was thinking of myself and Wordsworth.' Did ever one poet pay a finer compliment to another? I might add that Wordsworth said of Tennyson: 'I have been trying all my life to write a poem like his "Dora,' but in vain.' It is pleasant to hear words of genuine praise from one real poet of another, and Tennyson spoke from his heart when he said: 'Read the

exquisite songs of Burns, each perfect as a berry and radiant as a dewdrop. There never was an immortal poet if he be not one'; while of Keats he said to me: 'If Keats had lived he would have been the first of us all.'

The dewy radiance of Burns's songs recalls to me my first visit to Aldworth, when I saw him walking about the room looking at an etui-case of his wife's which he held in his hand, in which was set a piece of the stone called avanturine, brown with innumerable gold sparkles in it. 'Look at it,' he said; 'see the stars in it, worlds

His

We were speaking, as we paced the lawn at Aldworth, of the magnificent sound of some of Homer's lines, but he said that the grandeur of the lines in Homer was due to the Greek words being spoken by the Northern tongue. "The Greeks,' he said, 'never polufloisboied; they polufleesbeed.' own translation of Homer, of which he did so little, is so far superior to any other that I asked him when we were on this subject of Homer if he had never thought of doing much more. He said: "To translate Homer would be the work of a lifetime; and when done the benefit of it rests with the translator.' The lines I was thinking of as even better than the original were those from the Iliad:

As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley, and the immeasurable heavens, Break open to their highest.

This my friend Mr. Arthur Sidgwick called 'truly an incomparable rendering.'

All his classic poems show Tennyson at his best. 'Ulysses' has in it an element of autobiography referring to his turning to work as a remedy for the desolation into which his grief at the death of Arthur Hallam had plunged him; and how fine are 'Enone and Demeter,' and best of all 'Tithonus,' with the pathos of the boon granted by love at love's request turning out a curse, and finally 'Lucretius,' speaking of which, and especially of the passage about the abode of the gods,

Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, I said: 'Of course that is Homer,' and the poet said: 'Yes, but I improved on Homer, because I knew that snow crystallizes in stars.'

I was still a small boy when Tennyson sent to my grandfather his 'Charge of the Light Brigade.' I have it just as he sent it, a cutting from the Examiner of 1854. After the first twenty lines as they now stand was a break, and then came four which are now omitted:

6

Into the valley of death
Rode the six hundred,

For up came an order which
Someone had blundered.

The rest is as we have it now, except that "Charge for the guns!" he said,' was at first "Take the guns," Nolan said,' and 'Flashed as they turned in air' was well substituted finally for 'Flashed all at once in air.'

But even in this early original, after the line 'Plunged in the battery smoke' four lines of the Examiner cutting had been blacked out, and eight new ones written in by Emily Tennyson, six of which are still retained, ending with Then they rode back, but not, Not the six hundred.

The metre is very happy, but not a common one, and I once asked Tennyson if he had taken it from Drayton's

'Agincourt.' He said: 'No, when I wrote it I had not seen Drayton's poem, but the Times account had "Someone had blundered," and the line kept running in my head, and I kept saying it over and over till it shaped itself into the burden of the poem,' where it was repeated at least twice. Knowing that, it is hard to understand how he allowed himself to be persuaded to omit the expression from the poem altogether when it first came out in book form in the Maud volume; but Ruskin, remonstrating and telling him that it was the key to the whole thing, got him to put it back.

Another instance of his getting wrong advice, though he did not this time take it, he told me about when we were talking of his Lincolnshire dialect poems. He said that, as it was twentyseven years since he had left Lincolnshire, he felt that he had probably got some mistakes in his first 'Northern Farmer,' so he sent the MS. to a friend who lived near Brigg, and he altered it all into the dialect spoken in that northern part of the county. He felt sure that was not the dialect of East or Mid-Lincolnshire, and sent it to my father, who put it all back as he had written it. After that the dialect poems were always sent to one of our family before they were given to the public, but the first 'Northern Farmer' has still in it several traces of the wrong dialect in the use of 'o,' as in 'hoight' and 'squoire' and 'doy,' in place of 'a,' which the poet himself explains in his note to the Northern Cobbler to be the proper vowel-sound.

He loved Lincolnshire, and the sight of a Lincolnshire face was always a delight to him. Knowing this, I once asked: 'Why did you call it the "Northern" instead of the "Lincolnshire Farmer?" and he said: "You see, I was modest: I had been so long out of the county that I did not feel sure my

memory would serve me'; but really he was right all through.

How careful he was to be perfectly accurate may be shown by the following: Once at Farringford he asked me how they pronounced 'turnips' about Spilsby; he had been told 'turmuts.' I said, 'No, "tonnops"; and some months later, going to see him again at Farringford, when I had forgotten all about the 'tonnops,' his first words to me were, 'You were right about that word.' He also said: 'I think you are right, too, about "greät,” not “graät,” for I see it is sometimes spelled 'greet.'

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This is an instance of his perfect accuracy, for to many the distinction between 'great' and 'graät' is hardly perceptible. His poems were always printed and kept by him for some time before he published them, and many a new unpublished poem has he read to me, as to others, under the strictest promise of secrecy, in his study, upstairs, or in the garden, both at Farringford and Aldworth. Those were indeed delightful readings. 'Owd Roa,' one of his last dialect poems, he read to my wife and myself, and subsequently he made me read it aloud to him, and encouraged me to make suggestions on certain words, all of which when it came out I saw he had adopted. The line he made most of, speaking it with a kind of awe in his voice, is in the Globe Edition printed in italics:

But 'e coom'd thruf the fire wi my bairn i' 's mouth to the winder there.

He liked particularly to find that the hearer appreciated the humor of a line, and he looked up for it. His eye fairly twinkled as he read the lines