recover their breath, Jackson looked round cautiously.

"Here they come, sir!"

Malcolm hurriedly glanced back. A ghostly-looking band of Dervishes surrounded the chief's tent.

"Hurry, hurry!" shouted Malcolm, and they started forward again, making desperate efforts.

"All right, sir!" came from above, in the welcome tones of Barrett's voice. "But they're not coming after you, sir." A few moments later and Barrett was shaking Jackson's hand, and saying in a self-satisfied tone to Malcolm:

"I know my men, sir. Shall we sling Mr. Yunir on one of the camels? He looks as if he's been travelling lately."

And certainly the once redoubtable chief was a pitiable object. His jib beh was torn to shreds by the rough ground over which he had been dragged, and as he lay, with his face, arms and legs scored with long deep scratches, and smeared with dirt and blood, Mrs. Moriarty turned from him with a gesture and look which indicated that pity had almost banished revengeful feeling.

But, in glancing round, the widow caught sight of Malcolm, who was standing close by. With true Irish impulsiveness she sprang at him, and clasping him to her bosom she gave him a round dozen of the heartiest kisses that were ever bestowed on an astonished young man.

The peal of irrepressible laughter that burst from the men recalled Mrs. Moriarty to a sense of her recovered position.

Drawing herself up to her full height, and smoothing down her somewhat tattered raiment, she said to Malcolm, while glancing haughtily at the men:

"I trust, Lieutenant Frazer, you will extend your forgiveness to one, who has admitted her emotions to overbalance her dignity."

"Madam," returned Malcolm, with a

flushed face, but with a courtly air, "the honor you-"

His words were cut short by the sound of a rifle shot. Another rang out, and then another.

A trooper came running from his post of observation on the brow of the slope.

"They've started firing at each other,

sir."

The single shots suddenly crashed into a fusilade, and when Malcolm looked down he saw that a desperate conflict was in progress between two parties, into which the Dervish camp was divided.

The troopers viewed the spectacle with hungry longing.

"Don't it make your mouth water, just?" said one.

"Ain't they 'acking each other about lovely, eh?" exclaimed another admiringly.

"Can't we have a little cut in now sergeant," asked another in a deferential and wheedling tone "couldn't you just ask the lieutenant as a blooming favor?"

"Shut it," replied Barrett, shortly. But the next minute he sidled up to Malcolm.

"Doing our work for us a treat, sir. A volley or two now?" he said tentatively.

"Would have the effect of uniting them against us," continued Malcolm, drily. "Not just yet, Barrett. Possess your impetuous soul in patience a little longer."

spears, shields, in their wild attempt to escape from the flaming death that enveloped them.

When the fight was over and the enemy's camp destroyed, Malcolm learned from Mrs. Moriarty the tale of her capture, which showed that his surmise that she had been mistaken for the colonel's daughter was correct. The ruse employed by the kidnappers was an ingenious one. In view of the disquieting state of affairs, the picnic had been vetoed by Colonel Walton. Next day, however, Doris and Mrs. Moriarty had gone for a walk to a picturesque spot a short distance from the town. During their stroll they heard what they thought was the sound of a child weeping close by. They at once began to search for the distressed little one, and the broken ground soon separated each from the other's sight. Lured on by the retreating sound, Mrs. Moriarty ran some two or three hundred yards, when she was seized, gagged and bound by two natives, who carried her off, despite her frantic struggles, and notwithstanding the fact that there were several people within earshot.

Mrs. Moriarty's feelings, as she was being borne away, taxed even her voluTemple Bar.

bility to describe. She had been swathed round and round in wide strips of canvas, and thus, nearly suffocated, was placed on a camel like a bale of merchandise and driven off to the spot where Yunir and his tribesmen were waiting. Till her rescue she had seen nothing of Yunir, whose time had been far too fully occupied in directing the operations of the flight to give much heed to his captive.

Never was welcome more cordial than awaited Malcolm on his triumphant return to Suâkin. He and his party had been given up for lost. But instead of that they had annihilated the last band of Dervish desperadoes and brought back its fierce leader, Yunir, to suffer the penalty of his horrible crimes, what time his captor duly received the promised reward of his majority. Last, but certainly not least, the marauder's buxom captive had been set free.

And though it was not the princess herself whom Malcolm had rescued, the result was precisely the same as if it had been-that is, according to the immutable law which governs the conclusion of all true fairy tales.

Arthur I. Durrant.

The window looks on a narrow shelf of grass and a hedge of poinsettias. Beyond the ground drops steeply towards the pastures. At this season the poinsettias have grown tall and ragged and hold their burning scarlet blossoms up singly to the sun. Through their straggling stems the trees show; a cloud of pale pink marenga blossom, the heavy greens and browns of the

palm, the dull foliage of the mango. Away to the right, beyond the veranda, there is the barbecue, looking like a small asphalt tennis-court set in the grass. On the edge of the little plateau a few palm-trees, with the bold pattern of their leaning stems and large fronds, put an accent on the wide distance; where in green pastures of tufted guinea-grass the red Herefords and

the humped Indian cattle are feeding, under giant plumes of bamboos and in elm-like shade of the broad-leaf. Spirehigh the cotton-trees tower over all, stretching out gaunt white arms, half hidden by the growth of magenta orchids, wild pines and parasite figs. And about the flat pastures stand forest-clothed mountains, beautiful with the beauty of mountains in all places of the earth. Here and there wide wisps of vapor still trail across them, for it is early morning, although there is no dewy dimness in the air. Rather the sun smites with such a brilliancy of light, such a crispness of shadow on the dozen or more black men and women waiting upon the barbecue, that it makes a picture of them in spite of themselves-they truly having put on the whole armor of civilization, called Sunday clothes; except such of them as have no Sunday clothes. The ebon youth-they mostly are or look youngwear serge coats and light trousers of the last mode, the stiffest of shirtcollars and the smartest of ties. One hat alone, a felt, orange in the sunlight, strikes a note of color, of pleasant savagery. The white sailor-hat, that pitiless uniform of the she Briton, perches whiter, harder than ever on the short wool, above the flat noses of three particularly black young negresses. Their waists are pinched in British shirt-blouses, their feet are pinched in yellow British shoes.

On

the stone edge of the barbecue a woman, worn and emaciated as one seldom sees them here, sits nursing a baby, and a bright-eyed little girl stands beside her. This woman does not wear Sunday clothes. A crimson handkerchief knotted at the four corners, covers her head and forehead squarely. Not far from her stands a much older woman, grim and silent, she also kerchiefed and clothed in a loose garment of a shade which our ancestors used to call Isabel-that is, the color of Queen

Isabel's linen when a rash vow compelled her still to go on wearing it. I mention the color because it is the one which seems most generally worn in this neighborhood, when Sunday clothes do not prevail. But just in time to save me from the sin of wishing all negresses, especially them of the sailor-hats, to go forever clad in Isabel, up past the blowing bushes of red hibiscus, comes a fine robust black woman, clothed in a loose-girt garment of shining white, and wearing a snowy kerchief knotted four-square upon her well-held head. She also is seeking the magistrate, whom here they call the Justice, as our ancestors called him in Shakespeare's time; or the Squire, as fifty years since the rural Englishman called the landowner of his parish. And the Squire there in his study is to all appearance just such a big, loosecoated Briton as might have tramped with dog and gun across his acres when there were still squires in England and such things were still done. Yet, of all living creatures astir this morning, none has a better and few as good a claim to be called a native; if one excepts the humming-birds and the small green lizard that flits about in the sun, waving its beautiful orange frill in hopes of touching the æsthetic sense of the flies. For in Jamaica everything which is most characteristic of the country is exotic; trees, fruit, animals and, above all, men. The very grandfathers of some of these waiting negroes led the hunting and hunted life of the African forest less than a hun

dred years ago. Small wonder that the African type, the savage in his childishness, not in his ferocity, survives here, decked in tailoring instead of beads. Much more surprising to find how frequently the type of the energetic ruling race has survived generations of tropic life, life of the old kind with its fever and pestilence, its luxury and its slave-owning. Yet so it is,

and here sits the Squire according to the custom of that race, to do as a matter of course, without payment or reward, his share of the government of the community. This means in truth, no great quantity of strict legal business, but rather the listening to long stories-for the negro must be let tell his tale in his own way-about larceny and suspected larceny, about difficulties between husbands and wives, and, above all, about abusive quarrels fain to transform themselves into cases of assault and libel. Truly to dissuade these law-abiding but law-loving people from indulging their passion for litigation is, perhaps, the most valuable, as it is certainly the lengthiest part of the Justice's business. And in these trivial stories, these childish individualities, Black Jamaica, with all its problems, is continually passing along that narrow shelf of grass before his window. The tenant who has now so long occupied it is telling, in the sweet inexpressibly plaintive negro voice, an interminable story concerning the mysterious disappearance of his yams. "Tiefing," he calls it. The Government calls it "prædial larceny," and is preparing a cat-o'-nine-tails for the thief; but whether he or the Government will catch that elusive individual is another matter. As he draws to an end a well-dressed negro, with the air of youth bestowed by plump and shiny blackness, steps jauntily into his place. There is even something exaggerated about the easy nonchalance of his pose, the beatific nature of his smile. He coughs insinuatingly, and the Justice, who has been noting something in a book, looks up, stares, and then:

"Why, it's you, Dixon! I never expected to see you again."

With innocent wonder Dixon interrogates: "Not see me, 'quire? Why not see me?"

"Because I haven't seen you for ten years, and then you owed me a pound."

Oh the world of gentle pained astonishment in that ebon face! The depths of mild yet shocked reproach in the mellifluous voice, "Me go way and owe you a pound, 'quire? Oh no, Su', you make great mistake. I not owe no man anyting."

But something-perhaps a distant glimpse of a certain big book which has a way of recording trifles otherwise unconsidered-suddenly galvanizes Dixon's memory into unnatural activity. He not only recollects owing that pound, but he recollects repaying it at least seven times, if not unto seventy times seven. Doesn't Squire remember how he paid it in cleaning the pasture, how he paid it in corn, how he paid it in driving the wagon, how he paid it, in short, at various times in all the various fruits of the earth and by all the various labors of man?-how, finally, he, Dixon, paid that pound-of which, oh, shocking to relate, the Squire had heard nothing-in cash, into the hands of the Squire's own trusted Mr. Brown? The debt of one pound has multiplied-on the wrong side-in a manner to put to shame the loaves and fishes, till the brain whirls in a vain attempt to catch up with it and calculate for how many pounds the Squire is by this time indebted to Dixon. But the Squire recks not of this. What pains that British magistrate is, that his voluble ex-tenant has surprised him into the discussion of private affairs, when public business is to the fore. Has Dixon no magisterial business? He has. Alas, that he should not have a monopoly of dishonesty! Some very bad fellow has been "tiefing" his bananas.

Prædial larceny, or the "tiefing" of bananas and other fruits of the earth, is the one criminal offence really common in Jamaica; which does not prove the negro to be exceptionally thievish. "When black man tief. he tief yam; when white

man

tief, he tief whole estate," says his own self-justificatory proverb. But if money lay scattered on the hillsides the white man would "tief" that; and the crop of his provision ground means the same thing to the black man. Any day in March or April you will see here and there as you look along the mountain ridges, blue columns of smoke rising up from the forest, and at night glow upon glow, as of dim beacon-fires. Each patch of light signifies that a negro is preparing new provision ground after his wasteful primitive fashion. Sometimes, when the fire has licked up the trees and undergrowth, this ground will seem little more than a steep slope of limestone rock, coated with ashes. But out of this sprang the forest, and out of this, too, the kindly sun will bring forth with no great toil on his part, his subsistence for the year and something to spare, which he can sell in the nearest market. This will give him a little money to spend at the store and-if he does not own his land-to pay his rent or such part of his rent as he does not prefer to pay in labor or produce. shanty, built of laths and mud, is seldom near his provision ground. Possibly this is because his improvident system of culture makes a constant change of land necessary. He exhausts it so rapidly that in some parts of the island only ten per cent. of the land can be kept under cultivation at the same time. The rest, having been cropped two years, must lie fallow for eight or ten. Thus remote, usually separated by a mere boundary line from his neighbor's patch, the negro's provision ground is at the mercy of the thief; and if his own crop fail, he himself is apt to be at the mercy of that bunch of ripe bananas which hangs so temptingly just on the wrong side of his boundary. They mean subsistence or wealth to him, and it is so easy to take them without discovery.

His

The local policeman is not here this morning, from which it must not be inferred he has nothing to do. To keep his clothes and his helmet at that dazzling and becoming pitch of whiteness must in itself be a care to him. Then there is the police-station, a substantial stone building, very different from the lath and plaster shanties of the neighbors, to be kept clean and tidy, and the wall round the yard to be whitewashed. The last policeman ignominiously failed in these duties and was dismissed in consequence; wherefore the present man is zealous in their performance. Having brought the uniform, the house and the yard-wall up to the ideal standard, he has gone further, and is now engaged in reducing the surrounding trees to symmetry and order by whitewashing them all up to a certain height. It is, however, but a few days since he appeared at the Justice's window dragging with him a wretched delinquent. "Please sir," says he, sternly triumphant, putting forward his living and quite unimpaired prey, "Please, sir, I brought de suicide." But what of that? Suicide is certainly rare, but I have seen many a murdered man stand here and tell-with dramatic illustrations-the horrid tale of his own murder. Only the word after all is more often "Murderation;" and experience shows that a charge of murderation may be whittled down to one of "using some scrampy words."