winnowing machine, both felt the hopelessness of searching in the vacuum of their muddled country brains for any historical reminiscences worthy of reproduction, and sat by in unusual silence, while their rival was descanting upon the Peace of Amiens.

'Four great loaves of bread and a white flag were stuck up on all the church steeples, but that was only a trumped-up peace, for the wars went on worse than ever, until the victory of Trafalgar,' he continued, proud of this opportunity of airing his knowledge. And there never was such a thing as that heard of afore, they tell me; but then we heard Nelson was dead. All the bells tolled for six hours, and the men had to stop work, Quakers and all. That was the solemnest day I can ever remember, and the air being very still, you could hear all the different church bells a-going.'

'Ah, I mind right well when I was apprenticed to a miller, and we dursen't stir out of a night for fear of the press-gang,' piped old Mr. Campling, delighted to have obtained the ear of the public. There was seven pressed in one night out in the next parish, and we used to see the men come slipping along when it was dark under the hedges, dressed in short jackets, and Indian silk handkerchers round their necks.'

'I knew a man who was taken by the press-gang when he was a boy on his way to school,' broke in the clerk, and he cried so when they brought him aboard that the captain asked them how they could have taken such a child. He was away thirty-six year, and when he come back to his native at Yarmouth, he knew no one. I don't believe he rightly knew his own name, leastways, I never heard it. He was very deaf from the roar of the cannons, and he used to lie awake at night and pray out loud. He took a fancy to me because I was a churchman, and he told me he was on the Victory when Lord Nelson was killed, and that the sailors loved him so, they drank the spirits they brought him home in!'

'Them was times,' moralised Mrs. Campling, a brisk, pleasant old dame, wearing her wedding bonnet of seventy years ago. Every misty day the folks thought Bonaparty had landed, and all the men were armed for fear of the French. The old soldiers had guns, and the labouring men mattocks to defend the women and children; and a pore hand of it some on 'em would have made,' she added with a meaning glance towards her mild old husband.

'You're right there,' agreed James Bullock. Why, I recollect

when I was drawn for the militia in 1820, and sent to Yarmouth, how mure-hearted the other men was. That was the year King George the Fourth came to the throne, and we heard there was to be riots in London along of his being separated from his wife, Caroliney, and our regiment was to go to keep order. In spite of everyone being promised a guinea for crossing Yarmouth Brig, most on 'em cried and took on about having to go so far as to London howsomedever they settled it without us, so we never went.'

'Well, I ain't so partial to going into the shires' myself,' said Mr. Marsham, who secretly sympathised with the timid militia'I never knew nothing good come out on 'em yet.'

men.

'And to think of them pore critters in London as never see an egg,' interposed his wife, conscious of the lustre shed on herself by the possession of a limited but efficient poultry-yard. 'No wonder they look so dwiney, and speak in such a shire-tone, they tell me, that nobody can't understand what they du say.'

Mrs. Marsham had for many years conducted a remarkable little school in a remote hamlet, before the days when infants worked in worsted and were conversant with the tonic sol-fa system from the cradle. Mrs. Marsham's scholars sewed at patches in an ill-lighted room, ventilated by the simple process of leaving the door open; learnt to read in a droning sing-song under the shadow of the birch; and were incited to no higher musical effort than a shrill rendering of the 'Old Hundredth.' Such primitive methods of education being now out of date, the worthy lady had retired on a small pension raised by private subscription, and in the tiniest of cottages regaled her friends with home-made rhubarb wine, while she supported her husband in garrulous idleness.

'Well, I shall always say that Martha and me live like gentlefolks,' Mr. Marsham went on. 'We get up when we like, and we go to bed when we like, and we eat our vittles when we like; and I have got three suits of clothes, and a pocket-handkercher in each.'

'Gentlefolks, indeed!' retorted the clerk contemptuously. 'Why, when I went to service, eighty years ago, Miss Mayes, the farmer's daughter, used to get up in the morning, frost and snow, to milk the cows (now, you mustn't so much as look at a farmer's

The shires to an East Anglian mean everything but Norfolk and Suffolk.

daughter!), and rode to market with the butter herself, for there was no spring-carts in them days.'

'My mother used to say she had seen the first coach that ran,' said Mrs. Campling, 'and all the folks were rarely frighted at it. She said she had never spent more than sixpence herself in travelling, and that was when she rode with the carrier one way to market and walked the twelve mile back!'

'In them days,' the clerk went on, when the farmer had a piece of beef the labourer had the broth; and they bought their butter and milk straight from the farm; and there wasn't near so much ill-feeling. Now you have to go to shop for everything, and that's the kill of this country.'

This mysterious incursion into the realms of political economy threw a gloom upon the small assembly, who regarded Mr. Bullock with admiration, not unmingled with awe; and the stream of talk was dried up.

The shadows were lengthening; fresh signs of activity were apparent in all corners of the meadow; mothers aroused their sleepy babies and pointed to the avenue, where, one by one, the paper lanterns had become dancing globes of red and yellow; the rockets soared aloft gallantly in short-lived splendour; the band took up its position near the bonfire, in readiness to blare out the National Anthem for the twentieth and final time.

'Don't that make you think of Heaven?' whispered old

Mrs. Campling from beneath her coal-scuttle bonnet.

་

What nonsense you du talk!' said James Bullock.

A. M. WILSON.

VOL. VIII. NO. 48, N.S.

35

33

OR STORM, OR POISON.1

THE hot black night was impenetrable above. Low on the horizon an elongated blur of pale light represented the moon shining across the dry tangle of jungle on the opposite ridge. Below the two-foot mist gathered in thin waves over the wide irregular swamp which here broke the vast surface of forest-land. Many such swamps in many similar valleys breathed out miasma and deadly vapours within that fever-ridden area, where scores of square miles of hill and dale, feathered with primeval forests, still lie unmapped, although the district has been for a considerable period administered in its rare populated districts by a few active and capable Englishmen. But the two men just now disturbing its solitudes were content that this should continue to be so. The work they were engaged upon led them for choice into such regions, beyond the passing foot and ken of civilised man.

It was a dumb night. The half-drained swamps sweated, the jungle swooned in the horrible stagnation of air, and nature breathed like a sick man sunk in his last mortal sleep. It was an eclipse of the world in the panting dark before a tropical tempest.

Arcay stood in the door of the little tent and looked out into the night. Along the edge of the jungle ran a partially clear line, and across this line he was aware of a vast life moving swiftly and stealthily from one depth of blackness into the other. He pushed aside the flap of the tent and a faint light streamed a few feet outwards. Over the brown dust and the black decay that had eddied into little pyramids and lay heaped on the open patches whipped a long-bodied rat-like creature, then a moving sinuous line, then another. The rustling flight of frightened birds. Afterwards a large furtive shadow, which coasted cat-like outside the road of light and disappeared into the slumbrous shadow of the trees beyond.

Arcay stretched back and took up the lantern. Picking his steps round the tent, he climbed to a little elevation, which in daylight would have added miles to the prospect. Through the blackness he looked south-east, to where he knew a gigantic gap opened in the hills, the gap through which the monsoon must 1 Copyright, 1900, by Hesketh Prichard, in the United States of America.

rush upon them from the sea. The moon was lost in the flood of rising cloud, and Arcay saw only an endless expanse of gloom, which as he watched was suddenly shattered by a play of blue and jagged spears that trembled along the curve of the invisible pass and went out, only to flicker up again a moment later.

With a muttered word he began to descend the knoll, and even as he went he became aware that the rush and movement of animal life seemed ended. An unnatural hush brooded over and about him. He stopped impatiently to examine the fastenings of the tent. As he did so, the thunder bellowed like a distant bull. He started at the sound, for the air was full of electricity, and his nerves quivered under the jar, racked as they were by months of toil and hard living, only diversified by bouts of fever. Then he straightened himself and stood up to gauge the certain violence of the approaching storm by the numberless hidden signs open to the eye of woodcraft, and all the while the lowing of the thunder answered him.

He carried the lantern into the tent and roused his companion, who sat up with a tired grunt. He was a large stoutish man, attired in a fashion entirely inadequate to the demands of ordinary society.

Oh, lord!' he grumbled, I'll get heat-apoplexy if this pressure continues. Phew! man, it's suffocation!'

Arcay was moving about collecting various oddments which lay around the tent.

'Jump now! The monsoon is coming up through the throat of Deraghat. The jungle's been walking. We must get down the tent. Nothing will stand before what is coming.'

Durbrow was on his feet before the other finished speaking. He threw on a shooting jacket and went out to make his own survey of the storm. One glance at the sky was enough. Hurrying flashes showed him the angry puffed outline of the onrushing line over the hill pass. The intense stillness and the choking heat held their own promise also. Within an hour the burricane would be changing the face of the land, staled and wearied after the long months of heat.

'What a black fluke!' he groaned as he turned.

'How do you mean?'

Our specimens! And those orchids! We shall have no time to carry them anywhere, and the monsoon is going to break red-hot within the hour,'

1