"I don't believe it," cried Saleh bluntly, his loyalty getting the better of his acquired courtesy.

"Then that just shows what a stupid, ignorant little boy you must be!" she retorted. "Everybody who knows anything knows what bandits these English are. They talk a great deal about right and wrong, and about injustice and justice; they are always sending poor people to prison for little thefts; but they make me sick,—these English, -they are such robbers! They were running wild in their horrid wet woods, naked and shivering under their blue paint, when my ancestors were civilized men and mighty kings. They were just miserable savages; and now, for all their prating about virtue, if men steal big enough things,-a crown, a kingdom, they account it no crimethey think it glorious. Oh, they are such hypocrites and liars! I hate them! hate them!"

She

She ceased her tirade from sheer lack of breath, and stood there in the summer sunlight quivering with rage. would not have dreamed of speaking thus to any European; but, despite all her pride of race, this little brown boy did not seem to matter, simply because the accident of his color brought with it a conviction of his inferiority. Also, she felt, all right-thinking Orientals must share the opinions to which she gave such uncompromising expression.

To Saleh, the denationalized, however, her words were the rankest blasphemy. To him the very fire of her emotions was repellent because-because it was un-English! This unexpected encounter with a point of view so diametrically opposed to that which he had assimilated through his training, sympathies, and associates, smote him with a shock of horrified surprise. The limitations of his imagination had so far prevented him from so much as guessing that there might be more than one side even to the question of Eng

land's vast reformatory work in Asia, and his Malayan memories had become too blurred and distant for them to afford him any assistance in this direction. Therefore the railings of the little Princess were in the nature of an ugly revelation which, while it made the fool's paradise in which he had been living so contentedly totter to its foundations, outraged him by laying sacrilegious hands on much which he had learned to regard as holy. For the moment he was dumb, and had no words at his command to oppose to the bitter flood of the girl's rhetoric. "And the English hate us too," she went on presently. "They hate us because they fear us. Some day we shall drive them out of India, and my people will go back and reign as before in their own land!"

"That is nonsense!" cried Saleh, with utter conviction. "You could never turn us out. We are much too strong, and have got a footing there that nothing will ever shake."

"That shows how little you know," she retorted. "It will be done easily. We will outcaste them. We will make it a sin for any one, be he Hindu or Muhammadan, to supply the Melch with food or water. They will try to force our folk to give way; they will call out their soldiers; they will behave as they did in '57-like the savages they are at bottom; but it will be of no use. When it is their religions that inspire them, our people in India will die in thousands rather than sin at the bidding of the English. They have proved it in the past. It is the spirit of religion-not the accident of creed— which will unify our peoples, that will give them the power to die, but never to submit. The English will resist, for they are stubborn; but in the end they will have to go, and India will be ours once more. It can be done; I have heard my people speak of it, and some day we will do it!"

The dark blood dyed her pale cheeks to a deeper hue; her eyes, which had lost their dreamy melancholy, flashed as she gazed into vacancy like some tiny savage prophetess; her words poured from her, tingling with excitement, thrilling with the sincerity of her emotion, and Saleh stood before her, carried away in spite of himself by the contagion of her enthusiasm, but horrified at the picture which her words conjured up, and filled suddenly with a great fear for his friends.

"I do not think like you," he said hesitatingly, and even to his own ears his words sounded weak and stupid. "I like the English. They are my friends. They do a lot of good. They are kind people, and are just in their dealings."

He was painfully aware of his lack of eloquence: the very strength of his feelings rendered him more than usually inarticulate. He was loyally eager to vindicate the honor of his friends of the nation of his adoption; but he was conscious that he had neither the brains nor the words to argue successfully with the little spitfire before him.

"You like the English!" she cried. "You dare to say that you like them,you, an Asiatic, the son of one of the many whom they have despoiled! Only cowards like them, cowards who fawn, as dogs fawn, upon the hand that beats them-thus!" And she struck the hound which stood nearest to her a vicious blow upon his muzzle wtih the handle of her whip. The great beast, whimpering a little, cowered on the ground at her feet, looking up at her uncomprehendingly with his heavy, slavish dog's eyes "You are like him if you are fond of the English!" she cried, and struck the cowering creature again with her little cruel hand.

"Leave him alone! Don't be so cruel!" shouted Saleh, quivering with anger. Five years earlier the brutal

treatment of any animal would have had no power to move him, and his quick indignation at the girl's maltreatment of her dog went far to prove how utterly dead, or how completely lulled to sleep, was the oriental soul within him. Her words had disquieted, pained, tortured him; but now as he watched her brutally punish an unoffending animal he felt that he hated her.

"Ah!" she cried triumphantly, "you do not 'like' me when I am unjust to Rustam here, yet you praise the English, who have done much worse things! They hated my grandfather because he was a man and fought them. They beat his armies because they were illarmed; they took his country from him, stealing even his crown jewels, like the brigands they are; and they carried him away to this horrible cold England to die in exile! But he never ceased to hate them and to show them the measure of his hate, and they watched him always, because they were afraid of the poor old man whom they had wronged, but whose spirit they could never break!"

"I am sorry for him," said Saleh, "but perhaps there were reasons which you do not know. Perhaps his people were unhappy when he ruled them."

"That is the nonsense which the English hypocrites have taught you to talk," the girl replied with infinite scorn. "If his people did not love him, why did they fight for him? Why did the English have to kill hundreds and hundreds of them before they could conquer his country? Answer me that."

"I do not know. I have not read about it," said Saleh, who found himself at more of a disadvantage than

ever.

"And if you had read of it, it would be in English books, written for the English by Englishmen, and crammed with lies! They can always find an

excuse to justify their wickedness, these English; but the truth-ah, that is different! Only we who have suffered know the truth!

"Listen, you little black boy. They tried to make my father different-to turn him into an Englishman. He became a Christian-it is bad to be anything but a Christian in this land,and we are all Christians now. But when we win back our country we shall be restored to caste.

"My grandfather had tried resistance all his life, and it had failed. My father pretended for a long time that he was a friend of the English, hoping that would better serve his purposes; but because he spent some paltry sums -for even in exile a king must live lavishly-the English, who had robbed us of everything, were very angry on account of his debts. Then he escaped-went to Russia; but the Russians are white men too, and liars like the English. They made fair promises to him, but they never would do anything. They only wanted to make a tool of him. Then despair seized him, and he came back here and made his peace with the English-outwardly. He was a broken man then. He used to sit all day with his head fallen forward upon his breast, his hands idle, doing nothing, only thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking of all that ought to have been his,—and waiting for death. He died of a broken heart, my father, and it was the people whom you and other cowards 'like' who broke it! Oh, how I detest them; but still more I hate and despise black men like you who pretend to love them!"

She spoke with so fierce a passion that Saleh drew back from her, shocked and dismayed: outraged too, for instinctively he was aware that the little

Princess would never have dreamed of using such words to a white man, and Saleh desired above everything to be treated as an Eng

lishman. Her action in addressing him at all, even more than the words which she had uttered, was to him an insult, a humiliation.

"I am not a coward, and I do like the English. You must be a wicked girl to talk as you talk, and I don't believe what you say about the English is true. They are just people, and very kind people." Once more the hopeless inadequacy of his words caused him to be smartingly conscious of his own intellectual impotence.

The little Princess only answered with a disgusted ejaculation, and calling to her hounds to follow her, she left him with a look of blighting contempt and a toss of her pretty head.

Long after she had passed from his sight behind the trunks of the elms Saleh stood where she had left him, knee-deep in the bracken, jarred to the very marrow, confused, humiliated, and beset by vague doubts. During the whole interview his own inferiority had been borne in upon him with the force of a new discovery, for throughout she had spoken to him as though, because he was not white, he ranked no higher in her estimation than if he were one of her hounds. Coming precisely at the moment when for the first time his color was beginning to trouble him, the wound thus inflicted had eaten deep into his soul; but also, apart from the purely personal question, he had been offended by all that she had said against his friends. His was a nature formed for loyalty, and her abuse rankled. Moreover, her words had violated the integrity of that facile optimism which hitherto had led him to accept the world as he found it, subscribing without reserve to Pope's astonishing article of faith, that "whatever is, is right"! Now, in less than half an hour his universe had been turned topsy-turvy before his eyes: white had been made to look like black, right like wrong. It was horrible, un

natural, and infinitely bewildering, for it made him feel as though he were being robbed of his dearest beliefs, and were being left with nothing solid for his feet to rest upon.

As he turned homeward he tried, with the Malayan instinct that ever Blackwood's Magazine.

shuns the contemplation of aught that is distressing, to forget the little Princess and her dreadful charges; but do what he would, the thought of her still clung to him as a hateful and haunting memory.

The only answer was a pad, pad, pad down the stairs. When I looked out over the bed-clothes, the window, a gray patch barred with darker gray, was like a dim ghost gazing at me from the opposite wall. By the whiff of salt in the damp breeze that blew across the room, and by the incessant grind of the shingle outside, I could tell that the wind was off sea. The sea itself was nearly invisible-a swaying mistiness through which the white horses rose and peeped at one, as if to say, "Come and share our frolic. Come and ride us."

Tony, sleepy and sheepish in the eyes, was pattering about the kitchen in his stockings and light check shirt. The fire was contrary. We scraped out ashes, poked in wood and paper. Soon a gush of comfortable steam made the lid of the kettle dance. The big blue tin teapot was cleaned, filled and set on the hob. We foraged in all the cupboards. Tony went up-stairs with a "cup o' tay for the ol' doman," and returned with some of the biscuits that Mrs. Widger takes to bed with her as maiden ladies take their plate-basketand for much the same reason.

Faint light was showing through the north window of the kitchen. "Coom on!" said Tony. "Time we was to sea." He replenished the kettle, rammed himself into an old guernsey, took up three mackerel lines1 and a screw of paper containing salted bait, blew out the lamp, and forth we went. After collecting together mast, sails and oars from where they were lying, strewn haphazard on the beach, we pushed and pulled the Cock Robin down to the water's edge and filled up the ballast-bags with our hands like irritable, hasty children playing at shinglepies. "Shove her a bit farther down. Jump in!" commanded Tony. With a cuss-word or two, and a horrid disposition on the part of the oars to jump the thole-pins, we shoved off, shipping not more than a couple of bucketfuls of water over the stern. Tony scrambled aboard, his trousers and boots dripping. ""Tis al'ays like that, putting off from thees yer damn'd ol' beach. No won'er us gets the rheumatics." He hung the rudder, loosed the mizzen. I stepped the mast, hoisted the lug and foresail, and made fast the sheet. The life of the wind entered into the old craft. She bowed graciously to the waves. With a motion compounded of air and water, lightness and sweep,

I The hooking or whiffing lines, several fathoms in length, are trailed astern as the boat sails to and fro. They are heavily leaded according to speed and their position, and are baited with long three-cornered strips of skin (lasks or lasts) cut from a mackerel's tail.

as if we were partially suspended over the sea, she settled to her course, and the wavelets made a gurgling music along the clinker-built strakes of her.

Tony tangled a line, got in a tare, as he calls it, snapped the sid (snood), bit the rusty hook off, brought the boat's head too much into the wind, grubbed in his pockets for gut and made little knots with his clumsy great fingers and teeth. "An't never got no gear ready like I used to," he complained; and then with the merriest of smiles he added, "What do 'ee think o' Tony, getting in a tare fust start out? Do 'ee think he's maazed? But us'll catch 'em if they'm here. Yu ought to go 'long wi' Uncle Jake. He'd tell 'ee summut-and the fish tu, if they didn' come an' get catched."

By the time the lines were out, the dun sou'-westerly clouds all around had raised themselves from the horizon like a vast fringe, ragged at the edge with inconceivable delicacy, like a mighty curtain, between which and the water's edge the white light of dawn stared blankly, made the sea look deathly cold, but changed to a silvery sheen where the hidden cilffs stood. From immaterial shadows looming over the white surf-line, the cliffs themselves brightened to an insubstantial fabric, ruddily flushed, until finally, ever becoming more earthy, they upreared themselves, high-ribbed and red, bushcrowned and splashed with green-our familiar, friendly cliffs, for each and every part of which we have a name. The sun slid out from a parting of clouds in the east, warming the dour sea into playfulness. "Twas all a wonder and a wild delight!

As I looked at Tony, while he glanced around with eyes that were at once curiously dreamy and alert, I saw that, in spite of use and habit, and though he probably could not have told me afterwards what the sea and sky were like, the dawn was creeping

"Luke to the lu'ard line," he cried. "They'm up!"

He hauled a fish aboard, caught hold of the shank of the hook, flicked the fish into the bottom of the boat, and with the same circular motion flung the line overboard again. Wedging the head of the mackerel between his knees, he bent it till its skin was taut, scraped off the scales near the tail, and cut a fresh lask from the living fish. A tender-heart he is by nature, but now.. Great was his satisfaction. "That'll hae 'em," he crowed.

The mackerel bit hotly at our new baits. Before the lines were properly out, in they had to come again. Flop, flop went the fish on the bottom boards as we jerked them carelessly off the hooks. Every now and then one would dance up and flip its tail wildly, then sink back among the glistening mass that was fast losing its beauty of color, its most delicate pinks and steely blues, even as it died and stiffened.

Suddenly the fish stopped biting, perhaps because the risen sun was shining down into the water. The wind dropped without warning, as southerly winds will do early in the day. The Cock Robin wallowed again on the water. "We'm done," said Tony. "Let's get in out o' it in time to sell the macker for breakfast. There ain't no other boats out. These yer ought to fetch 'levenpence the dizzen. An' we've made the day gude in case nort else don't turn up."

While I rowed in he struck sail and threw the ballast overboard. Most pleasantly, when there are fish in the boat, does the shingle from the bags plop-rattle into the water. Willing hands hauled the Cock Robin up the beach: we had fish to give away. Our catch made elevenpence a dozen to Jemima Caley, the old squat fish-woman