spiked barbs in our legs and bodies; over granite boulders that caught and reflected every ray of sun, till the heat was like a furnace, and our feet and hands swelled, and face, eyelids, and lips blistered, while our throats became so parched that we could hardly swallow, and grew sick. We slithered and scrambled on in desperate effort to reach the river, trying not to scream from the pain of the mimosa thorns, and to resist the desperate temptation of grasping the poisonous cactus lianes that hung alluringly down, as if to offer a support which, if accepted, would irritate the skin beyond all endurance. We were almost at our last gasp when P. A. remembered that he had brought a tin of apricots for luncheon, and in a trice that tin was open and its juice gulped down. He was heroic, and insisted on my having the lion's share, and I was not heroic, and accepted it. What it meant to us no words can ever say! Assuaged, though not satisfied, we pressed on, till presently, from the brow of a hill, we saw the river lying some 400 feet, below. A man was sent for water at once, but the cliff was precipitous, and he returned, having found the climb impossible, and we were forced to proceed till a place was reached where descent was practicable. Then we sat at last and drank in bliss: hippo' crashed through the bush below, and a fish-eagle circled over a pool, so girt with sheer cliff that it is wellnigh impossible that a human being should ever penetrate its solitudes. When we continued it was to slither down two or three hundred feet of precipitous gorge and scramble up another in ever-increasing intimacy with the sharp grass and jagged rocks, though encouraged by the mighty sound of rushing water to which we drew ever Blackwood's Magazine. nearer and nearer. I found my heart thumping. In a few minutes our toil was to be rewarded, and the Falls of the Mao Kabi, for thousands of years unseen, would be revealed to us. Another moment and we were on the summit of a cliff that overlooked the river as it rushed tempestuously between its granite walls, gathering impetus for a plunge of 60 feet down either side of a huge boulder into a rock-gort basin below. The reverberation was tremendous, and spray rose in drenching clouds, and, as if to promise peace to their turbulence, a rainbow shone through the glistening drops, making a radiant bridge of hope across and through the stormiest strife of waters. Scrub trees had partially veiled it from our sight, and as we sought a way down the precipice, a strong smell of baboon indicated we were passing by one of their fastnesses. Two big snakes glided away as we approached. Whether it were the sheer descent, with nothing between us and the seething torrent below, or the anger of the Djinn of the falls that he feared, we do not know, but our attendant Kukawa lifted up his voice and wailed aloud until we had once more returned to safety. Not many obstacles lay between the falls and the St. Andrew's cross, and as we retraced our steps to camp that night, we were able to congratulate ourselves that the work of exploration was complete. M. Bertaut has kindly expressed his wish to name the Falls after me"Les chutes MacLeod"-and as Commandant Maillard, then acting for the military territory of Chad, confirmed his suggestion, I can only say how greatly I appreciate the honor they have done me. Olive MacLeod. A NEW ISSUE. "Know anything about stamps?" "My dear Bobby," I said, "I know everything about everything." "Coo-I bet you don't. You don't know what Tomlinson's average is this term." "Ah, now you've just hit upon the one thing” "Well, it's thirty-eight." "Batting or bowling?" Bobby looked coldly at me. "I was going to ask you about my stamp," he said; "but if you're going to be funny-" "I'm not, I promise. This isn't my day for levity. Show me the stamp." I collected stamps when I was Bobby's age. I suppose in those days I did know something about them, but they have altered since my time; with the result that I can now only judge them by the beauty or otherwise of the illustration. Sometimes I come across a letter stamped with the representation of a volcano or an iceberg or a couple of jaguars-whatever it may be, and I have sent it off eagerly to some youthful philatelist; to receive a week later such formal thanks as are generally reserved for the man who offers you a large Cabbage White for your butterfly collection. "It's just got a lion or something on it, and a josser's head, and some other things," said Bobby, searching in his pocket. "Uncle Henry sent it to me." The description seemed to apply to a good many stamps. "Any words?" "Wait a sec.," said Bobby, and he ran it to ground in his right-hand trouser pocket. "Here it is." It could claim to be unused, and by so much the more valuable, but another week or two in Bobby's pocket might have invalidated its claim. However I had no doubt that I had never seen a stamp like it before. "Who is the josser?" said Bobby. "It's nobody I know," I said, looking at it closely, "unless-no-it isn't your Uncle William, is it?" "It's got 'postage revenue' on it," Bobby pointed out. "So it must be Colonial, I should think, wouldn't "No, no, Bobby, not again," I remonstrated. He blushed and put the stamp back in his pocket. "Anyhow," he said, "it's awfully decent of Uncle Henry, isn't it? I believe it's most beastly rare." "Well, look here, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'm lunching to-morrow with a man who's a great philatelist." "Coo. What's that?" "It means he collects stamps-and I'll ask him about yours. And I'll send you a line." "Oh, I say, thanks awfully," said Bobby. My philatelist had never heard of it. No doubt I described it badly; my memories were a little vague for one thing, and for another I was probably wrong to have assumed that it went into Bobby's pocket the same smudgy color as it came out. He was interested, however, in the gum test, and on my suggestion, made on the spur of the moment, that it was a midVictorian issue of one of the islands in the South Pacific, he proposed that it should be sent to him for examination. I wrote to Bobby to this effect and went into the post-office for a stamp. "One?" said the lady. "Only one," I admitted humbly. She threw one at me. I picked it up and then gave a jump. "Just an ordinary lion? You're sure it's not meant for anybody particular?" "Yes. Do you want another one?" "No, thank you," I said sadly, and I took my stamp home with me. I put it on another envelope, and wrote another letter to Bobby. "Dear Bobby," I wrote, “ I am sending you a second one. It is not so beastly rare as we thought, and if I were you I should tell Uncle Henry all about the Coronation." A. A. M. LIFE IN LONDON: THE BANQUET. In every large London restaurant, and in many small ones, there is a spacious hall (or several) curtained away from the public, in which every night strange secret things go on. Few suspect, and still fewer realize. the strangeness of these secret things. In the richly decorated interior (sometimes marked with mystic signs), at a table which in space reaches from everlasting to everlasting, and has the form of a grill or a currycomb or the end of a rake-at such a table sit fifty or five hundred males. They are all dressed exactly alike, in black and white; but occasionally they display a colored flower, and each man bears exactly the same species and tint and size of flower, so that you think of reginents of flowers trained throughout their lives in barracks to the end of shining for a night in unison on the black and white bosoms of these males. Although there is not even a buffet in the great room, and no sign of the apparatus of a restaurant, all these males are eating a dinner, and it is the same dinner. They do not wish to choose; they accept, reading the menu like a decree of fate. They do not inquire upon the machinery; a slave, unglanced at, piaces a certain quantity of a dish in front of them—and lo! the same quantity of the same dish is in front of all of them; they do not ask whence nor how it came; they eat, with industry, knowing that at a given moment, whether they have finished or not, a hand will steal round from behind them, and the plate will vanish into limbo. Thus the repast continues, ruthlessly, under the aquiline gaze of a slave who is also a commander-in-chief, manœuvring his men silently, manoeuvring them with naught but a glance. With one glance he causes to disappear five hundred saladplates, and with another he conjures from behind a screen five hundred ices, each duly below zero, and each calculated to impede the digesting of a salad. The service of the dinner is a miracle, but the diners, absorbed in the expectancy of rites to come, reck not; they assume the service as they assume the rising of the sun. Only a few remember the old, old days, in the 'eighties (before a cabal of international Jews had put their heads together and inaugurated a new age of miracles), when these solemn repasts were a scramble and a guerilla, after which one half of the combatants went home starving, and the other half went home glutted and drenched. Nowadays these repasts are the most perfectly democratic in England; and anybody who has ever assisted at one knows by a morsel of experience what life would be if the imaginative Tory's nightmare of Socialism were to become a reality. But each person has enough, and has it promptly. The ceremonial begins with a meal, because it would be impossible on an empty stomach. Its object is ostensibly either to celebrate the memory of some deed of some dead man, or to signalize the triumph of some living contemporary. Clubs and societies exist throughout London in hundreds expressly for the execution of these purposes, and each of them is a remunerative client of a large restaurant. Societies even exist solely in order to watch for the triumphs of contemporaries, and to gather in the triumphant to a repast and inform them positively that they are great. So much so that it is difficult to accomplish anything unusual, such as the discovery of one pole or another, or the successful defence of a libel action, without submitting to the ordeal of these societies one after the other in a chain, and emerging therefrom with modesty ruined and the brazen conceit of a star actor. But the ostensible object is merely a cover for the real object, the unadmitted and often unsuspected object: which is, to indulge in a debauch of universal mutual admiration. When the physical appetite is assuaged, then the appetite for praise and sentimentality is whetted, and the design of the mighty institution of the banquet is to minister, in a manner majestic and unexceptionable, to this base appetite, whose one excuse is its naïveté. A pleasurable and even voluptuous thrill of anticipation runs through the assemblage when the chairman rises to open the orgy. Everybody screws himself up, as a fiddler screwing the pegs of a fiddle, to what he deems the correct pitch of appreciativeness; and almost the breath is held. And the chairman says: "Whatever differences may divide us upon other subjects, I am absolutely convinced, and I do not hesitate to state my conviction in the clearest possible way, that we are enthusiastically and completely agreed upon one point," the point being that such and such a person or such and such a work is the greatest person or the greatest work of the kind in the whole history of the human race. And although the point is one utterly inadmissible upon an empty stomach, although it is indeed a glaring falsity, everybody at once feverishly endorses it, either with shrill articulate cries, or with deep inarticulate booming, or with noises produced by the shock of flesh on flesh, or ivory on wood, or steel on crystal. The uproar is enormous. The chairman grows into a sacramental priest, or philosopher of amazing insight and courage. And everybody says to himself: "I had not screwed myself up quite high enough," and proceeds to a further screwing. And in every heart is the thought: "This is grand! This is worth living for! This alone is the true reward of endeavor!" And the corporate soul muses ecstatically: "This work, or this man, is ours, by reason of our appreciation and our enthusiasm. And he, or it, is ours exclusively." And, since the soul and the body are locked together in the closest sympathetic intimacy, all those cautious dyspeptic ones who have hitherto shirked danger, immediately put on courage like a splendid garment, and order the strongest drinks and the longest cigars that the establishment can offer. The real world fades into unreality; the morrow is lost in eternity; the moment and the illusion alone are real. The key of the mood is to be sought They can be What fear can translating in less in the speeches as they succeed each other than in the applause. For the applauders are not influenced by a sense of responsibility, or made selfconscious by publicity. natural, and they are. prevent them from stantly their emotions into sound? By the applause, if you are a slave and non-participator, you may correct your too kindly estimate of men in the mass. Note how the most outrageous exaggeration, the grossest flattery, the most banal platitude, the most fatuous optimism, gain the loudest approval. Note how any reservation produces a fall of temperature. Note how the smallest jokes are seized on ravenously, as a worm by a young bird. And note always the girlish sentimentality, ever gushing forth, of these strong, hardheaded males whose habit is to proverbialize the sentimentality of women. The emotional crisis arrives. Feeling transcends the vehicle of speech, and escapes in song. And one guest, honored either for some special deed of his own or because his name has been "coupled" with some historic deed or movement, remains sitting, in the most exquisite self-consciousness that human ingenuity ever brought about, while all the rest fling hoarsely at him the fifteen sacred words of a refrain which in its incredible vulgarity surpasses even the National Anthem. The reaction is now not far off. But owing to several reasons it is postponed yet a while. The honored guest's response is one of the chief attractions of the night. Very many diners have been drawn to the banquet by the desire to inspect the honored guest at their leisure, to see his antics, to divine his human weaknesses and his ridiculous side. And, moreover, the honored guest must give praise for praise, and lie for lie. He is bound by the strictest conventions of social intercourse to say in so many words: |