Saleh felt, not sought by him, and most of the offerings made to him, he was still convinced, had been voluntary tokens of fealty. From this time onward Saleh found himself more than ever laudator temporis acti, more than ever discontented with the present, daily in conflict more and more acute with the dominion of the white men in the land.

"And by all that's impossible, this is what the Resident sends me when I apply for an Assistant!" stormed Baker to his friend the Medical Officer. "A pretty Assistant, upon my soul! Of all the lunatic businesses that I have ever struck in this Bedlam of an East, this is the most insane! Still, here he is, and here, I suppose, the young man has got to bide; but I shan't send him on any more out-district work. I shall put him on to the accounts, and I can only pray that the devil won't move him to rob the till."

So, as one of the results of his fiasco, poor Saleh was presently condemned to the most uninteresting of all branches of Government business, the management of a small Sub-Treasury; but the expedition bore other fruit. Saleh brought back with him from that mosquito-haunted river the seeds of malarial fever,-not the mild, chronic malaria to which most Malays are more or less subject, a disease that for the most part works little harm, but the virulent, pernicious tertian, which is generally reserved exclusively for the entertainment of Europeans. Once more the English were to blame. The denationalization of Saleh they had attempted: the declimatization of him they had achieved. In the former case the success attained had been only very partial, in the latter it was far more complete; yet those responsible for the insensate experiment, it seems to me, were only less to be congratulated on their achievement than their luckless victim.

XVIII.

Malignant malaria of this particular type, it is popularly supposed by the natives of the distracted heat-belt, is sent as a special dispensation-by that Providence which notoriously tempers the wind to the shorn lamb-for the chastening of the otherwise insupportable energy of the white man. Lacking some such salutary check as this inposes upon the European's morbid appetite for toil-which includes a desire to make all mankind partake, in equal measure with himself, of a full share of work, the tropics, it is thought, would speedily be rendered unfit for habitation by the races whom Nature has taught from the beginning to live by her aid, and so living, to idolize Ease. But malignant malaria is one of Nature's watch-dogs, set to guard her shrine and to punish intruders upon its peace.

It seizes the strongest in

its jaws, shakes him till his teeth chatter, and when it has had its will of him, casts him aside, spent, shattered, feeble in mind and body, and whimpering like a little child. Some and their number is past all counting-are broken once and for all; others gather themselves together after a space, and carry on the struggle, albeit with a certain new sobriety and caution; but let the victim be ever so energetic, ever so full of vitality and force, he bears the scars and the memory of that encounter with him to his grave.

Saleh, in the natural course of things, ought not to have been exposed to any such ordeal, and Nature, in mistaking him for a white man, showed something less than her usual perspicacity. The lad, in truth, had no great store of superabundant energy and vitality of which to be purged. None the less, he suffered, not like a Malay, but like any other newly imported stranger. Nature, ruthless as is her wont, milked the manhood out of him with both her busy hands, racked him with aches and

pains, shattered him with chills, scorched him with the fever fires, pursued him with despairing visions, and hag-rode him without mercy. All the men and women whom he had known in life, all the stories and legends that he had ever heard, all the sensations which he had experienced, all the facts which he had learned, but each one of these things contorted and distorted wonderfully,-danced through his mind in a tangle of combinations, intricate, incongruous, inconsequent, monstrous, but informed throughout by a deadly but elusive logic. At times it would be Alice Fairfax, hideously transformed, her personality subtly interwoven with a Complaint from a Native Chief, a severe Pain in the Head and Back, a Rudeness of Baker's and the Pons Asinorum, proving with clarion din that the angles at the base of the Color Question are a Pair of enormous Boots in which two microscopic feet wander and lose their way. At other times the vision would change to some combination even more intricate, even more harassing,-people, places, facts, inanimate objects, and even sensations welding together in ghastly, brainstretching conglomerates, instinct with individuality and personality, strikingly human, yet torturingly inhuman and impossible. The barriers which divide the worlds of idea, sensation, and reality seemed to have been thrown down. The mind had become a wilderness overrun by hordes of unruly imaginings, masterless, panic-driven, maddened, maddening; but under all, trampled upon by all, spurned by all, tossed hither and thither restlessly, abided the agony of the fever-rent body, the travail of the fever-haunted soul. Also, through all the visions two arch-persecutors asserted their supremacy,-the Horror of Effort and the Futility of Endeavor.

To the immense disgust of the Medical Officer, the parasites insisted upon

carrying their master across the river, where they lodged him in his mother's house. A crowd of women filled the stuffy sick-room and re-breathed the exhausted air. They plastered Saleh's body with yellow tumeric and other messy concoctions. Prayers, charms, simples, and incantations were called into request, with a fine catholicity of faith, to aid the resources of the British pharmacopoeia. There was also a very general belief entertained at the Court of Pelesu that Saleh's illnessthe virulence of which demanded explanation was due to the evil magic of a certain wizard of great repute who chanced to be among the number of the aggrieved peasants of the Bûyong valley. Many and bitter, too, were the murmurings against the white menfor in the good old times, men recalled, the wizard would have suffered vari ous and evil things until he had thereby been compelled to exorcise the Familiar by whom, at his bidding, poor Saleh was manifestly possessed. This aspect of the case was discussed so frequently in the hearing of the patient that he got the idea interwoven with all the other inconsequences running riot in his fever-wearied brain, and more than once he called aloud upon the wizard by name, or in his ravings confused his own with the identity of the Familiar. After this, what further proof was needed? The worst suspicions were confirmed; and Baker began to have much ado to keep the King, Tungku Ampûan, and the courtiers quiet, and had to send word to the police at Buyong to guard the wizard closely, since at this time his chances of dying a violent death were extensive. Even chill-blooded Europeans are apt to wax wrathful when the superstitions of others frustrate the action of commonsense; and to the Malays of Pelesu the refusal of the white men to accept the proven fact of the guilt of the wizard appealed as the grossest

and most mischievous piece of superstition of which they had had any experience. If Saleh had died, I think that the wizard would have died too with surprising celerity, even though one or more loyal people had to swing at a rope's end as the price of their devotion to duty.

Saleh, however, did not die,-and for this, perhaps, the clean life which had been his for years may have been partly responsible; but instead he crept back into existence, still haunted by the twin demons which had so possessed him while the fever held,-the Horror of Effort and the Futility of Endeavor.

Blackwood's Magazine.

Saleh had always been "slack" at the best of times, but now all that there had ever been of energy in his composition had been dredged out of him; and for this, be it remembered, the race which puts Energy shoulder to shoulder with Courage in the forefront of the manly virtues, not Saleh, was responsible. It was surely no fault of his, poor lad, that the white men, in the course of the experiment of which he had been the hapless victim, should have robbed him, among other things, of his natural immunity to the climatic influences of his native land.

Yet the

The rather inane question, “Do you like India?" may as a rule be answered summarily by a monosyllable. The answer depends less on the person than on the place where he is cast, for the varieties of life met with in India, the different kinds of interest, work, and sport, and the different conditions of climate and degrees of comfort and the reverse are incalculable. The question may mean "Do you like Dera Ismail Khan, Coconada, or Quilon?" answer will infer a grotesque generalization. India is everything and nothing, and everything between. There are places where life is an idyll, places where it is made just endurable by the prospect of furlough, places where one feels that one's own particular case ought to be set beside the stories of Marsyas and Sisyphus in a classical dictionary, and places so hideous and unattractive that to escape from them one might consent to be immured permanently in a new mahogany-and

brass-fitted public-house outside Clapham Junction, if only to watch life through the windows.

Everyone has his own peculiar social ideals and takes his own intellectual equipment with him wherever he goes, but to content the ordinary man the country must provide somewhere to ride or at least a good deal to shoot. If there is plenty of room to let a horse out and good shooting as well, and if in addition to these advantages the place has some natural beauty of its own and a certain sylvan or desert, as well as human, charm, the dweller there can pity folk who dwell anywhere else, and the retired Anglo-Indian who has had the wit or luck to live in such a place, though only for a short time, when he is asked the trite old question, "Do you like India?" will unhesitatingly answer "Yes." For by a special providence that accounts for all that is optimistic in man, such places live in the mind when the horror of a clammy.

backwater in Bengal or one's own particular gridiron elsewhere is forgotten.

Of course this is prefatory to an appreciation, a eulogy it may be, of a certain sequestered valley and haunt of wildfowl, which I always think of when people ask me if I like India. The tribute must out. It is Parlakimedi in Ganjam. A beautiful name worthy of the place, and not to be pronounced with the English "a" as if it were a new kind of indoor game, but with the soft Hunterian "a" and a purring "r" as a Scotchman would pronounce "pearl," the second accent being on the syllable. antepenultimate Parlakimedi, as if the word had been conceived by a poet to lend music to his hexameters

Deep in the bosky shade of the Parlakimedi valleys.

If you want to see India as it has been the last few thousand years go to Parlakimedi. It is true there is a new college and a brand new palace, but these toys look as if some meddler had introduced them just to see if they were any good, and as if the honest folk finding they were not had left them there looking as incongruous as a model of a Hottentot village stuck in a glass exhibition house. Big as they are they are too much by-the-way to make the place look hybrid; rather, they are so palpably incidental that they emphasize the inveterate Brahminism of Parlakimedi-that is to say, the constitutional inability of the inhabitants to depart in any detail from the ritual prescribed by Manu, that legendary old man whom they make responsible for their instinct of segregation, attributing to him the narrow and prohibitive restrictions that have bound them up in close corporations since Vedic times.

The houses of the astrologers on the other hand are part of the place.

There is a whole street of them, the walls polished and clean, rising from a high plinth and covered with pictures and designs which might be the signs of the zodiac, but are not. The passage opens into a wide courtyard, at the back of which stands a substantial house barely discernible from the road through the narrow lintel, for in this land either through respect to the Raja who alone might possess a substantial roof, or by his command, or out of fear of making any display of property the rule has held through many centuries that the buildings abutting on the street should be thatched. Perhaps a few generations ago, before we crippled the oppressor, the doors in many of the houses were so contrived that the interior buildings could not be seen. The astrologers indeed may have been exempt from the rule, for they were and are still, though insidiously, the most influential men in the place, and the Raja in his uncomfortable English palace is guided by their oracles, which are of course incapable of any new or subversive utterance.

The autocrat himself, if he is like other Rajas of the district, belongs to the most prescribed and fettered class in Hindustan. He can have few if, any friends, and intimacy even with his relatives is impossible in strictly orthodox families, for palace etiquette, founded on suspicion, forbids any free intercourse between father and son, and brother and brother. It is often impossible for neighbors of similar rank and caste to meet, since each family has its own ideas about its relative dignity and importance, and the traditions of no two families correspond. "A" may not take more than six steps forward from the gadi to meet "B"; and the pride of "B's" ancestors, respected by the family from a date before Asoka, makes it impossible for him to proceed more than three steps beyond the threshold to meet "A."