The day came, and Grant emerged to find a considerable line of junglis squatting in the clearing near the main guard, each with the biggest thing in cobras he could lay his hands on. There must have been twenty at least, each done up in a bit of basket, or any odd strip of cloth. Each, with due precautions, was exhibited to Grant, who chose one, paid for it, killed it, and carried it off in its basket to beg a pint of methylated off the doctor-babu wherewith to pickle it. Suddenly there arose the father and mother of a hoo-hah at the main guard. The remaining and unsuccessful junglis, having no further use for their cobras, opened their various receptacles and told the contents to hook it, with the inevitable result that the place was soon a mass of confused and very peevish snakes, each with a grudge against things in general, and ready to get a bit of its own back. It took three of us the rest of the day to ferret them out with shot-guns, and there were several narrow escapes.

Thankful we were that his ambitions for outsize snakes didn't run to hamadryads. Hamadryad ? The big King Cobra who, apart from his power to inject about a teaspoonful of instant and painful death, is the only snake with a long-range habit of vindictive attack. Usually a close inspection of this large and spitefully

sible when it has been reduced to pulp, blown about by a charge from a 12-bore, or variously bedevilled by a concourse of sticks. But what was probably a unique specimen, in that it was undamaged, was one day collected and presented to Grant. And, at the risk of a digression, the way of it was this:

As

By chance a portion of the stockade-line had to be inspected and a post on the Main River rebuilt. The river, at this time of year, was covered with floating débris from collapsed jungle on the banks; this would surge and bump down the rapids, or swim lazily across intervening pools. this scribe stood on the bank, a big half-submerged cottonwood floated by, and, among the upturned roots, lay coiled the very last word in hamadryads. The heavy black head raised itself to inspect the sandbank; the thick greasy coils unfolded, and the snake swam ashore, where he strolled up the bank unconcernedly, yard on yard of him. Deponent fled; it was no time to stand on the order of one's going with a hamadryad approaching, however leisurely. Not so Johnny Gurk, standing by. "Whoop! a snake!" and a big billet of wood poised; wallop, on to the snake. Good lord, now you've done it; he'll see red! Not he. The missile, by all things lucky, caught him on the cervical vertebræ,

A careful approach and a prolonged inspection confirmed the lack of damage.

Can we secure him? We'll try. A stout log is rolled on to him, pinning him six inches behind the head, and a Gurk put to sit on each end. That's made all safe for democracy, anyhow. But he can't remain like that for ever. Hey, Babu-ji -to the doctor-babu visible in the dispensary,-a pound of cottonwool and the chloroform bottle, quick! The wool is made into a cup, and soaked in chloroform. This, in a long cleft cane, is smothered over the head of the hamadryad. Prolonged and anxious pause. And then he woke up. loose yards of him flicked and belted about like summer lightning, and the sand flew in wisps, but the superimposed Gurks stuck to their log, and there was no biting. Jove, he was furious. The doctor-babu danced about on alternate legs in an agony of apprehension, hugging the bottle and venting himself in highly technical warcries-the complete advisory anæsthetist; the crowd cheered and abused; the chloroform cap stuck to its work.

The

Presently the threshing grew less; the coils formed and straightened and twisted again. Persistence got it in the end; in five minutes it was atwitching; in ten all was still. The cottonwool was wrapped and poked round the head, and a

all snug. Not till a quarter of an hour of immobility had passed was it safe to remove the log. Then poke and push him a bit. Nothing doing. Clean dead; suffocated; and ab-so-lutely undamaged.

Stretch him between pegs and measure him. Twelve feet five and a half inches. A unique prize.

Now how to pickle him. Methylated spirit by the gallon forms no part of jungle equipment. No; but ration rum does. A 4-gallon keg of proof spirit was dug out of the rationgodown. The bung was knocked out and the hole enlarged, allowing of the insertion of the hamadryad, which was passed in hand over hand. The hole was filled in and sealed down. The keg was presently despatched, with compliments, to Grant, who, with its help, rounded off an entirely unnecessary chapter of his writings with an exclamatory passage worthy of the Great Sea Serpent.

Thence back to the local H.Q. for tea with Phayre, our one white doctor. In the middle of this an agitated and rather exhausted messenger arrived from Labêk, three marches distant, bringing an urgent chit from Grant. What's up now? The chit, on being opened, contained a demand for information on what appeared to be a question of tribal obstetrics, and was passed to the doctor for elucidation, who tore it up.

Grant was undoubtedly writing a book, though he never said so. He had had a row with the one really scientific Society to which he belonged-one of his many unnecessary rows. But, from veiled hints, one gathered that he hoped to read his interminable memoir before one of the semi-learned Societies, to audiences composed of middle-aged babblers "interested" in savages and unusual places, who had never been a mile from their dinner in their lives. He would strew the mess - table and floor with sheets of manuscript, and meals for all of us became fitful -and ourselves fretful-in trying to get him to clear the decks and let us get at the table. His sotto voce hints at the nature of his ploy were confirmed by the finding of a loose sheet blown out on to the parade ground, "Chapter 23,' 'Chapter 23," and bearing the chortly title of "Bodily Oddities."

Were we never to be rid of this incubus, this nightmare, this Old Man of the Sea? Days and weeks passed, till we forgot when we had last had a sound meal or a normal life. Tempers wore thin; Ranbir even lost his enthusiasm; and the junglis grew increasingly restive, whatever Crooke did to pacify them, at what they came to think of as a meddlesome inquisitiveness. It was impossible even to offer them the excuse that the sahib

V.

had bats in his belfry, and must be humoured, since the jungli tradition of how to treat a lunatic was altogether too abrupt and gory. What made it worse was that he could never stick for long to one line; it was snakes, or anthropometry, or dogs' ears, or heredity, or weather, or questions whichto my mind rightly-the junglis regarded as hitting below the belt. And still he wrote and wrote. I read all the stuff many months later. He had a genius for wrapping up the minimum of information in the maximum of verbiage. His statements, as long as his family tree, had as many collaterals. It seemed impossible for him to keep to the point for long, and a superabundant imagination backed by extensive reading spread his ideas athwart his neat manuscript with the catholic embrace of a Virginia creeper.

The temptation to pull his leg was insistent, as, for instance, to tell him of the fivetoed crocodile (a rare species), or about the man-eating thunder bug, or about the uhu bird, he that flieth backward to keep the sand out of his eyes. But it would have been too easy. Also, it would have gone down in the book, and his facile audiences in England might have finished by taking the stories au grand sérieux. We refrained.

But the man was a sahib all

right; to the very last he never said or did anything offensive; nor, in spite of the unending worry we got from him, did he ever get cross word or crooked answer from us.

There was a tedious gap when absolutely nothing happened, and the clouds, which usually only poured warm water on us, rained ramrods. The whole world went out in a sea of dense mist, where you breathed as much water as air, and the toadstools and mushrooms grew on the boots while you watched them. We played a good deal of bridge, I remember, of the elementary sort played in those days before auction; Macmillan very silent and inscrutable, Grant extreme-ly-pre-cise, and calling everything by its severely correct title; and the old Doomworm raving to Heaven at regular intervals about the shortcomings of a hand which, as he truly said, Job would have hesitated to sit down on. And then for days we'd sit and smoke and do nothing but watch the inside of Niagara as viewed through the doorway. Grant seemed even to have written himself to a standstill. Presently the season eased up a bit. Macmillan got a brain-wave, and went off to a neighbouring village to fetch the local witchcraft artist. His arrival was as good as a sherry and bitters to Grant; bucked him up no end. Religion !

The writer had to go off on an extended job just then. He

left the two hard at it, immersed in the hoips and godwots of a monkey mythology.

Returning a fortnight later, he found an ugly state of affairs.

Grant was missing.

With him Ranbir; also the Madrassi.

The three had been absent twenty-four hours, and anxiety growing acute, Crooke had examined the kit and gear left behind. From evidence of what was taken and what left it became clear that the three had pushed off on their own, with an extended absence in view, since considerable foodstuffs had gone with them. Strangely, the main gate sentries knew nothing. Grum Sahib came and went, and nobody said him nay; wasn't he always talking to the villagers? Ranbir ? The Madrassi? They may have come and gone. There was the cookhouse outside. Had they all gone out together? No; of that there was positive denial.

So there had been a rendezvous outside. Cunning fox, Grant. Damn the fellow! But further consideration modified this a little. Inconsequent, hectic, unbalanced, his subject had become an obsession with him. The long gaps and delays must have maddened him; possibly he had at length realised what screeds of tosh he was writing, on the strength of what little real information. He must have resolved to cut the painter and go and hunt