comforting when far below me I caught sight of my camp fire and my little camp. Next day I went to the base of the Nilgiri peak, which is said never to have been scaled save by one individual (and he of very doubtful veracity), and well I could believe it. Viewed from here, I could not get away from the impression that the two peaks, Mukarti and Nilgiri, were two live things, challenged and challenger: the challenger, Nilgiri Peak, rearing up as if on the point of a spring over the rift at his adversary Mukarti; the latter, motionless and watchful, awaiting the onset with his two great ears pricked eternally over space. Room enough here for a world of legend and fairy tale, were the Toda man a little more alive to his opportunities. As it is, he uses Mukarti as the jumpingoff place (and a better jump it would be hard to find) for the souls of his dead brethren and their buffaloes, when they take their departure for the Toda underworld. Measured roughly, the Indian Ocean is some sixty miles distant from here, looking westwards; and early in the afternoon I had turned my glass towards it. There was, however, nothing to be seen barring two or three solid-looking black things, inclining from the vertical, low down in what I took to be the western sky. Later, however, with the sun nearer the horizon, I turned my glass in this direction again, and what I had taken to be part of the sky now proved to be the crinkled floor of the Indian Ocean, its far edge mingling with the sky and its near edge with the haze that quite hid the coast-line. The black things were sailing-craft heeling to the breeze. Through the glass I could make out others, and their rig and what sail they carried. A steamer was also making down the coast, her progress visible as that of the hour-hand of a clock-that is, one could see no movement, but only that it had moved and kept on doing so. My companions, unlike those of stout Cortez on another peak gazing at another ocean, did not appear to be at any wild surmise, unless it were, as they dosed, how long it would be before they were back in camp. Mukarti Peak, in order to keep himself from toppling into the plains, thrusts out a long and jagged flying-buttress right down into the forests far below. One side of this buttress is sheer precipice; the other, grass slopes as steep as grass slopes can be, and precipice and slope meet at the top in a veritable razoredge, although a very jagged one. I spent an exceedingly toilsome day in working this buttress, for there is no kind of walking more toilsome than on the sides of one's boots on a dry grass slope. I saw three or four different herds of ibex, all in quite unget-at-able places; and by showing myself, I got them to perform the most astonishing feats of agility on the face of the cliff. Those who have seen the wild goats on the Mappin terraces in the Zoological Gardens walk across the face of their miniature cliff at the bidding of their keeper, can form some idea of it. Yet even these walls of apparently sheer rock do not afford the ibex safety from that curse of all Indian shooting-grounds, whether plain or mountain, the wild dog. These brutes have been seen making better time along a cliff-face in pursuit of ibex than the ibex themselves. I have not witnessed this myself, but I have heard the wild dog at work far below me, and seen the terrified ibex come up from below and take to the downs above the cliffs. It was time to leave Mukarti and to turn my unwilling steps homewards. For two days I dawdled along a river-bank idly wetting a line with a view to carp and only pulling out trout, which were out of season and had to be returned. There were excursions also after that very evasive fellow the Nilgiri snipe. And so into Ootacamund. I have been in India a good many years, and have sampled nearly every variety of its sport, scenery, and climate, whether of mountain, foot-hill, plain, river-bed, or jungle. I have taken, with rifle, spear, rod, and gun, a modest toll of nearly every game animal that exists in the Great Peninsula. On mantelpiece and wall are mementos, great and small, of them all, ranging from jaw of mahseer and tusk of boar to buffalo and bison heads. Each has its memories. But pleasantest of them all is that afforded by the plain homely head of an old saddle-back and one of his forefeet. I like to think that those glassy goaty old eyes have seen, and that gamey foot has traversed, just the same scenes as I have the green downs, the purling streams, and the black cliffs of the Blue Mountains. X. A MAN IN THE MAKING. BY BARTIMEUS. He was one of those reddish creatures : red hair, brown eyes that looked as if they had sparks in them, and a profusion of freckles about his nose and cheek-bones. Hair and eyes were an inheritance from his Mother, whose Grandmother lived in one of those damp mysterious-looking palaces reflected in great numbers in the canals of Venice. The freckles he got from his Father, who was pure Celtic Scots, and named him Euan. Euan Raphael M'Neil, to give you the whole thing, but his Mother called him "Raffy.' I. explained that China was a very long way off, and two years was a long time when you looked at it from this end. And he was their only son. They stayed at an oldfashioned hotel near the dockyard gates. The windows looked out across the Hard at the Victory swinging to the tide, and the red-brown roofs and gables of Gosport. Submarines and destroyers passed in and out all day, and just as they were sitting down to dinner a mammoth battleship glided majestically up harbour from the mysterious outer sea. The air At the time he was ap- smelt of salt and seaweed, and pointed to his first seagoing nearly every passer-by was a ship he stood perhaps 5 feet bluejacket or marine. But no 4 inches, but mere inches or one in the hotel seemed to lack of them is no criterion notice these things: and Euan, when one suddenly finds one- eating boiled mutton and caperself a full-fledged midshipman. sauce in the bow-window of the Moreover, he had been ap- coffee-room with its air of pointed to the new Flagship shabby dignified antiquity, realof the China Squadron, and ised that little round him had was due to leave England in changed since Nelson stepped a few days' time. Also he down from the adjacent sallyhad a dirk. . . port to his waiting gig, to emNo, decidedly inches did not bark in that same Victory for matter. His Mother and Father accompanied him to Portsmouth on the eve of the day he was to join his ship. Euan was inclined to protest at this as having a flavour of "wet-nursing" about it, but his Mother the last time, and Tom Cringle and his friends ruffled in to that very coffee room and called for spiced brandy-andwater. . . Both his Mother and Father sat on his bed after he had undressed and turned in. They all kept up a kind of forced joviality, and even indulged in a mild pillow-fight; but after Euan's Mother had kissed him good night and gone to her own room, his Father sat on, twisting his empty pipe slowly round in his strong hands, staring through the open windows at the lights across the harbour. "You're sixteen, Euan," he said presently. "The next two years are the ones that matter most in all your life. When you are quite an old man -a smile lurked beneath his bristly ginger moustache, 66 'as old as I am even, you will find that these next two years are the holding-ground for your soul's anchor." He chewed his pipe-stem. "This ain't going to be a pi-jaw. I've told you already all you need to know all there is to know. You know about women, Euan, and all that. . . . There's only one way to keep a clean mind, and that's to sweat good and hearty every day and turn in dog-tired. . . . He rose and stood looking down at his son with grim wistfulness. "Go on believing in the things Mother taught you. Don't get too jolly manly to say your prayers; and write home once a week." He turned and strode to the door. "Come back a man. Good night." They walked with him to the Dockyard gate the following morning. Euan would have preferred to perform the short journey unaccompanied, but he wore his uniform and dirk, and Euan glanced at his Mother and Father. He had a curious feeling he mentally described to himself as "bowelly." His inside seemed to be composed entirely of some restless unstable fluid. He fingered his dirk hilt in search of comfort. The surface was a palecoloured pebbly substance his Mother called shagreen and his Father said was shark-skin a material (according to his Father) favoured for the manufacture of sword-hilts, because it did not grow slippery with blood. . . . Its contact with his fingers heartened him. The impulse to throw his arms round his Mother's neck passed as swiftly as it came. He grinned at his Father, who was looking at him with a kind of critical anxiety. old cock," said "So long, his Father. We'll look out for you about tea-time if they'll let you come ashore." direction indicated by the policeman. gulp. "Why did we do it? Oh, why" Her husband pressed her arm as they retraced their steps. "Because he's all we've got. All we prize and love and value in the world. He's good stuff, Nina, though I say it what shouldn't. He's worthy of the His Mother and Father, who lacked the fortifying influence of brass buttons, dirk, and patches, stood staring after him till he vanished from sight behind a pile of rusty buoys. His Mother gave a sort of Empire. And now, so are we." That first day on board remained for all time a tangle of blurred impressions, few of which ever succeeded in detaching themselves into separate distinct memories. Euan was greeted at the gangway by the Midshipman of the Watch, a saturnine youth a couple of years his senior, who adjured him in a swift whisper to flee while there was yet time: the assurance that the Commander was a cannibal and that the Sub was frequently tried for manslaughter of junior midshipmen did little to give him self-confidence as he stood forlornly on the vast Quarter-deck and awaited recognition by an Olympian Lieutenant. This dignitary, who carried a telescope under his arm and wore a sword-belt round a wasp-like frock-coated waist, eyed him coldly through a monocle, and said in a tone of complete mental and physical exhaustion: Carry on." Under the guidance of the Midshipman of the Watch (who, Euan decided, had the largest feet and ears and the tightest II. trousers of any mortal he had ever seen), he was conducted forward to the Commander's cabin. The breakfast hour was still in progress, and the batteries were crowded with men sitting about and smoking. A diminutive Marine Bugler, with a countenance of serene childish purity, strutted past, and eyed Euan superciliously. As Euan's guide paused before a curtained doorway in the superstructure, a stout Petty Officer Quartermaster stepped into his line of vision, addressing the Marine Bugler: "If I 'ears you usin' that hawful langwidge again was wafted to the ears of the shocked newcomer. Euan felt himself propelled by a hand on his elbow into the doorway, and left there in full view of a big man with a curly beard in the act of lighting a pipe. He wore the uniform of a Commander. His cabin was littered with halfunpacked trunks and suit-cases, golf-clubs, guns, and fishingrods. Photographs and dogbiscuits strewed the the chairs and bunk, a red setter lay with her nose on her paws, |