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headgear, clearing the way with curses and hide whips, and calling monotonously, Clear the path; give heed! Close behind them rode four figures gowned and turbaned in white, their horses' heads tossing wildly from the bit check, flinging frothy spume and blood to left and right upon the onlookers. And last of all, a little group of walking men, with one who faltered with blind, uncertain steps within their midst.

Nearer drew the procession, making for an open space beyond the market's edge, and reaching it came abruptly to a halt. Around them now the great crowd packed rapidly in a circle in tense anticipation. A white-gowned horseman, the Emir's officer, pricked forward a space or two, making his black stallion bound and rear against the savage bit, then sitting motionless he raised his hand and voice and spoke clear and slowly to the listeners.

“A gaya maku, ku jemaa "-the Hausa words rolled forth sonorously. "I am bidden to tell you that this day and now punishment is falling on an evildoer by order of our chief. This man before you did vilely slay a stranger who took shelter in his house. With intent and to the end to rob him he killed the stranger, stabbing him at night while he slept. The deed was proved, and by the Emir's will he dies this day before you all, so that you may behold and take warning of the fate which follows upon wilful murder. May God lengthen the Emir's days."

He ceased, and from the crowd there came a murmur rising and falling, to pass away into a deeper silence than

before. "Amin.' "It is just." "Great is the power of

the Emir." The white horseman reined back to where his fellows stood, giving a low-voiced order.

The crowd in utter silence gazed stolidly upon the scene, squeezing yet more closely together, contracting the circle pressing ever inwards, and as they watched two giant men, the gaolers, moved out into the centre, holding by the arms the wretch condemned to die. His arms and wrists were bound behind his back, and he was naked but for a small blue loincloth. He seemed to move without volition, as though he were asleep. Upon his features, fixed and emotionless, there showed nothing of his terror; even his limbs did not tremble or totter now. Yet in his wideopened eyes a last expression of his tortured soul came to the surface as he went. The eyes rolled from side to side, a little glassy with dilated pupils, as though they sought some way of an escape, yet hopelessly, for there could be

none.

He glanced from one to the other of his gaolers,

watchfully, suspiciously, and once half looked over his shoulder, shrinking from some fancied near approach of danger from behind. They reached the centre of the open space, and there the gaolers pressed upon his shoulders to make him kneel, turning his face and body to the east and keeping restraining hands upon him there. The chief of the police strode out to join the trio, grouped now like statues, motionless. Stripped of his great turban, his gown of office, and all the accoutrements of ordinary use, he showed himself clad only in the loose full trousers and sleeveless undershirt faintly tinged with the blue dye run from the upper robe.

Across his brawny left forearm lay the great sword, broad bladed, heavy, and cross-hilted with iron and brass. With quick, firm steps he crossed the open, and halting took his stand on the left side of the kneeling figure. signed to the two others to fall back.

He

The

A weird scene of savagery and rough justice. The sun had slipped a little lower down the western sky. It threw a foot-long shadow on the dusty ground in front of the bound man and him who stood upright upon his left. murderer's eyes, if they saw aught with comprehension, beheld the open space, the half circle of dark forms packed tight and wedged before him, the blur of stolid, staring faces, and away beyond them the rocky hillocks in the compass of the city walls, with here and there a date palm standing stiffly up above the hut roofs. High overhead some small black specks of winging vultures were circling round and round against the fathomless blue of the sky in never-ending glide. Perhaps he did not look, perhaps his gaze could not take in the last he would ever see of this world. Likely he glanced terrified from the corner of his eye at Death's stern agent standing there, yet he knelt on unmoving.

The executioner pressed lightly with his hand upon the murderer's head to make him lower it and bend the neck. Swiftly he stepped back a measured pace, both hands upon the brass wire hilt, the long iron blade across his shoulder. His elbows rose higher, higher, the sword point drooping now behind his back towards the earth; he lifted himself upon his toe tips gathering energy into one huge whole, then smote downwards with all his might. One bright blade flash, a whistling sound which ended in a dullish thud, and a subdued half groan, half roar of voices from the onlookers.

There in the dust a trunk lay prone, still welling blood; a head six feet away gazed up with staring eyes, and some

where in the upper air a spirit had gone forth to ask for justice in the last court of all.

It was finished, well and quickly done, and at once the crowd broke up, returning to their business unperturbed by the swift tragedy. A few more morbid or more idle than the rest remained a while longer to watch the poor remains being gathered up to be taken forth and cast without respect into the bush for the hyenas to quarrel over, since burial rites are not for such as these; then the laggards too went back to their affairs and joined the hurly-burly once again. The mounted men and he who had so well and strongly used the sword were on their way back to the city, bearing witness to the Emir that his command had been obeyed and justice done.

Now, with the passing day, al asr was at hand; the thin, reedy call to prayer rose, long drawn and quavering, from the market mosque. Some pious ones entered there, putting off their shoes outside the doorway, and joined solemnly in the invocations which proclaimed Allah as the greatest of all, asking mercy for themselves at least from the Merciful, the Compassionate; and here and there a one -who knows?-prayed for it also for the guilt-stained soul which had left this world so speedily. Then they came forth once more to mingle with the herd of chafferers surging even more thickly than before around the ware-stalls and the groups of sellers. The dust fog lay thicker than ever over the market; higher and higher sounded the roar of voices haggling, screaming, shouting one to another from booth to booth; from various points a furious drumming broke out, where dancers, snake charmers, and other side-show artists were attracting audiences.

No word was spoken among any of the swift drama they had witnessed a short half-hour before. Its memory had vanished utterly from minds now wholly occupied with the business of daily life; death had no place there, and tragedy had fled.

Just a yard or two outside the market boundary in the bare, dusty space, abandoned now by every human thing, three vultures with bald white heads and hideous skinny necks waddled and hopped about a large damp patch and thrust foul beaks into the reddened ground.

A. C. G. HASTINGS

LIVING in the country and reading the London papers, one is very often struck by the total difference of outlook between those who make the laws, those who write or speak in public about them, and those who endure them.

Here, in a corner of Blankshire, we see the working of the national machinery from one point of view, our own, but from that point of view we see it very plainly.

Perhaps I had better first of all describe this district of Blankshire.

It is what might be called a semi-rural place. A fine county town gives us a sense of dignity, and the proximity of two very rapidly growing seaside resorts gives us markets and threatens to engulf much of our beautiful country-side, while our lovely villages attract the ghastly bungalows of the small holders and not a few multiple shops which deface our rambling streets. We are also within range of a growing industrial neighbourhood.

This is all to say that our country-side is prosperous. Those of our farmers who go in for milk and small produce do well as long as they chiefly employ their own families. If they will grow corn and insist on having many farm hands, those follies are punished by the losses they entail. We are sorry for the individuals who lose, but we can think of no remedy. We read, indeed, of this or that Cabinet Minister or ex-Minister talking about the land and what it could and should produce, and we shrug our shoulders, knowing that, until the town leaves off buying in the cheapest market," certain essential food-stuffs cannot be grown in our part of the country, though we have farmers and soil second to none.

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Sometimes we go so far as to wonder whether the cheapest market is so very cheap after all, when we see the land around us going out of cultivation and read the total of our foreign bills for food-stuffs, but we have no time or knowledge of how to point this out, nor any platform from which to speak. And we are in general very distrustful of public speaking. "What does he know about it ? we say, when anyone, who is himself unused to the land, comes along with a remedy. And we say this, I am afraid, without regard to the merits of the plan and as a general attitude to all theorists.

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You see, we have had a lot of disappointments. were going to have an agricultural minimum wage, linked

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to the price of corn and sustained by Government. that never came off. We hoped we were going to have some protection of our produce, but this did not materialize; and our farmers, who were patriots" and "defeaters of submarines" during the war, have now become " ' grasping and "greedy," to say nothing of "backward" and oppressive to the labourer, and so forth.

Then we are ill at ease in other ways. It seemed to our labourers a wonderfully good plan to have their wages raised, while their rents were fixed and their cottages secured to them, but it hasn't worked quite as you might expect. For one thing, people left off building cottages to let: they only build to sell; and for another, bad characters who will not work cannot be moved to make way for respectable ones who will. Then the rents of the very few cottages available have quadrupled, so that if a man leaves his job and his cottage he is much poorer, and he is aggravated by the sight of empty cottages that the owner dare not let for fear of not being able to get possession again. For no agreement to give the cottage up on a certain day can be enforced on the cottager apparently, and strange to say, this does not help him to find a house.

Then with what pæans of joy our local innovators greeted the downfall of the two big local squires! The great houses are now shut and will be dismantled, and the squires have gone to live in two former farmhouses, while the farmers have been put in roomy cottages. That makes two cottages less for labourers. Other cottages have been sold to pay death duties and super-taxes. They have been bought by "gentry " who have become poorer.

It seemed a beautiful idea to take away the rich man's money, but the absorbtion of the poor man's houses by another class was not foreseen, nor the general reluctance to own cottage property. In old days the village tradesmen used to invest in cottages, but now they prefer to put their money elsewhere, and no one can be surprised.

The misadventures of Mr. Brown, the butcher of Blankey, are widely quoted. Here is the story as it is related in these parts. Mr. Brown, a hard-working, careful man, invested his money before the war in two cottages. One he lives in, the other he lets. This last being vacant a few years ago, he put a bill in the window. What was his delight when a pleasant stranger came along and offered him 12s. a week, the cottage not being worth so much. Mr. Brown closed with the offer at once, and the stranger moved in with his family.

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