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 sudden shifts stopped. I was flying by grace of engine power and inherent stability.

I squirmed in my straps as I felt it. I was helpless, seven thousand feet up, with my throttle full open, flying full speed, wild and unpiloted—with the controls four feet in front of me which I could not touch. I felt myself amuck, a crazy missile in the sky. I shot up, slanting to the left, tipped and started to dive. With the engine on full it frightfully increased the pull of gravity; I zoomed with the ground rushing up to me—when the radio caught me again.

It leveled me off, straightened me and sent me ahead of the three-seater once more; and held me there, as on a leash, for an hour. We were over Ohio, with Lake Erie lying on the left, when I was sent circling and the three-seater passed me and flew on far ahead.

Still circling, I watched it go eastward and diminish to a speck. It was inconceivable that it still piloted me; yet I was piloted, for I was circling, level and steady; but the character of the control had changed. Another pilot, not so abrupt and positive, held me in his hand.

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 He was on the ground, I realized; for no other airplane was in sight until one rose with two men aboard.

They flew above me, while the ground pilot kept me level and steady. The extra man in the new plane came aboard and brought me down to an unmarked meadow next to what appeared to be an ordinary farmhouse. Neither the pilot nor the two mechanics who inspected my machine furnished me any account of Bane or of Cawder. It was a stop for fuel, they told me; and immediately the pilot took me on.

He remained at the controls, not leaping and returning me to radio guidance, after we were again in the air; he brought me over the mountains and to the lake in the hold in the hills.

Having wheels, not pontoons, we landed on the green lawn to the east of the water where an empty three-seater stood, its engine giving off heat vapors.

The drawn-up doors of hangars displayed a dozen single-seaters, two-seaters, three and four, at which mechanics tinkered and tuned.

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 Donley directed some of them; and I saw the red head of Kinvarra bent in an intent inspection.

A blue seaplane, of the pattern of the effigy's, taxi-ed on the lake and the beach clattered, was silent, and clattered again with a motor-testing. The air of final preparations pervaded the place—practical, careful preparations.

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approached me and Kinvarra straightened for a stare at me. Nothing in their manner today indicated consideration of me as a prospective partner; I had passed into another category as regards them. Donley nodded to me coolly—very coolly—and cautioned the mechanic who unstrapped me, so that I could rise from the seat, "Leave his hands as they are."

"How long has Bane been back?" I asked Donley who debated before he decided to inform me.

"A little while."

"Miss Lacey with him?"

"Yes."

"Logan still here?"

"At the house," said Donley and returned to Kinvarra.

I saw them beside the airplanes not as pilots but, today, as glorified gunmen. Nothing of the dreamer or of the impossibilist adhered

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 to these two—or to Boggs and Mendell for that matter. Much more definitely than yesterday I was able to place them—gunmen from Cawder's criminal organization, gunmen trained to the modern vehicle, the airplane, and introduced to the modern weapon, the airplane bomb.

Much more positively than yesterday, they impressed me as purely practical souls adhering to Bane because he had started something which they would carry out as they pleased and for their own purposes and ends. No; nothing of the impractical about them. Bane had trained them and put into their hands tremendous engines of destruction which they would employ for no fanciful revenge upon society but for loot for themselves and their women.

I was thrust into an automobile; and after three minutes, arrived at the terrace where, as yesterday, ladies lounged; but their temper, too, was changed. The atmosphere also was of completed preparations, contemplation of great gains to be got—and risks to be run.

Donley's bride, more over-rouged and with

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 her bleached hair fuzzier, perched on a stone balustrade overlooking the lake and puffed, with imperfect complaisance, at her cigarette while she turned the diamond rings on her fingers. She dreamed, not of taking over authority, but of bigger diamonds and more of them. Mendell's beloved stood on the tile pavement tossing grain to doves and dreamed, I was sure, not of domination, but of brighter silks for her body, richer food and service.

Sally Gessler arose from an inconspicuous seat in the shadow.

"So you're back," she said with some satisfaction; and the sight of her partly reassured me. "You must have been kept going."

"I've been moving," I agreed.

"Danced you, did they?"

"Is that what they call it? Yes; they did."

She considered me, with her dark, naturally heavy and languorous, drooped over her green irises which were bright with excitement. Gin supplied some of the stimulation; perhaps a drug helped with the brightness; but there were other excitations too.

She seemed thinner than yesterday, drawing

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 her dress with her long hands close to her figure. This was a reflex habit; she was making no particular play for me, except as she assigned me to a scheme of her own running concurrently with the greater enterprise about her and running somewhat, at least, contrary to it.

"You've had company most of the time?" she inquired. This of course, was why she stopped me; she wanted to know whether Bane had kept me with him and with her rival when in Chicago.

"Not too much," I told her and asked, "Where's Logan?"

"He's inside," she replied, accenting it in a way I was shortly to understand. My guide pushed me toward the house whither I proceeded readily enough after I had glanced through the open doorway.

Helen Lacey hovered in the entry awaiting me. Bane was not about; nor did she expect him suddenly to appear. For the moment, she was free of him; that was what I gathered at my glimpse of her. She wanted the moment with me.

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 The imminence of the enterprise, which excited the others, terrified her. She had learned the plan.

She looked at me but did not speak to me; she said to my guard, "You may leave Lieutenant Carrick with me."

"I'm to put him with Lieutenant Logan," the man replied.

"Who told you?" she demanded.

"Mr. Donley; he said it was Mr. Bane's orders."

"That must have been before I saw Mr. Bane; he's just been here with me. You may leave Lieutenant Carrick with me."

If she failed to convince, she succeeded in confusing him.

At best, her situation with regard to Bane must have puzzled the mechanics and pilots quartered across the lake. It was none too plain to the pilots in the house. Kvery one knew that Bane craved her praise and approval; everyone knew she had certain influence with him. So the man modified his original intentions and let me accompany her into the library.

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 To be sure, he followed to the door and he made no move to unlock my hands. She did not risk the mistake of requesting it, but she did close the door upon him. There was no other door to the room and the windows on that side overlooked a sheer drop to deep water, so he contented himself with standing sentinel.

She glanced out the window and what she saw held her for a moment fascinated in her fright. With one hand, she clasped my arm, with the other she pointed across the lake where a crew was launching a seaplane.

"See; they've just changed another and are putting it into the water."

"Another what?" I asked.

"Another land machine into a seaplane; they're taking off all the wheels and putting on pontoons. They've decided on the ship attack; they're striking at sea!"

"When?"

"Tomorrow—early tomorrow morning. He's told me the time."

"What are they striking? What ship?"

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 "He hasn't told me that. He said, I'd see. But it's the Wotan, I know. It's the Wotan!"

"The !" I repeated.

"The new big ship! The greatest ship on the seas! Here! Here's what it is; here's what it has aboard! It's making its maiden voyage now, you know. Here!"

She picked up a newspaper, showed it to me and then spread it for me upon a table while I bent over to read.

The Wotan, just completed and the greatest and fastest ship on the water, was making its maiden trip. Fifty millions it had cost; ten thousand passengers it carried; a newspaper column was crowded with the list of only the most famous names. It was bringing over Rembrandts', Rubens' and Raphaels' for which the Metropolitan museum had paid ten millions; ten millions in stones from Amsterdam, emeralds, rubies and Rand diamonds were aboard; twenty million more was in platinum and gold bullion.

The vessel was due at New York tomorrow noon.

I straightened, staring at her; and I better

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 understood Donley's and Kinvarra's caution with me and, also the absent-mindedness of the ladies on the terrace. Before them lay loot—loot gathered in one place and put at their mercy—beyond dreams of buccaneers. Forty millions for the trouble of the taking; five or ten millions more, perhaps, if they bothered to despoil, personally, the passengers.

The airplane put the plan—almost any plan—within their power. With airplanes and bombs, and night to cover them, they could fly and at dawn do whatever it pleased them to do—if no warning went before them.

"Where's your father?" I asked her and she winced.

"Here; but I haven't seen him. They won't let me."

"They've locked him up?"

"Yes."

"Logan's here?"

"He's locked up too."

"Then they're locking me up."

"That's it."

"That all?" I asked.

"All?" she echoed and shivered. "What do you mean?"

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 "Did he bring me back just to lock me up here?"

"He's some idea of his own with you," she said, suddenly, tightening her clasp on my arm. "I was with him this morning, you know."

"I thought so," I told her. "Who was the third with you?"

"A new pilot he was bringing on from Chicago."

"Who danced me? Bane himself, wasn't it?"

She nodded, her little fingers clinging close tome. "I thought, once, he had killed you."

"I thought he might, by accident," I admitted. "But I didn't think he would purposely, while you were with him."

"I begged for you, of course," she said. "I begged for you."

"I was sure you did."

"He let you off—but he'll not let off the ship! The rest of them mean simply to rob; they're after the diamonds and gold. But he—you've heard him."

"I've heard him," I said.

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flung back the door. The force and abruptness of it declared him before we saw him.

"Here you are!" he greeted me. "Had your little talk, have you?"

"We've had a little talk," I admitted, manifestly.

"I was sending you," he mocked me by exaggerated deference in his manner, "up to your room to rest. You've been through a bit: and you've rather more before you. You want rest; you'd better go to your room."

I stepped into the hallway with him. He was the stronger; the mechanic was there; also my hands were cuffed together with steel. The moment, however, probably offered my best chance of escape and I tried to take it with the result that I was flung down, allowed to rise and thereupon led to a little room in one of the rounded towers which presided over the lake.

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 The mechanic twisted at the band about my wrists and removed the cuffs before he left me. He merely locked me in and I was perfectly prisoned.

The door of the little room proved, upon investigation, to be of steel grained like wood; the two windows were tall and mullioned. Exteriorly, or if considered casually from within, they appeared to have been designed simply for a picturesque effect; but actually the stone mullions divided the panes into such narrow slits that no one possibly could press through.

I heard through the ceiling the steady pacing of feet and I realized that above me was a similar room confining Pete, probably.

With respect to Pete also, Bane had some idea of his own. Undoubtedly before Pete, as well as before myself, stretched a considerable experience; and before the girl who blamed herself for it all.

Where was she? With Bane? Or locked up like me?

Through the tall slits between the mullions, I inspected the lake and the bit of beach where wheels were being removed from monoplanes

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 and pontoons put on. One by one, separately always to avoid show of many machines, the seaplanes rose, were tested and returned.

Single-seaters and two-seaters with machine guns, they were. The great weight-carriers for the ton bombs were not hangared here. This place specialized in the combat and pursuit types—and radio controlled machines run by automatons.

These were the escorts and protectors of the bombing biplanes being mustered elsewhere—just over the hills, perhaps, upon another lake or on waters a hundred miles away. Or perhaps they were being prepared singly, not to be gathered and squadroned until tomorrow's dawn when they would be drawn, by radio commands, to the determined positions in the path of the Wotan, on her maiden voyage, with her great passenger list, her cargo of paintings, diamonds, emeralds, platinum and gold.

How simply the airplanes could strike, with no warning given!

I thought, now, not of mere robbery and the seizure of the ship under the threat of

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 bombs. I thought of the ton bombs poised under airplanes hovering above the ship—and of Bane's broken brain. I went again to the steel panels of the door. I went to the window and tried with my pocket knife to pick the mortar from between the stones of the mullions.

With my supper—I supposed they would send me supper—I might procure a better implement. But with my supper something different arrived.

A servant, accompanied by another who attended to the opening and fastening of the door, laid a tray and departed.

I sat at the little table, shaking out the napkin which lay on the tray, when in the center of the clean white square of linen, three pencilled numerals caught my eye, 18—35—21.

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figures were faint but freshly written, without blurring. They bore no resemblance to a laundry mark. They suggested to me a message.

Their interpretation, at that moment, was wholly puzzling, but their purpose seemed to me, clearly, to convey some information of special and highly personal significance. A girl had pencilled them, I thought. They were large and flourishy figures with feminine twists; and, as I looked at them, I thought of not Helen Lacey but Sally Gessler.

Of course I examined everything else on the tray and the tray itself; but nothing explained them. There they were by themselves, in their pencilled flourishes; and they had been sent to me to tell me, what?

They might be intelligence of the strength of airplane squadrons; they might refer to distances; they might apply to—anything. But whatever their interpretation, already

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 they meant to me that someone in the house was secretly scheming forme. And this someone, I believed to be Sally Gessler.

I knew that Helen Lacey would help me, if she could; and it might be that she had pencilled these figures; but they attached in my mind to Sally and her particular sort of scheming against Bane.

I dampened the center of the napkin, obliterated the figures and ate supper with better appetite than I would have credited a few minutes before. Something more promising than the chance of my removing a stone mullion in a tower window, was afoot in the house.

The same servants who had brought the tray, removed it together with the tableware and the napkin now innocent of numerals. Nothing else was sent me; no one else called. Night spread over the cloudless and moonless sky.

The first hour of darkness continued like the day; airplanes pushed into the water, rose and were tested; airscrews drummed and droned; lights streaked across the stars and the spread of wings eclipsed the constellations.

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 But shortly after nine o'clock, this ceased. The sky, the lake, the land became silent. Lights switched out; everything and everyone was prepared for the enterprise of the morning which would proceed, undoubtedly, as it was planned.

I lay down, trying to picture the enterprise prevented. How? By warning to Pete's and my seaplane squadron? What warning would have reached them?

Probably they had found Pete's machine wrecked on the sea; so they had reported him lost after a parachute jump. Me, they would have reported as lost, machine and all. Our disappearance must have puzzled them; but it would have given them no real warning.

I lay trying to sleep but succeeded at semiconsciousness only in which suddenly I was jerked by the shock of the sensation of being "danced", with my hands cuffed with steel, in an airplane with radio control—and a madman running the radio. That was what Bane meant by the bit I'd been through with rather more before me. Rather more before Pete, too? And what before her?

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 I twisted over, clutching at the couch.

My door was opened, without any preliminary rap, by two men who switched on the light and-returned to me my own clothing.

"You're flying today; put these on," one commanded me.

Flying? Yesterday I had flown, being "danced"; then my borrowed garments had sufficed. There was a new implication this morning.

I did not imagine that Bane's mind was so broken that he fancied me converted to his plan; no, he had some other idea of his own regarding me. It involved me in flight, perhaps "dancing" again. Nevertheless, I put on my own clothes and was led out under the stars. The time was three.

Women and men whispered and embraced on the terrace; I made out Mendell's voice and his wife's sobbing a goodbye; I heard Sally Gessler speak; Boggs replied. I listened and looked, in the starlight, for Helen Lacey. She was not discoverable by me.

Pete spoke to me, "Hello".

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 I answered and they pulled us further apart, escorting him first to the pier.

Airplanes were rising from the lake; the darkness drummed with their drone. They put Pete in a boat and shoved me aboard another which was rowed out to a moored monoplane; and as I stood in the boat, I heard Helen Lacey's voice:

"You said I'd be with you."

"You'll be with me," replied Bane.

"No!" This came in a cry of protest. It was not a reply to him; she was trying, helplessly, to stop something which was being done.

"All right now," said Bane. "You'll be all right; you'll come back—if I do."

She made no reply. A monoplane flew up from the water; immediately another followed it.

I was thrust aboard the seaplane beside which I stood and lifted into the seat pit.

Expecting to have my hands cuffed behind me as yesterday, I grasped a control wheel in front of me. No one opposed this, except to shift my hands slightly whereupon a steel clamp came down. Someone twisted a lock bar

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 and secured me; someone else buckled the ordinary straps over my shoulders.

I yelled across the water to warn Pete, in case they were trying the same trick with him and a shout of his echoed to me. They had trussed us both; and though a pilot remained with me, I knew it was only to take me into the air.

When he had me high over the lake, he leaped and I was alone again, flying with my, hands clamped to a wheel which was only a dummy. It connected with no controls; the actual control was by radio.

I was swung to right, to left, lifted a little and jerked left again. This did not feel like the "dancing" of yesterday. Other airplanes flew in front and behind me and on both sides. I was aware that I was manœuvered to put me in alignment in some formation.

A plane passed me close; but I thought it was unintentional. It blundered by so stupidly that I was sure that it also was run by radio. I saw a head and shoulders before the stars. It might have been another man, trussed like me; it might have been a wood and wax effigy.

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 His head did not move and he had no guidance of his plane.

Someone, however, pulled him into position; the squadron straightened and flew toward the dawn. Not only the stars now gave direction; the east evidenced itself with a pallid promise of light. Eight machines composed the squadron in which I flew—eight monoplanes proceeding by pairs; for we held no real squadron formation. In front of me, flew two machines—the one which had nearly hit me and another which seemed to control it. Behind me was a machine which, I felt, piloted me. On my right, flew two similar pairs.

Four radio-controlled machines, four manpiloted monoplanes composed our squadron. At a distance to my left, and too dimly seen to be counted, flew another formation; and we all flew fast. The early morning lights of New Jersey towns and cities twinkled below us and before the east paled grey we picked up the glow of New York and passed it southward, putting out over the sea and holding, on our left, Long Island.

We were flying, relative to the air, five miles

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 a minute, I estimated, and the drift of the sky favored us as I could witness from the smoke of steamers as we swept out to sea. It was not yet twenty minutes since we had risen from the lake in the hills and we were over the ocean in force, commanding the sky and the water with power to work whatever we wished.

Because the machines in my immediate squadron flew in four pairs, I supposed that the four subordinates of the luncheon table on the terrace were the pilots—Boggs and Donley, Mendell and Kinvarra. Bane was not in this formation, I believed. I was sure, at least, that he was not piloting me; for the impulses which swung me to right or left and increased or decreased the speed of my engine, to keep me in position, reached me in manner unlike yesterday. Another hand held me. Other hands held Pete and the two effigies in the other radio-controlled machines. The dawn was displaying them to me.

In front of me flew, first, a monoplane with a dummy in the pilot's pit; behind it flew Boggs, I believed. On my right flew another

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 effigy of a man; next Donley, I thought; then flew Pete, cuffed and strapped. I guessed that Mendell controlled him and Kinvarra steered me. But I could feel, by the way we all were steered and shifted, that command was not in our squadron; our whole formation obeyed orders from elsewhere. This elsewhere must be the squadron of six machines which had started the journey on our left but which now was flying below us.

Rather, we had risen above this other squadron, which had held to a height of five thousand feet. We flew at eight thousand, I guessed.

Four of them were double or triple-seaters; two seemed to be singles. One of the big machines was the flag-ship, undoubtedly. Bane was aboard it. Aboard it with him, was she?

In my ears, with the drum of the motors, was her cry which had come to me in the darkness on the lake:

You said I'd be with you!

You'll be with me, said Bane.

No!

From the north emerged four larger ma-

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 river full speed. The river seems broader above the Fallabar, but this is mainly on account of its being temporarily unencumbered with islands. A good deal of the bank we have passed by since leaving Nazareth Bay on the south side has been island shore, with a channel between the islands and the true south bank.

The day soon grew dull, and looked threatening, after the delusive manner of the dry season. The climbing plants are finer here than I have ever before seen them. They form great veils and curtains between and over the trees, often hanging so straight and flat, in stretches of twenty to forty feet or so wide, and thirty to sixty or seventy feet high, that it seems incredible that no human hand has trained or clipped them into their perfect forms. Sometimes these curtains are decorated with large bell-shaped, bright-coloured flowers, sometimes with delicate sprays of white blossoms. This forest is beyond all my expectations of tropical luxuriance and beauty, and it is a thing of another world to the forest of the Upper Calabar, which, beautiful as it is, is a sad dowdy to this. There you certainly get a great sense of grimness and vastness; here you have an equal grimness and vastness with the addition of superb colour. This forest is a Cleopatra to which Calabar is but a Quaker. Not only does this forest depend on flowers for its illumination, for there are many kinds of trees having their young shoots, crimson, brown-pink, and creamy yellow: added to this there is also the relieving aspect of the prevailing fashion among West African trees, of wearing the trunk white with here and there upon it splashes of pale pink lichen, and vermilion-red fungus, which alone is sufficient to prevent the great mass of vegetation from being a monotony in green.

All day long we steam past ever-varying scenes of loveliness whose component parts are ever the same, yet the effect ever different. Doubtless it is wrong to call it a symphony, yet I know no other word to describe the scenery of the Ogowé. It is as full of life and beauty and passion as any symphony Beethoven ever wrote: the parts changing, interweaving, and returning. There are leit motifs here in it, too. See the papyrus ahead; and you know when you get abreast of it you


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 chines—biplanes with long, lozenge-like pendants below them. Bombers, they were—the seaplanes bearing Bane's ton bombs of TNT. Their appearance caused only slight shift of our course; their timing was almost perfect for their appointment. Undoubtedly they talked, back and forth by radio, with our flag-ship; and after they joined us, our speed decreased to theirs. They flew lowest, perhaps two thousand feet above the sea.

On the ocean lay a sharp elliptical seed. The white wash of a wake declared that it moved but its advance was so slow in comparison to ours that it seemed simply to lie on the sea and swell as we flew at it.

Toward it we leaped at three levels, the four bombing biplanes lowest; above them, the squadron of six; then, we. Swiftly, in the magic manner of objects approached by airplane, the seed expanded and lengthened and stood out of the water until it became a ship. A minute more, and it was no mere ship. Longer and wider and higher out of the ocean it grew until it became, beyond doubt, the Wotan on her maiden voyage, the greatest vessel on the seas!

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roll of the passengers ran in my mind and the catalogue of the loot, as I watched the bombing biplanes descend. They flew in straight for the ship and from below the first plane in line, a bomb was released.

Down and looping slightly forward, the bomb dropped and struck the water beside the ship. It dotted the sea with a spot of white; the white mightily erupted and upheaved. I watched the water no longer. I stared at the ship.

Its lights were out. That, I saw, before a saw it stagger. It swayed, swung and lurched to the right. The terrific shock of the ex—plosion first had registered on the electrical installation; then seams opened, the engines stopped, steering was smashed. Momentum only bore the Wotan on. With the lights, the radio likely had been wrecked; it could send no call for help, no appeal to the shore.

From my height overhead, I could see on

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 the sky-deck only little specks appearing, clustering and scattering and clustering thicker as more pushed up from below—passengers they were, I knew; people in pandemonium scrambling and screaming for the boats.

Yet I saw, too, that discipline survived among the crew. Below, electricians worked at the lights and, beyond doubt, also at the radio; for the lights flashed on.

Instantly another bomb went down on the other side. It burst and lights went out and stayed out. The specks on the sky-deck shook and scattered at the shock like little shot on a tray which is tapped. The helplessness of the ship had passed beyond Bane's boast. If he had miscalculated, his error had been in the overuse of his power; the ship might not remain afloat long enough to be looted.

Those clustering, scrambling specks about the boats on the sky-deck—those specks which were men and women and children—proclaimed that the passengers were sure that the ship was sinking.

Far away, beyond sight from the Wotan, I saw a steamer; in a different direction, an-

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 other; a third. None was near enough for quick aid; and I know that none had been summoned. If one blundered up, a bomb from a biplane would wreck it too. No aid could come from the water. I looked about the air.

A plane appeared from the direction of land and already, as I looked at it, I was jerked about to meet it. Kinvarra, behind me, swung his plane toward it, too, and we flew at it together. He sent me ahead of him, in the position in which I was most easily guided, and I flew for the approaching plane head on.

The strange airplane flew, curious only, not yet suspicious. He hardly had time to become suspicious, that pilot. Far away he had sighted a fleet of airplanes over a ship and he wondered what they were doing; then we were at him.

I was at him, first—I with no power to pilot, with no hand upon any control. For all purposes, I might have been an effigy in the pilot's pit with a machine-gun before me. I could do nothing to save the other plane—or myself, if we smashed.

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 I knew that sometimes, as when Pete had been knocked out of the sky, the automatic monoplane had held to the air; but, in spite of its special strengthening, this must have been accident, mostly. I could not expect to stay up, if we smashed. Kinvarra could not expect me to.

Not that I imagined he cared what happened to me. He was making me a part of a missile hurled at the curious airplane. No; he was making me, instead, a dummy machine-gunner. For the gun in front of me suddenly clacked; and the curious airplane, approaching, dove to the right.

For a few seconds, while I pointed at nothing, the machine-gun before me continued to fire. Then Kinvarra turned it off. He turned off, indeed, all control of me; for I had the sensation, as yesterday, of flying helpless and without guidance at all. Kinvarra had let me go, forgotten me while he dived after the other airplane. He shot it down and flattened his own flight. For a few seconds more, while he watched it and I watched him straining in my straps to make him remember me, he let me

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 fly without control; then I felt him returning attention to me; control caught me; and I sank in my straps, sweating. Suppose the strange, inquiring machine had been a fighting plane and shot Kinvarra down!

It had borne no arms at all; it merely had blundered by to see what was going on and had been shot down, therefore, like a bystander witnessing a crime in a street.

Kinvarra was swinging me and himself back toward the ship. Above it, three biplanes, with their bombs like great evil eggs below them, steadily circled; higher, circled the six machines of Bane's immediate command. The other six of our squadron clung to the ceiling. The fourth bomb-bearer I did not see. I scanned the water about the Wotan.

The little boats, speckled with thick clusters of dots which were men, women and children, were being launched on the left side; for the ship, in settling, listed to the left. It listed so far, indeed, that launching appeared to be impossible on the right; at least, on that side no boats reached the water. I could see, on the sky-deck, the scrambling specks trying to push

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 starboard boats over to port to be dropped from the davits.

Now I discovered the missing biplane on the water beside the sinking Wotan, on the right. The biplane had no bombs now; it had been lightened and become a cargo carrier, capable of taking on two tons dead weight; so it was alongside, demanding—undoubtedly—the jewels and platinum and the thousands of pounds of bullion gold.

The ship seemed to refuse or delay the delivery of it. Perhaps, in the panic, someone attacked the biplane's crew; for a signal went from the biplane on the water to the bombers in the air. And one of the evil eggs went down.

Not so near the ship; not so near as the first two. Perhaps some mite of mercy moved the hand releasing that third ton of TNT; perhaps the hand considered solely that it must not too greatly hasten the sinking of the ship. The bomb splashed and burst to the left of the Wotan, on the opposite side from the biplane on the water, on the same side as the little boats which were launched all acluster

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 with the specks which were men and women and children fleeing the ship.

I watched the wave, from the burst of the bomb, sweep upon them; I watched it toss and swamp them and smash them against the flank of the ship. I watched, wrenching at my wrists in the clamps binding me; and, watching helpless to move a hand, I thought of Helen Lacey, in some airplane below there with Bane, also watching and seeing the little boats, crowded with specks, become boat bottoms and the specks bestrew the sea. In some way like me, she was held, I supposed—held and shown what I had seen and was to see.

The ship and all its people utterly at Bane's mercy, as he had boasted. With the roar of the airscrew, his boast rang in my head: "How they heap up wealth which they can not possibly defend from me! How they organize and superorganize themselves to make themselves safe, and then make airplanes and TNT and—me!"

In one of those airplanes below me, he sat staring down at those specks struggling in the sea; and triumph throbbed in his broken

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 brain—triumph as he displayed his power to her and to Pete and tome. For I knew now that part of his purpose with us was to show us his words made true. Before us, he had boasted; before us, he would spread the proof.

Kinvarra, Donley and the rest—pirates in soul—held no concern with this. But no more mercy moved them; they were out for business; and their business was to rob the ship. So like bandits blowing a train from a trestle to despoil an express car, they would kill without pity for their purposes.

From the left of the sinking ship, little boats again dropped into the water—little boats covered with specks which were people who had seen, beyond doubt, the fate of the first boats but had no other choice except to stay on a sinking ship.

As well be in the little boats as aboard the Wotan, if another bomb went down.

I strained and squirmed in my manacles.

The sun arose; and in the clear light, I stared at the steel clamp binding my hands to the dummy wheel. Three numerals confronted me in tiny figures marked into the

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 steel: 7—15—10. A series of figures ran round the bands of the three circlets of steel which formed the fastening of my clamps. It was a combination circlet lock. The numerals in the napkin leaped with full meaning from my mind: 18—35—21.

I could not twist my fingers far enough to touch the circlets but I could bend and catch them in my teeth. I had to straighten and see how far I had revolved each band; and after fixing the first at 18, I turned it away twice before I fixed also the second at 35; and the last was the hardest; but I got the three figures in line—and was free.

My hands were free, that was; but I could touch no control. They were in front of me in the pit for the pilot who had taken me into the air and had leaped. I unbuckled the straps over my shoulders—and Kinvarra saw me. He saw that my hands were free; but he still had control of the plane.

Instantly he flung me forward, throwing me into a dive with engine on full. His idea, when I surprised him, was to crash me at full speed into the sea. If he had thought, at that

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 first second, to overturn me, he'd have flung me out; for I had thrown off the straps so I could climb into the forward pit. But he did not think, at once, about tipping me out; he thought of crashing me into the sea and so he gave me seconds to scramble into that forward pit and grab the controls.

I could feel, as I shut off the engine and pulled on the elevators, that too late he was trying something else; he was trying to overturn me. Under my hands I felt the tug of the radio effort. But it was no match for my muscles, I flattened my flight and was free.

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who had held me in his hand a half minute ago—was after me. He followed, firing, trying now to shoot me down; but I expected it and dodged him.

I cut to the right, confusing him by flying through the fleet which did not know that I was free.

The biplane from beside the ship was rising from the water with big bulges below its wings. These were not bombs nor bomb-shaped; they were cubes—steel boxes, undoubtedly, which had been carried in collapsed form and now were expanded to contain the cargo of loot. Jewels, they bore away and the platinum and a ton or two of the treasure of gold. But tons of bullion—actually tons by dead weight—remained aboard the Wotan; and a second biplane descended for its share.

It was the one which had laid the third frightful egg of TNT which, bursting, had

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 swamped the little boats and swept the specks into the sea. A fourth bomb also it must have deposited. How or where it had exploded, or whether it had plunged harmlessly into the ocean, I did not know. I saw only that this biplane lacked both bombs; it, too, was become a cargo carrier descending, light, to take its tons of treasure.

I twinged to attack it; but it was no mark for me. It no longer dangled death over the specks on the sea. If I had a drum of machine-gun bullets to fire, I must spend them on the biplanes, with their eggs below them, swinging about and about on their beat over the ship.

I passed the cargo carrier and climbed with Kinvarra after me but not gaining upon me; my plane was swift as his.

I must try to attack, I knew, when the bombers reached an end of their orbit furthest from the ship. Attack? First I must escape attack; for a two-seater, with a machine-gun, flew at me.

It had detached itself from the flight of six machines which I had considered Bane's immediate command. I dodged, climbed and

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 dived, zooming past a three-seater and next a single-seater.

I had only a flash of the face of the pilot but I knew it was she—she in a single seater! It meant—it must mean that Bane had brought her along as he had Pete and me.

I flew beyond the formation over the sinking ship and contours of other airplanes confronted me—contours familiar, contours of my comrades, navy contours! They were single-seater biplanes like my own and Pete's of three days ago in which we had flown to sea; but this was a combat patrol armed with machine-guns and arriving ready to fight.

They were only six; but it was clear that they flew with some realization of what was happening here. In attacking formation, they came; and I banked about, as I saw them.

Kinvarra, on my tail, fired through my wings; he made a pepper-pot top of the metal beside me. I could not get him in front of me but I pointed at and trained my machine-gun upon the two-seater; and fired. Then, at three angles we flew away from each other.

Overhead, the pursuit and combat planes

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 of Bane's fleet moved to westward. The squadron mustered six machines, since Kinvarra and I had left it.

Three of the planes were piloted by men; three by automatons; or rather, two by wood figures and the third by Pete, held helpless as any effigy. No one had sent him, in a napkin, the key to the lock on his wrists.

The six machines were flying in pairs, in strange formation for combat—if you did not know their plan for the fight. They flew in fore-and-aft alignment, by pairs—in front a radio-controlled plane, in the rear the pilot. They flew fast and straight for the navy planes, offering frontal attack; and fast and straight, the six planes from the shore flew to accept it.

They had good view now of the sinking ship and of the little boats about it; they could see the bombers in the air above it; and they meant to waste no minute in manœuvering. If these pirate planes offered frontal attack, the navy would meet them. Plane would single out plane for duel direct to shoot down

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 or be shot down in the first seconds of the fight. On they flew, pointed straight at each other.

In each airplane, a machine-gun was fixed which pointed with the airplane. It had no other aiming. You pointed your plane and fired; so you put your target directly before you; you flew at it, as you fired.

If you took time, you manœuvered, of course, to get behind your target, to put your self on his tail and shoot him down without enabling him to fire at you; but when you had no time, you flew at him, firing, and he, firing, flew at you.

You flew at each other with frightful speed, firing. Your first bullets were bound to miss; it would be the bullets fired last, when you were flying straight at each other and nearer by eight hundred feet each second, which would send one plane, or the other, down. That meant that the man who kept his nerve for a second longer than the other, would kill the fellow who faltered. These, as I knew while the squadrons dashed at each other, were the conditions of the fight; and I knew that

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 of the six pirate planes, the three leaders had no nerves at all—they were automatons.

No; two were automatons; but the third was Pete!

I saw him in one of those three leading planes flung headlong into the fight. His control pilot, flying behind him, aimed him at the first of the oncoming navy planes; and the first of the navy planes aimed straight for him, head on at each other and firing, they flew; and I stared, sick at the sight.

Straight on, without faltering, the navy plane flew; some friend of mine, a classmate, the pilot! On, straight on for another split of a second; for he would not lose nerve first. On!

They crashed! It was head on, flying each at five miles the minute. For the navy man would not first swerve; and Pete's control sent him into the crash.

With my eyes, I followed them down; and falling and fluttering near them, dropped wings from another plane; a wingless fusilage shot into the sea. The survivors of the six

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 whirled above me, fighting. I followed falls no longer. I was in the fight.

Two-seaters and three-seaters, armed with extra machine-guns and gunners, re-inforeced the blue monoplanes. Bane's command had moved up and was engaged. A navy plane plunged past me, trailing smoke. Another went into a tail-spin beside a falling doubleseater. I joined a navy plane and he or I shot down a blue single-seater—Donley, I thought.

By the reckoning that ran in my mind, there could be but three navy planes in the air. But I saw more than three. I realized that another squadron had arrived.

Below, the bombing biplanes had left the ship; they were seeking to escape with Bane's two- and three-seaters trying to fight a way clear for them. I joined an attack against the two-seaters and a three-seater which, I was sure, carried Bane—and controlled the automatic plane which bore Helen Lacey. I got close enough to see Bane fighting a machine-gun; I saw, then the three-seater shot down.

I flew for a blue monoplane on the edge of

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 the fight which was climbing wildly with full throttle and pointed out to sea. To the other pilots, it appeared that I pursued a pirate plane which was attempting to escape; but I saw what it was—a blue monoplane without a machine gun which never had taken part in the fight. It was the radio-controlled seaplane in which Bane had brought her to see the show of his power. He was shot down; so it was flying wild, without control or possibility of control.

What had been his word to her on the lake? "You'll come back—if I do." So he had planned this, in his broken brain; so he had arranged to bring her back with him, if he was to return; if he was shot down—this.

He had left her flying with full throttle; for with full throttle I pursued and scarcely gained. I would not have overtaken her at all except that, having no control, she did not fly straight. She shot away in a series of zigzags which were caught and corrected only by mechanical balances and wind strains. Similarly she climbed and dropped, climbed and dropped again.

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 I came close to her. Clearly I could see her in her seat. She saw me and faced me, and her countenance might have been the effigy's; it had no expression at all. No fear for herself; none after what she had seen on the sea.

She gestured with her head in appeal to me not to help her, not to try to do anything for her. I was putting myself above her and she was forbidding me the madness of attempting a leap to her plane.

I did not try it. I left my seat but before I could crawl on a wing, we were separated. The business required another pilot in my plane and steady steering of hers. I dropped back into my pit and pursued and watched her. Watched, that was all I could do.

I shot ahead of her, far in front, with her falling behind me. I banked about, staring back and praying—for what already had happened.

Her engine had stalled. From failure of fuel, or whatever cause, her motor was stopped and she was slipping, without the frightful force of the airscrew to speed her, down to

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 the ocean. She fell fluttering, with wings spread to the air currents and catching them like a dropping leaf. Down, down she went but not in the awful plunge of an airplane zooming with motor full on nor in the plummet drop of a plane with smashed wings. With her wings intact, and catching at the air, she went into the sea.

I found her under the wreck of her wings, floating with her face out of the water; and I felt, as my hands lifted her, a stir of life.

Her eyes did not open but as I worked at her to free her, she spoke to me. "Don't," she said. "Don't . . . take me out." Then she said, "You saw it? You see what I see?"

"The specks on the sea," I said.

The specks on the sea! And she spoke no other word during all the time I worked to free her, except once, "father". And she gave me no help at all; she did not want to be freed. But I had her out; I took her up in my arms and bore her to my pontoon. I stood holding her, dripping and cold and small. Her head drooped limp but she breathed; and her body was not broken.

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 I stood with her in my arms surrounded by quiet and calm. Silenced was the whirr of airscrews, motor-roars, shots and bombs—except as they rang in my ears. The sea lapped in little wavelets upon the pontoons; externally it was like the morning she had spoken to Pete and me on the sea.

She roused and shuddered from no shock or sound without her. Her dark lashes lifted from the chalk of her cheek and her grey eyes gazed aghast into the sky and searched it only to see it empty. Her eyes, then, came to me. "He's killed?" she whispered to me.

Bane was this he. "He must be."

She stared at me, trying to think. "Your—friend?" she next asked.

"It's all over for him."

She jerked in my arms. "The specks in the sea," she said and twisted.

To the west, whence we had flown, distant Vs lettered the sky, new squadrons standing sentinel over the sinking ship. The funnels of liners lay on the horizon where the Wotan had been.

A bow pointed for us and a steamer stopped

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 with passengers pressed shoulder to shoulder at the rail as they stared at us. I was aseat upon my float holding her in my arms; throughout an hour, though she was conscious and had not slept, she had not spoken to me.

"A ship is here," I told her; and she asked, "You must take me aboard; can't you leave me here?"

They sent a boat for us and asked: "What happened to you?"

"Haven't you heard of the Wotan?" I said.

"Heard? Man; the Wotan's been bombed and sunk by airplanes! They bombed her boats, too! It was worse than the Titanic and the Lusitania. . ."

I hugged her to me, trying to stop her ears. So I took her aboard and gave her in charge of a physician.

The air was full of Wotan news. Two thousand passengers were missing. They had gone down with the ship or been in the boats which were bombed—the specks on the sea. Of the twenty airplanes in the raid, eleven had been shot down; of the nine, five had fled pursued and their final fate was yet to be known.

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 Four only had escaped—one, the biplane which had dropped the first bombs and taken away two tons of treasure. Where it had flown with its diamonds and rubies and platinum and gold, no one knew—nor who would be the survivors to share the loot.

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to a New York astounded and stunned; the wharves were lined, the streets swarmed with people awaiting the sorry ships bearing the rescued and the dead of the disaster.

Every now and then, in a strange, mass terror, they all looked up and searched the sky to see what there might be threatening them.

The newspapers bore broad, black edges and printed page after page of lists of the lost.

The alarm was on everyone's lips: "Is it just the start? What next?"

I was taken at once into conference with the Army and Navy Intelligence to whom I told, of course, all I knew. Helen was able, on that same day, to relate her experience.

In return I was told that the chateau and establishment at the lake in the mountains had been taken in charge. No one but servants had been found, except a man of fifty discovered locked in a room and dead. No sign of

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 violence; heart-failure, apparently. They described him.

"Her father," I said; and they left it to me when to tell her.

Cawder, in Chicago, had escaped; his offices were cleared; no one was caught there; and from offices discovered to have been corresponding with him from Detroit, Cleveland, New Orleans, San Francisco and a half dozen other cities, everyone was fled. A radio warning early must have reached them.

The extent of their organization was stupendous.

I told Helen of her father, soon after I rejoined her; for she asked and asked of him. "Do you suppose he's heard of the ship? He'll not want to live."

"He never heard, I think," said I; and my news was small shock to her. "I hope it happened when they went away," said she. "He was to blame—he and I!"

At this, I caught her in my arms and pleaded with her. "Never say that again! You did nothing throughout it all, nothing but good. Even if you take upon yourself responsibility

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 for your father's act, you did nothing but good!"

She tried to push herself free from me. "How can you say that?"

"Because it's true! It's true!" I cried and held her as though with my arms I could save her sanity. "Your father was responsible, at the worst, for no more than Bane."

"But he did it all; he led them!"

"In a premature, poorly planned raid which did little in comparison with what they might have done. Your madman Bane had to go ahead at once when Cawder would have waited for full preparation of a tremendous plan. So Bane destroyed one ship when Cawder would have struck with a great airfleet at the nation's greatest cities!

"And in what was done, you were always a check upon Bane; but for you, he would have been more merciless; and but for you, no warning would have gone to the navy airplanes. For Sally Gessler sent it to destroy Bane, and you, in her jealousy of you."

She quivered, small and lovely in my arms; and more quietly I held her against me as

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 some of her agony, for her father's guilt, was gone.

"What does it all mean?" she questioned me, able for a moment to forget her personal place in it. "What does it all mean?"

I played with a lock of her hair and looked into her wide grey eyes and I touched the smoothness of her cheek.

"It may mean that at last," I said, "at last the day has come for the destruction which men have looked for and feared since someone first struck a spark from flint or rubbed together two dry sticks to start a fire. You find the day described, my dear," I said, "in the legends of every people, in one form or another. It goes far, far back before the beginning of history when the Gods, but not man, had fire.

"The Gods, you know, argued whether to give it to man; and most of them were against it. But one God, with an overtrust in man, gave it away; or in some stories, man stole it; and so started the creation of instruments which man had not the moral equipment to rightly control and which therefore destroy him.

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 "Doubt of man's ability to acquire the character of Gods as swiftly as he can acquire their powers, and dread of the certain consequences, runs on the tongue of every people."

"This means we've come to the day at last?"

I shook my head. "Not quite, I think—though never a race of men ever lived who have stolen as many material powers from the Gods as Americans. Beyond any doubt, the day can come. But I won't have it yet—please."

My hand again was at her hair.

"Nor I," she whispered.

"For first, we want to live, you and I, don't we?"

"Yes; I do want to live."

"And love?"

"Yes; and love. For I do love; I love you."

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text: Flying Death (Balmer)

title: Flying Death (Balmer)


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Part 1

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Part 1


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 1

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 1


text:
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 will find the great forest sweeping away in a bay-like curve behind it against the dull gray sky, the splendid columns of its cotton and red woods looking like a façade of some limitless inchoate temple. Then again there is that stretch of sword-grass, looking as if it grew firmly on to the bottom, so steady does it stand; but as the Mové goes by, her wash sets it undulating in waves across its broad acres of extent, showing it is only riding at anchor; and you know after a grass patch you will soon see a red dwarf clay cliff, with a village perched on its top, and the inhabitants thereof in their blue and red cloths standing by to shout and wave to the Mové, or legging it like lamp-lighters from the back streets and the plantation to the river frontage, to be in time to do so, and through all these changing phases there is always the strain of the vast wild forest, and the swift, deep, silent river.

At almost every village that we pass—and they are frequent after the Fallabar—there is an ostentatious display of firewood deposited either on the bank, or on piles driven into the mud in front of it, mutely saying in their uncivilised way, "Try our noted chunks: best value for money"—(that is to say, tobacco, &c.), to the Mové or any other little steamer that may happen to come along hungry for fuel.

Mr. Hudson is immersed in accounts all day. I stare at the forest, Mr. Huyghens at the engines. The captain is on top of the sun deck most of his time: but he and every one, save Mr. Hudson and Mr. Huyghens, about every twenty minutes go down into the afterhold. If Mr. Hudson were not on board, I'd go down too, just to see what in the world they have got down there. The Krumen on their return have pails of dirty water, which Mr. Hudson, kindly fearing it will give me the idea that the Mové is leaking badly, explains that it comes out of something connected with the propeller conditioned by the state of the packing. The captain, with his arms full of tinned provisions. The engineer empty-handed but looking content. Rosa, Mr. Hudson's devoted servant, with the boots and boot-cleaning stuff. I wish to goodness I could go down; maybe I should find hairpins and ammonia there, both of which I am bitterly in need of, particularly the ammonia, after those mosquitoes.


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 2

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 2


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 3

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 3


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Part 2

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Part 2


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 4

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 4


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 5

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 5


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 6

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 6


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 7

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 7


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 8

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 8


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Part 3

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Part 3


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 9

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 9


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 10

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 10


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 11

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 11


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 12

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 12


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 13

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 13


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 14

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 14


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 15

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 15


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 16

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 16


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 17

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 17


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 18

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 18


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 19

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 19


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 20

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 20


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 21

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 21


text: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 22

title: Flying Death (Balmer)/Chapter 22


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 We stayed a few minutes this afternoon at Ashchyouka, where there came off to us in a canoe an enterprising young Frenchman who has planted and tended a coffee plantation in this out-of-the-way region, and which is now, I am glad to hear, just coming into bearing. After leaving Ashchyouka, high land showed to the N.E., and at 5.15, without evident cause to the uninitiated, the Mové took to whistling like a liner. A few minutes later a factory shows up on the hilly north bank, which is Woermann's; then just beyond and behind it we see the Government Post; then Hatton and Cookson's factory, all in a line. Opposite Hatton and Cookson's there was a pretty little stern-wheel steamer nestling against the steep clay bank of Lembarene Island when we come in sight, but she instantly swept out from it in a perfect curve, which lay behind her marked in frosted silver on the water as she dropt down river. I hear now she was the Éclaireur, the stern-wheeler which runs up and down the Ogowé in connection with the Chargeurs Réunis Company, subsidised by the Government, and when the Mové whistled, she was just completing taking on 3,000 billets of wood for fuel. She comes up from the Cape (Lopez) stoking half wood and half coal as far as Njole and back to Lembarene; from Lembarene to the sea downwards she does on wood. In a few minutes we have taken her berth close to the bank, and tied up to a tree. The white engineer yells to the black engineer "Tom-Tom: Haul out some of them fire and open them drains one time," and the stokers, with hooks, pull out the glowing logs on to the iron deck in front of the furnace door, and throw water over them, and the Mové sends a cloud of oil-laden steam against the bank, coming perilously near scalding some of her black admirers assembled there. I dare say she felt vicious because they had been admiring the Éclaireur.

After a few minutes, I am escorted on to the broad verandah of Hatton and Cookson's factory, and I sit down under a lamp, prepared to contemplate, until dinner time, the wild beauty of the scene. This idea does not get carried out; in the twinkling of an eye I am stung all round the neck, and recognise there are lots too many mosquitoes and sandflies in the scenery to permit of contemplation of any kind. Never


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 have I seen sandflies and mosquitoes in such appalling quantities. With a wild ping of joy the latter made for me, and I retired promptly into a dark corner of the verandah, swearing horribly, but internally, and fought them. Mr. Hudson, Agent-general, and Mr. Cockshut, Agent for the Ogowé, walk up and down the beach in front, doubtless talking cargo, apparently unconscious of mosquitoes; but by and by, while we are having dinner, they get their share. I behave exquisitely, and am quite lost in admiration of my own conduct, and busily deciding in my own mind whether I shall wear one of those plain ring haloes, or a solid plate one, à la Cimabue, when Mr. Hudson says in a voice full of reproach to Mr. Cockshut, "You have got mosquitoes here, Mr. Cockshut." Poor Mr. Cockshut doesn't deny it; he has got four on his forehead and his hands are sprinkled with them, but he says: "There are none at Njole," which we all feel is an absurdly lame excuse, for Njole is some ninety miles above Lembarene, where we now are. Mr. Hudson says this to him, tersely, and feeling he has utterly crushed Mr. Cockshut, turns on me, and utterly failing to recognise me as a suffering saint, says point blank and savagely, "You don't seem to feel these things, Miss Kingsley." Not feel them, indeed! Why, I could cry over them. Well! that's all the thanks one gets for trying not to be a nuisance in this world.

After dinner I go back on to the Mové for the night, for it is too late to go round to Kangwe and ask Mme. Jacot, of the Mission Evangelique, if she will take me in. The air is stiff with mosquitoes, and saying a few suitable words to them, I dash under the mosquito bar and sleep, lulled by their shrill yells of baffled rage.

June 8th.—In the morning, up at five. Great activity on beach. Mové synchronously taking on wood fuel and discharging cargo. A very active young French pastor from the Kangwe mission station is round after the mission's cargo. Mr. Hudson kindly makes inquiries as to whether I may go round to Kangwe and stay with Mme. Jacot. He says: "Oh, yes," but as I find he is not M. Jacot, I do not feel justified in accepting this statement without its having personal confirmation from Mme. Jacot, and so, leaving my luggage with the


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 A Malay Ghost Story.

The following story was told me in Raub by a Negri Sembilan Malay, who has been resident for many years in Ulu Pahang, with the result that his idiom and vocabulary bear the traces of both places. J. E. NATHAN.

Ada-lah sakali persetua didalam negri Pahang orang tiga beranak, laki-nya bernama Jenal dan bini-nya bernama Debus, serta dengan anak jantan sa'ekor bernama Mat Dong. Dan pada suatu hari berchakap Jenal itu kepada bini-nya, "Mari kita menchari tempat membuat ladang padi; buleh kita menanam labu pisang tebu dengan padi sakali."

Lalu iya berjalan dan mendapat suatu tempat yang elok mem- buat ladang di tepi sungei Chemerka; menebas menebang lagi mem- bakar dan memagar serta mendirikan pondok di tengah ladang itu. Kemudian dia menanam pisang labu tebu dengan padi sakali, dudok-lah di-situ tiga beranak menjaga tanaman-nya jangan di- rosak oleh babi dan rusa.

Habis lama lama bekelama'an padi sudah masak dia menuai serta membawa kepada rumah pondok itu. Dan tiada berapa lama-nya Jenal itu jatoh sakit, makan pun ta'buleh, bangun pun ta'buleh, makin sahari makin terok penyakit-nya.

Berchakap-lah mak kepada anak sa'ekor itu. "'Nak 'nak, pergi-lah menjeput wan awak di kampong. Dengan chepat bawa kamari, sebab tentu-lah mati bapa awak." Maka budak itu pun pergi dengar segra handak jeput wan dia. Tiba ka-rumah, "Wan Wan," kata-nya, "Mak minta datang dengan segra. Bapa sakit sangat."

Di-jawab-nya, "Bagimana kita berjalan dengan segra, hari dah malam. Jangan-lah balek; esok pagi-pagi kita pergi berdua."

Tinggal-lah si Debus laki bini di-dalam pondok di-tengah ladang. Maka biru badan si Jenal nak mati, bernapas pun dengan kesusahan. Maka bini berasa takut didalam hati, "Apa kena budak itu ta'balik?"

Dan sa-kejap lagi mati dah bapa itu. Apa-bila bini-nya me- lihat laki sudah pulang ka-rahmat Allah menangis-lah dia. "Wahai, mati dah bapa anak aku!"


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 Kemudian di-ambil kain, di-bujor sa'orang sa'orang, di-tutup maiat dengan kain itu; di-ambil pula perasap di-buboh api. Ke- mudian dia turun meuchari daun sireh "Barangkali kalau mak datang senang; ta'payah lagi turun didalam glap."

Dudok-lah dia sa'orang sa'orang mengupas pinang dengan kachip. Kupas kupas tinjau ka-luar; Datang kah tidak mak aku ini?" Didalam itu ada-lah bunyi orang di-luar pondok di- kaki tangga. Kata si Debus, "Siapa itu? masok-lah." Di-jawab, "Aku." Masok-lah orang itu rupa-nya seperti sa'orang perempuan yang tua sakali, blakang-nya bongkok, gigi-nya rongak, jari-nya longkai-longkai dan kuku-nya berchanggai.

Kata dia. "Bila mati laki awak?" Di-jawab oleh bini si mati, "Ini-lah petang sudah senja. Baik juga datang mak ini, kawan sa'orang perempuan di-tengah hutan rimba ini."

Kemudian pergi-lah orang tua itu dekat maiat, buka-lah kain selubong, di-buka dia chium jilat maiat itu lagi pandang ka-kiri ka-kanan. Maka bini si mati sudah tampak kelakuan orang tua itu seperti kelakuan hantu, takut-lah dia serta berpikir "Tentu-lah hantu orang tua ini."

Di-dalam itu dia ambil kachip, dia buat buat mengachip pinang; sampei mengachip dia pandang ka-atas, di-ujong alang di-kepala tiang hantu hantu sahja, berjuntai-juntai kaki, seperti Haji pakaian-nya dengan serban besar-besar berambu-rambu. Apa bila di-lihat hantu banyak banyak itu dudok di-alang seram seram bulu tengkok-nya dan ketar lutut-nya, takut di-buat oleh hantu itu.

Maka dengan hal yang demikian dia beri jatoh kachip pinang di-bawah rumah. "Hai! Mak," kata dia, "Kachip kawan jatoh ka-bawah. Kawan nak turun ambil" "Jangan ambil, hari malam malam ini. Ini-lah ada pinang terkachip." "Ta'buleh, mak; ta'chukup pinang di-kachip ini. Kawan nak ambil juga." Turun-lah dia mengambil kachip; sudah sampei ka tanah lari selalu. Ada-lah anggaran sa-puloh depa jauh deripada pondok itu, di-dengar 'bus-bus-bus' di-belakang bunyi hantu-hantu turun mengejar.

Maka pikir si Debus, "Jikalau kawan chabut berlari tentu di- dapat oleh hantu ini. Baik juga kawan menyurok." Menyurok- lah dia di-belakang batang kayu besar; lalu-lah hantu sa-kawan itu menonong sahaja, tiada sangka perempuan itu sudah simpang menyorok.


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 Maka sa-kejap dia melanggar ibu babi berkubang di-dalam semak; bunyi-lah babi 'Hor-hor-hor.' Pada pikiran hantu bunyi manusia itu. Kata dia, "Di-mana awak menyurok? Kita makan juga nyawa awak malam ini." Dan babi itu di-gomul di-balun oleh hantu mati selalu.

Maka waktu hantu-hantu tengah membunoh babi itu, lari-lah si Debus pusing jauh-jauh, tiada berhenti sakali pun sampei tiba ka-rumah mak bapa.

Kemudian dia cherita kepada mak bapa hal ahual hantu hantu itu. Kata bapa-nya, "Nanti hari siang, kita panggil orang ramai, kita pergi ka-ladang buleh tanam sakali." Dan malam itu tidor- lah dia ke-semua-nya.

Hari dah siang berpakat pakat sapuloh lima-belas orang pergi ka-ladang. Tiba ka-pondok naik-lah di-tinjau maiat; kain selubong habis berklabong di-kreja hantu. Maiat pun tertiarap, kepala men- giring tangan-nya simpang perenang, habis lebam-lebam badan-nya di-isap hantu.

Mengangkat-lah maiat itu membawa ka-kubor lalu tanamkan. Ladang itu pun di-tinggal selalu; sampai sekarang siapa-siapa pun tiada berani membuat ladang di Sungei Chemerka itu.

Once upon a time there lived in Pahang a man Jenal with his wife Debus and one boy called Mat Dong; and one day Jenal spoke to his wife. "Let us look for a place to make a clearing and plant padi."

So they set out and found a good place for a clearing on the bank of the river Chemerka. They felled the big timber and cleared the scrub, burnt it off and fenced it and built a hut in the middle of the clearing. Then they planted their plantains and padi with gourds and sugar-cane and lived there, the three of them, guarding their crops from the attacks of pigs and deer.

Months pass and the padi ripened; they reaped it and stored it in their hut. But soon Jenal fell ill; he could not rise or take food; and every day the sickness increased upon him.

Then Debus called her son, "Go and call your grandmother from the kampong, bring her here at once for I fear your father will die." The boy ran off at once and when he reached his grand- mother's house, he gave her his mother's message but she replied. "Night is coming on, how can we start at once? You must sleep here and we will start together early to-morrow morning."

So Debus and her husband were left there in their hut in the clearing; and as the hour of his death approached, a grey tinge spread over his body and his breathing was laboured. His wife was troubled in her heart. "Why does not the boy return?"


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 A few more minutes and Jenal was dead; and when his wife saw that his spirit had passed, she wailed and mourned him. Then she fetched a white cloth and covered the corpse with it, composing his limbs and placing a censer at his feet. Then she went down from the house to fetch sireh leaves, hoping all the while that her mother would soon come.

There she was left alone, husking betel nuts with the betel scissors and ever she kept peering into the darkness for her mother's coming. Now all at once she heard the sound of feet climbing the house ladder and she called out, "Who is there? Come in," "It is I" came the answer and there entered an ancient crone, hump backed and gap toothed with long skinny fingers and nails like talons.

When did your man die?" asked she; and the widow an- swered. About dusk this evening; and glad I am that you have come, left alone as I am in the middle of the jungle."

Then the old hag went up to the body and lifted the cloth that covered it; she sniffed at the body and licked it, with furtive glances around her. And when Debus saw her acting thus she was sore afraid for she knew that the old hag was an evil spirit. She took the scissors and pretended to be husking nuts; but while she did so, she glanced above and there all along the beams and joists she saw a row of ghosts, dangling their feet, dressed like Hajis with long tasselled turbans; and when she saw them she shivered and her knees shook with the fear of them.

Seeking for a way to escape, she dropped her scissors to the ground through the floor and cried "Old dame, I have dropped my scissors. I must go out and get them back." "Don't bother! it is dark outside and you have nuts ready husked." "Not enough yet, mother; I'll go and get the scissors."

So she went out and when she reached the ground, she ran away at once; and when she had run perhaps twenty yards, she heard the thud of the ghosts' feet, as they leaped down to chase her. Now Debus thought, "If I simply go on running they'll certainly catch me." So she hid behind a great tree trunk, and the swarm of ghosts rushed past, looking straight in front of them and never dreaming that the woman had turned aside to hide. A second later they ran into a wild sow, grunting as she turned in her wallow, and the ghosts thought it was the woman. "Where are you hiding?" they cried, "wherever it be, we shall have your blood to-night." And they fell on the pig and beat it to death forthwith.

While they were engaged in this, Debus stole away and making a wide turn ran and never stopped till she reached her mother's house. There she told them all that had happened and her father said. "Wait till day break and we'll go in a body to the clearing and bury your man."


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 At day break they collected ten or fifteen men and went to the clearing; they climbed the ladder and looked at the corpse. The cloth over it was thrown aside in a heap; the body lay on its face with the head turned to one side and the arms awry, and all over it were purple bruises, where the ghosts had sucked the blood.

Then they took the body and buried it in the grave yard. The place was forthwith abandoned, nor to this day can anyone be found daring enough to make a clearing on the banks of this stream.


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 Mové, I get them to allow me to go round with him and his cargo to Kangwe, about three-quarters of an hour's paddle round the upper part of Lembarene Island, and down the broad channel on the other side of it. Kangwe is beautifully situated on a hill, as its name denotes, on the mainland and north bank of the river. Mme. Jacot most kindly says I may come, though I know I shall be a fearful nuisance, for there is no room for me save M. Jacot's beautifully neat, clean, tidy study. I go back in the canoe and fetch my luggage from the Mové, and say good-bye to Mr. Hudson, who gave me an immense amount of valuable advice about things, which was subsequently of great use to me, and a lot of equally good warnings which, if I had attended to, would have enabled me to avoid many, if not all, my misadventures in Congo Français.

I camped out that night in M. Jacot's study, wondering how he would like it when he came home and found me there; for he was now away on one of his usual evangelising tours. Providentially Mme. Jacot let me have the room that the girls belonging to the mission school usually slept in, to my great relief, before M. Jacot came home.

I will not weary you with my diary during my first stay at Kangwe. It is a catalogue of the collection of fish, &c., that I made, and a record of the continuous, never-failing kindness and help that I received from M. and Mme. Jacot,m and of my attempts to learn from them the peculiarities of the region, the natives, and their language and customs, which they both know so well and manage so admirably. I daily saw there what it is possible to do, even in the wildest and most remote regions of West Africa, and recognised that there is still one heroic form of human being whose praise has never adequately been sung, namely, the missionary's wife. With all the drawbacks and difficulties of the enervating climate, and the lack of trained domestic help, and with the addition of two small children of her own, Edmond the sententious, aged five, and Roger the great, aged eighteen months, and busy teething with phenomenal rapidity and vigour, and a tribe of school children of the Fan and Igalwa tribes, Mme. Jacot had that mission house as clean and tidy, and well ordered as if it were in Paris.


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 One of the main comforts I had at Kangwe was the perfect English spoken by both M. and Mme. Jacot; what that amounted to I alone know, for I cannot speak a word of French, neither could I give you dates until I left Kangwe on the Éclaireur, for it is one of my disastrous habits well known to my friends on the Coast that whenever I am happy, comfortable and content, I lose all knowledge of the date, the time of day, and my hairpins. "It's the climate." But I kept my fetish notes, except during two days when my right elbow was out of repair in consequence of my first visit to a Fan fireside. It happened this way. Down on the river bank, some one-and-a-half miles below Kangwe, lies Fula, a large Fan village. Through Fula that ill-starred day I passed with all the éclat of Wombwell's menageric. Having been escorted by half the population for a half mile or so beyond the town, and being then nervous about Fans, from information received, I decided to return to Kangwe by another road, if I could find it. I had not gone far on my quest before I saw another village, and having had enough village work for one day, I made my way quietly up into the forest on the steep hillside overhanging the said village. There was no sort of path up there, and going through a clump of shenja, I slipped, slid, and finally fell plump through the roof of an unprotected hut. What the unfortunate inhabitants were doing, I don't know, but I am pretty sure they were not expecting me to drop in, and a scene of great confusion occurred. My knowledge of Fan dialect then consisted of Kor-kor, so I said that in as fascinating a tone as I could, and explained the rest with three pocket handkerchiefs, a head of tobacco, and a knife which providentially I had stowed in what my nautical friends would call my afterhold—my pockets. I also said I'd pay for the damage, and although this important communication had to be made in trade English, they seemed to understand, for when I pointed to the roof and imitated writing out a book for it, the master of the house


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 * Hare and Tortoise (1925) by Frank Cyril Shaw Davison

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iv With this stream of Norsemen the colonisation of Iceland also is closely connected. That island had already been discovered by a Viking named Naddodd, who called it Snowland (Snæland); it was next seen by Gardar, a Swede, after whom it was named Gardarsholm; and lastly, the Viking Flóki gave it the name of Iceland, from seeing the Isafjörd covered with polar ice. But the first settlers were Ingolf, son of Örn, and his foster-brother Leif, who set sail about 870, and reached Iceland; they soon however passed on to Ireland, whence after a few years they returned to Iceland, taking with them some Irish slaves. The year 874 is fixed by the chroniclers as the date of this final settlement. Leif was soon after murdered by his unwilling Irish colonists; Ingolf remained alone and is regarded as the first settler in the island. About the same time Harold Fair-hair had seized the throne of Norway, and, by the establishment of despotic power, had become unbearable to the high-spirited and independent chiefs; and therefore the newly-discovered island, bleak and desolate as it was, offered a welcome home to men who had hitherto lived in the possession of equal and undisputed rights. Again, the Norsemen in the British Isles became unsettled after the death of King Thorstein, Olave the White’s son (the Oistin Mac Amlabh of the Irish Annals), in the year 874 ; and they seem from that time to have begun to migrate to Iceland. Conspicuous among these emigrants was Queen Auðr Djápauðga, King Olave’s widow, who set forth with almost all her kinsfolk and followers. It is probable that the number of Norsemen who sailed from Ireland to Iceland was about equal to that of those who had gone thither from Norway. They carried with them their families and such cultivation as they possessed. They spoke that form of the Scandinavian tongue which prevailed on the western coast of Norway; and as time went on, while new dialects formed themselves throughout Scandinavia, in Iceland the old tongue rose to the dignity of a literary language, and thereby retained its original form. It has thus been preserved to our days.

The first settlers formed an independent aristocracy, or republic, which continued for nearly four hundred years. Up to the end of the 10th century they held the heathen faith and practised the rites of heathen worship: Christianity was accepted as the faith of the island in the year 1000 Two centuries and a half after this change of faith ( 1262) the Icelanders made willing submission to the king of Norway, that is, as has been said, about four hundred years after the first discovery of the island.

It was during this period that the Laws and Sagas of Iceland were written. Some idea of the extent and variety of this literature may be formed from the compendious account which is subjoined to this Preface. Tales of an historical and mythological character were committed to writing, being for the most part narratives of the feats of heroes abroad and at home, and belonging to the times before the year 1030, which may fairly be called the patriarchal age of Icelandic history; and in these tales, with poems, laws, and documents of various kinds, the old Scandinavian tongue, as spoken and written by the Icelanders in the period ranging from 900 to 1262 , has been handed


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 ing angel and explain matters. I expect to obtain a discount of at least five-and-twenty per cent. off my bill of crimes for that Bradshaw.

The 3.10 train in the morning was, of course, too late for us. It would not get us to Ober-Ammergau until about 9 a.m. There was a train leaving at 7.30 (I let B. find out this) by which we might reach the village some time during the night, if only we could get a conveyance from Oberau, the nearest railway-station. Accordingly, we telegraphed to Cook's agent, who was at Ober-Ammergau (we all of us sneer at Mr. Cook and Mr. Gaze, and such-like gentlemen, who kindly conduct travellers that cannot conduct themselves properly, when we are at home; but I notice most of us appeal, on the quiet, to one or the other of them, the moment we want to move abroad), to try and send a carriage to meet us by that train; and then went to an hotel, and turned into bed until it was time to start.

We had another grand railway-ride from Munich to Oberau. We passed by the beautiful lake of Starnberg just as the sun was setting and gilding with gold the little villages and pleasant villas that lie around its shores. It was in the lake of Starnberg, near the lordly pleasure-house that he had built for himself in that fair vale, that poor mad Ludwig, the late King of Bavaria, drowned himself. Poor King! Fate gave him everything calculated to make a man happy, excepting one thing, and that was the power of being happy. Fate has a mania for striking balances. I knew a little shoeblack once who used to follow his profession at the corner of Westminster Bridge. Fate gave him an average of sixpence a day to live upon and provide himself with luxuries; but she also gave him a power of enjoying that kept him jolly all day


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 long. He could buy as much enjoyment for a penny as the average man could for a ten-pound note—more, I almost think. He did not know he was badly off, any more than King Ludwig knew he was well off; and all day long he laughed and played, and worked a little—not more than he could help—and ate and drank, and gambled. The last time I saw him was in St. Thomas's Hospital, into which he had got himself, owing to his fatal passion for walking along outside the stone coping of Westminster Bridge. He thought it was "prime," being in the hospital, and told me that he was living like a fighting-cock, and that he did not mean to go out sooner than he could help. I asked him if he were not in pain, and he said "Yes," when he "thought about it."

Poor little chap! he only managed to live like a "fighting-cock" for three days more. Then he died, cheerful up to the last, so they told me, like the plucky little English gamecock he was. He could not have been more than twelve years old when he crowed his last. It had been a short life for him, but a very merry one.

Now, if only this little beggar and poor old Ludwig could have gone into partnership, and so have shared between them the shoeblack's power of enjoying and the king's stock of enjoyments, what a good thing it would have been for both of them—especially for King Ludwig. He would never have thought of drowning himself then—life would have been too delightful.

But that would not have suited Fate. She loves to laugh at men, and to make of life a paradox. To the one, she played ravishing strains, having first taken the precaution to make him stone-deaf. To the other, she piped a few poor notes on a cracked tin-whistle, and he thought it was music, and danced!


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 A few years later on, at the very same spot where King Ludwig threw back to the gods their gift of life, a pair of somewhat foolish young lovers ended their disappointments, and, finding they could not be wedded together in life, wedded themselves together in death. Their story, duly reported in the newspapers as an item of foreign intelligence, read more like some old Rhine legend than the record of a real occurrence in this prosaic nineteenth century.

He was a German Count, if I remember rightly, and, like most German Counts, had not much money; and her father, as fathers will when proposed to by impecunious. would-be sons-in-law, refused his consent. The Count then went abroad to try and make, or at all events improve, his fortune. He went to America, and there he prospered. In a year or two he came back, tolerably rich—to find, however, that he was too late. His lady, persuaded of his death, had been urged into a marriage with a rich somebody else. In ordinary life, of course, the man would have contented himself with continuing to make love to the lady, leaving the rich somebody else to pay for her keep. This young couple, however, a little lighter headed, or a little deeper hearted than the most of us, whichever it may have been, and angry at the mocking laughter with which the air around them seemed filled, went down one stormy night together to the lake, and sobered droll Fate for an instant by turning her grim comedy into a somewhat grimmer tragedy.

Soon after losing sight of Starnberg's placid waters, we plunged into the gloom of the mountains and began a long, winding climb among their hidden recesses. At times, shrieking as if in terror, we passed some ghostly hamlet, standing out white and silent in the moonlight


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 against the shadowy hills; and, now and then, a dark, still lake, or mountain torrent whose foaming waters fell in a long white streak across the blackness of the night.

We passed by Murnau in the valley of the Dragon, a little town which possessed a Passion Play of its own in the olden times, and which, until a few years ago, when the railway-line was pushed forward to Partenkirchen, was the nearest station to Ober-Ammergau. It was a tolerably steep climb up the road from Murnau, over Mount Ettal, to Ammergau—so steep, indeed, that one stout pilgrim, not many years ago, died from the exertion while walking up. Sturdy-legged mountaineer and pulpy citizen both had to clamber up side by side, for no horses could do more than drag behind them the empty vehicle.

Every season, however, sees the European tourist more and more pampered, and the difficulties and consequent pleasure and interest of his journey more and more curtailed and spoilt. In a few years time, he will be packed in cotton-wool in his own back-parlour, labelled for the place he wants to go to, and unpacked and taken out when he gets there. The railway now carries him round Mount Ettal to Oberau, from which little village a tolerably easy road, as mountain roadways go, of about four or five English miles takes him up to the valley of the Ammer.

It was midnight when our train landed us at Oberau station; but the place was far more busy and stirring than on ordinary occasions it is at mid-day. Crowds of tourists and pilgrims thronged the little hotel, wondering, as also did the landlord, where they were all going to sleep; and wondering still more, though this latter consideration evidently did not trouble their host, how they were


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 going to get up to Ober-Ammergau in the morning in time for the play, which always begins at 8 a.m.

Some were engaging carriages at fabulous prices to call for them at five; and others, who could not secure carriages, and who had determined to walk, were instructing worried waiters to wake them at 2.30, and ordering breakfast for a quarter-past three sharp. (I had no idea there were such times in the morning!)

We were fortunate enough to find our landlord, a worthy farmer, waiting for us with a tumble-down conveyance, in appearance something between a circus-chariot and a bath-chair, drawn by a couple of powerful-looking horses; and in this, after a spirited skirmish between our driver and a mob of twenty or so tourists, who pretended to mistake the affair for an omnibus, and who would have clambered into it and swamped it, we drove away.

Higher and higher we climbed, and grander and grander towered the frowning moon-bathed mountains


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 round us, and chillier and chillier grew the air. For most of the way we crawled along, the horses tugging us from side to side of the steep road; but, wherever our coachman could vary the monotony of the pace by a stretch-gallop—as, for instance, down the precipitous descents that occasionally followed upon some extra long and toilsome ascent—he thoughtfully did so. At such times the drive became really quite exciting, and all our weariness was forgotten.

The steeper the descent, the faster, of course, we could go. The rougher the road, the more anxious the horses seemed to be to get over it quickly. During the gallop, B. and I enjoyed, in a condensed form, all the advantages usually derived from crossing the Channel on a stormy day, riding on a switchback railway, and being tossed in a blanket—a hard, nobbly blanket, full of nasty corners and sharp edges. I should never have thought that so many different sensations could have been obtained from one machine!

About half-way up we passed Ettal, at the entrance to the Valley of the Ammer. The great white temple, standing, surrounded by its little village, high up amid the mountain solitudes, is a famous place of pilgrimage among devout Catholics. Many hundreds of years ago, one of the early Bavarian kings built here a monastery as a shrine for a miraculous image of the Virgin that had


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Rh down to us in a form which may justly be called classical. In Sweden and Norway the old Scandinavian tongue is preserved in writing only on the scanty Runic monuments. The earliest Danish and Swedish written laws are believed not to be earlier than the middle and end of the 13th century, by which time the common language in these lands had already undergone great changes, although the modern Danish and Swedish were not yet formed. In Norway, however, a considerable literature of the 13th century survives; and the old language lasted longer there than in the sister countries. This literature consists of laws, diplomas, homilies, and translations of French romances; and these works are quoted in this Dictionary together with the Icelandic. These documents belong to the period embraced by the reign of King Hakon, 1216-1263; but, though valuable, they do not make an original literature. Only in Iceland did a living literature spring up and flourish; there alone the language has been handed down to us with unbroken tradition and monuments, from the first settlement of the island to the present day.

It is believed that the present Dictionary will furnish not only a complete glossary of the words used in this old classical literature, but also a full account of the forms and inflexions of the verbs, with copious citations of passages in which each word occurs, with references carefully verified, and explanations given whenever they seem to be required; and, at the same time, though the Dictionary is mainly intended for the old authors, both in prose and poetry, it endeavours to embrace an account of the whole language, old and new.

A few words must be added to explain the origin and history of the work.

Many years ago, projected a General Dictionary of the Old Scandinavian Language; and in 1840 he left England to settle in Copenhagen, the chief seat and centre of Scandinavian learning and the home of the best collection of Icelandic MSS., for the purpose of preparing himself for his work and of obtaining the assistance of Icelandic students in collecting materials; among these Mr. Konrad Gislason’s name ought especially to be mentioned. Mr. Cleasby was a man of independent means, an excellent scholar, held in high esteem by foreign scholars, devoted to his work, and shunning no labour to make it perfect. He reserved for himself the old prose literature; while Dr. Egilsson was engaged on the poetical vocabulary, towards the expenses of which Mr. Cleasby promised to contribute, so that he may be said to have been the chief promoter of that work also. The MS. of the Poetical Dictionary was ready for publication in the year 1846. In the following year Mr. Cleasby caused five words—bragð, búa, at (conjunction), af (preposition), and ok (conjunction)—to be set up in type as specimens of the projected Prose Dictionary. These he sent to several foreign friends, and among others to Jacob Grimm, who returned a most kind and friendly answer, warmly approving of the plan as indicated in the specimens, and adding many good wishes that Mr. Cleasby might have health and life to complete the work. Unhappily these wishes were not to be realised. In the b


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 said "Um," and then laid hold of an old lady and pointed to her and then to the roof, meaning clearly I had equally damaged both, and that she was equally valuable. I squared the family all right, and I returned to Kangwe viâ Fula, without delay and without the skin on my elbow. Wishing to get higher up the Ogowé, I took the opportunity of the river boat of the Chargeurs Réunis going up to the Njole on one of her trips, and joined her.

June 22nd.—Éclaireur, charming little stern wheel steamer, exquisitely kept. She has an upper and a lower deck. The lower deck for business, the upper deck for white passengers only. On the upper deck there is a fine long deck house, running almost her whole length. In this are the officers' cabins, the saloon and the passengers' cabins (two), both large and beautifully fitted up. Captain Verdier exceedingly pleasant and constantly saying "N'est-ce pas?" A quiet and singularly clean engineer completes the white staff. The passengers consist of Mr. Cockshut, going up river to see after the


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