own numbers. Judging from the reports, these men had a Mauser and a Browning pistol apiece. These weapons, being automatic in their mechanism, represented in a confined space the concentrated killing power of a force of thirty men. What training have our police had to cope with a situation such as this? what suggestion has ever been made to them that one day they might be called upon to deal with criminals armed in this manner? Personally, I would attach no blame to the police in this. They have a hard and fast formality for the arrest of criminals. This is not Russia, nor were our police a posse of Sheriff's men out West in America, where shooting on sight is permissible. This is London city, where people have to be arrested with all due formalities, before the police are entitled either to shoot them or beat them over the head with staves. That this disgraceful scene happened is due to the legislation that has neglected the police and encouraged the lodgment of the criminal alien in our midst. If you were to ask my opinion, I would say that up till the actual point of contact between the ruffians and the police, the detective work of the latter force was admirable in the extreme. Their information was so good that they were able to act with directness and rapidity. Judging from the paper, they only received certain information that the two oriminals were in a particular house

about an hour before midnight. So exact was this information that by five o'clock on the following morning, not only had they isolated the locality, but they had also removed all the inhabitants of the neighbouring rooms from the house, and practically had their quarry interned in one room. That they did not know how to act at this moment is true, but I do not find them altogether blameworthy on this account. None of you would say that a hunter was not a good hunter because he had not been schooled to climb trees. Neither would

you ask 8 hunter to climb trees. Therefore you should not expect a good policeman, whom you only arm with a truncheon, to be expert in the matter of dealing with desperate criminals carrying efficient firearms. The locating of those criminals was a police job, and it was well done. The capture or destruction of those criminals was not a British policeman's business, any more than it Iwould be the business of a hunter to climb trees.

pains to look after your property. You don't see them about, or if you do see them, you don't notice them, because they take very particular pains not to be noticed. That's part of their cleverness. It may sound very improbable to you, but I was once mixed up in one of these secret police affairs. I was never more surprised in my life. I can assure you the trouble was not of my making, and I don't even now know what particular impulse it was that induced me to take the hand. As you fellows know well enough, mine is not the kind of temperament temperament that hankers after breathless excitement. But the story is so strange that you ought to hear it.

"It is just about three years ago, during the season, that my wife wanted me to go with her to a jeweller's in Bond Street about the re-setting of some jewellery, or the matching of some pearls. It was a lovely day, so I said I would go down with her if she would walk. She stuffed the gewgaws and some money into her bag and we went out. There were a lot of people out, and we met several pals and didn't hurry. Just before we came to the shop I remembered I wanted something myself a little lower down, so I told my wife that if she went on and got her business under weigh I would come along later and join her at the jeweller's. I rolled up-I suppose, about ten minutes later, -and, looking through the

door, saw there were several people in the shop, and a particular lady I wasn't over anxious to meet, so I thought I would stroll up and down outside and wait for my wife to come out. I noticed three well-dressed men go into the shop and several women, and I was just beginning to wonder whether I had better face the obnoxious lady in the shop and join my wife, when one of the well-dressed men came out through the glass doors of the shop and pushed rapidly past me as he turned up the street. At the same moment I was seized violently by the arm by a milkman who had been innocently arranging his cans on his hand-cart just in front of the shop. 'Quick, governor,' he shouted, after 'im, as if you had a hundred blue devils beside you, or we lose him. Look! he's passed the bag to a pal.' Now, for the life of me, I cannot tell you what impelled me. I'm not the kind of man that you can picture tearing up Bond Street in the wake of an agitated milkman. But there was something in the grip that man took of my arm, something in the urgency of his appeal, that impelled me, so that I threw away my cigar and ran with him as hard as I could. I had seen the well-dressed man throw a bag to an unkempt fellow waiting in the gutter. I saw the latter turn and cut up Conduit Street like a hare that has jinked, and I ran neck and neck with the milkman, who exhorted me to continue in my

efforts by shouting, 'Throw a leg, governor. If we lose sight of him, we lose him for ever.' We tore up Conduit Street. I don't know what the passersby thought, I had no time to think of them. When we reached Regent Street our quarry dived into the traffic like a frog into a mill-race. We went in after him. How I missed being knocked down by a taxi' and pinched between two motor 'busses, I don't know. The milkman took the same risks. We were across almost as soon as the man, and he nipped down a passage into Kingly Street. We sped after him. I don't know what streets we doubled down. I know that at this period it flashed across my mind that I was making a conspicuous ass of myself. Here I was racing down the slums of Soho at the bidding of a strange milkman, who had only his earnestness to recommend him. But he never stopped in his exhortations to me. He never gave me a chance to stop. Keep it up, governor ! We'll get him.' Our quarry doubled and tacked, but somehow we stuck to him, till, just as we were pacing down the very worstlooking street of the lot, he suddenly slipped into a low house, of which the door was open. My milkman never lost & second. He whispered hoarsely in my ear, Stop here, governor, and grab the first person as comes out of that house, no matter who he is. I know the way behind.' In a flash he was gone. He had

nipped down some alleyway and disappeared. I felt a real fool.

Now my milkman had gone, the whole folly of my action rushed in upon me. I had left my wife stranded in a shop in Bond Street. I had lost my hat and my stick. I had nearly been run over in Regent Street, and here I was in an unknown and almost deserted street, standing outside a door, waiting with orders from a strange man to grab the first person that came out of it. If I had had two seconds more to have made up my mind I would have left the place and gone back to the nearest hatter, a wiser and chastened man. But just at that moment a boy of about fifteen came out of the door in front of me. My milkman must have left his spell upon me, for I immediately threw my arms round him and held him fast. 'Lemme go, governor,' he shouted; 'I ain't done nuffin' to you.' He struggled hard, and the more he struggled the more I felt impelled to hold him. And then suddenly, as if by magic, two policemen appeared on the scene and seized my boy for me. My milkman, wreathed in smiles, appeared in the doorway from which the boy had just come, saying blithely and quite respectfully, 'You've done that very well, sir. We've got the other two inside.' He then added, 'I'll just put my hands over this young feller.' He took off the boy's battered bowler, and out of the lining came a roll of £80 in Bank of

England notes. He then felt the boy's clothes, and produced out of his socks a pair of ruby and diamond earrings which, to my astonishment, I saw were the very gewgaws that my wife had taken with her to have re-set. The detective, for my milkman was nothing less, then pinched the boy's ear and said, 'Where's the lady's bag?' 'In the airey, sir,' he answered sulkily enough. The milkman retrieved it, and sure enough it was my wife's bag. 'But,' I said to the detective, how did you know that I was connected with the lady who owns this bag?' The man smiled and replied, 'It's our business to know a few things, sir. But if you hadn't been game to run we should have lost the lot,-we were only just in time.' We left the boy and the two men in the house in the custody

of the constables, and took a cab back to Bond Street, and here the strangest part of the story comes in. We found my wife still discussing her pearls with the jeweller-man, and quite unconscious of the fact that her bag had gone.

"After an experience such as this you will understand why I refuse to believe in the incompetence of our police force. They are police, and real good police. That they are not military police is not their fault. As I said before, it is the fault of the legislation that has permitted an alien population largely composed of the criminal classes to establish itself in this country, and has at the same time omitted to control it with a military police to safeguard a law-abiding country from such outrages as we have just been discussing!"

GRRR-RR-R comes from the Blue Dog with no other name, followed by a yap and the pattering of feet on the floor. Then three tame burhel enter my bedroom. They have slept on the roof of some shed, the nearest approach to the rocky ground which they haunt when wild, and at the first sign of dawn they are stirring. A cold nose is pushed into my face, effectually waking me, and I hear one of them drinking out of my water-jug. The dogs, although great friends and, indeed, playmates of these wild sheep, resent their entering the house, and while I am quieting them I hear a sound of broken glass. The ram has leaped on to the window sill, and in doing so put a horn through a pane. This somewhat alarms the sheep, and they move off to do some mischief among the flower-beds.

I lie in bed waiting for my servant to bring me the morning tea, and listening to the chirp of the sparrows and the curious "hooping" of the hoopoes who have nests in the turf-wall of the house. The latter are great friends, and have introduced me to their four youngsters, whose heads are perpetually looking out of a hole in the wall, but whose beaks and orests have not yet grown to the length that gives the parents their curious hammerheaded appearance.

It is beautiful day in October, and I am one of the three British officers at the most advanced Agency which the Indian Government maintains in Tibet. The first question that presents itself is, "What is to be done to-day?" At sunrise this morning the post started, to the accompaniment of a jingle of bells, on its hundred-mile trek to the next post-office on the road to India, and no more letters can arrive for four days. The obvious answer to the query has just presented itself "Let us kill something," when I recollect that this is a polo day. My mind being thus at ease, I dose until I hear my servant arrive. In any other country he would cause some remark. Dorje Pentzog is small in stature, with a very Mongolian countenance set between two large turquoise earrings, and wears his hair in a queue in the Chinese fashion. He is followed by a troop of dogs, each of whom receives a biscuit. The Blue Dog, an Australian greyhound, is rather sorry for himself and

moves stiffly, for yesterday "Butch," the tame panther, gave him a playful scratch on the tail. "Bob," the old English sheep-dog, is, perhaps, the most boisterous of them all, while "Peach," also a greyhound, and the essence of laziness, looks beseechingly from the chair where she lies, and