power, as the following letter shows:

"And then the problem that Pinkerton laid down: why the artist can do nothing else? is one that continually exercises myself. He cannot granted. But Scott could. And Montaigne. And Julius

Cæsar. And many more. And

why can't R. L. S.? Does it not amaze you? It does me. I think of the Renaissance fellows, and their all-round human sufficiency, and compare it with the ineffable smallness of the field in which we labour and in which we do so little. I think David Balfour a nice little book, and very artistic, and just the thing to occupy the leisure of a busy man; but for the top flower of a man's life it seems to me inadequate. Small is the word; it is a small age, and I am of it."

'David Balfour' is, of course, the story afterwards called 'Catriona,' which he considered his high-water mark. "I shall never do a better book than 'Catriona," he observed. But he might have done so, if he had thought less about it.

As the time went by, there came to him what comes to all Scots, a deep longing for his own country. In his case it was more pathetic than in most, because it was a hopeless longing. He knew that to return to a northern climate was to court sentence of death, and he meant to stay where he was, and work to the end to provide a maintenance for his family. But though he stayed, his heart returned. The tropical beauty and richness that lay under his eyes ceased to delight him. "I am used to it; I do not notice it; rather prefer my grey, freezing recollections of Scotland," he said. Edinburgh, his noble native city, swam

before his eyes, in pictures; its castle, steep against the sky, the waters of the Firth, the blue lines of the Pentland Hills, the lights of the Lothian Road at night; he yearned to them, and to the memories of "ces beaux jours, quand j'étais si malheureux.”

He was accustomed to write at intervals to Alison Cunningham, his nurse, to whom the charming 'Child's Garden of Verses' was dedicated. Of her he once made this request :—

never

"Some day climb as high as Halkerside for me (I am likely to do it for myself), and sprinkle some of the well water on the turf. I am afraid it is a pagan rite, but quite harmless, and Ye can sain it wi' a bit prayer. Tell the Peewies that I mind their forbears well. My heart is sometimes heavy and sometimes glad to mind it all. But for what we have received, the Lord make us truly thankful. Don't forget to sprinkle the water, I feel a and do it in my name. childish eagerness in this."

If any one can read this with a heart unmoved, he must possess an organ of extraordinary hardness. Only an exile knows what his country means to him.

And so, as might have been expected, his last stories were not of the South Seas, but of Scotland. "On revient toujours à ses premiers amours ; and he came back even to the "Covenanting books" which he had read consistently in childhood and youth, the works of Wodrow, Walker, and Shields, which he delighted in. The son of Covenanting forebears himself,-a dutiful, courageous, self-subduing son,-it was not their style and lan

guage only that spoke to him. Their spirit was his. He did not know it in his youth as well as he came to know it in that far country he wandered to.

"After all, what I wish to fight is the best fought by a rather cheerless presentation of the truth. The world must return some day to the word duty, and be done with the word reward. There are no

rewards, and plenty duties. And

the sooner a man sees that and acts

upon it like a gentleman or a fine old barbarian, the better for him

self."

It was well there was stern stuff in him, for he had hard troubles to face, of which the world knew nothing.

"You will see that I am not in a good humour; and I am not. It is not because of your letter, but because of the complicated miseries that surround me and that I choose to say nothing of. . . . Life is not all Beer and Skittles. The inherent tragedy of things works itself out from white to black and blacker, and the poor things of a day look ruefully on. Does it shake my cast-iron faith? I cannot say it does. I believe in an ultimate decency of things; ay, and if I woke in hell, should still believe it! But it is hard walking, and I can see my share in the mis-steps, and can bow my head to the result, like an old, stern, unhappy devil of a Norseman, as my ultimate character is..

"Well, il faut cultiver son jardin. That last expression of poor, unhappy human wisdom I take to my heart-and go to St Ives."

In one thing he never failed, in kindness. His faithful kindness to the Samoan chiefs, his friends, who were imprisoned for their share in a war that others by their misconduct had made, was very singularly returned, and in a beautiful spirit. As soon as they were released from prison, they came in a body and made a road for him, called "The Road of Loving Hearts," to join his house with the main road. As roadmaking in Samoa was a thing to which natives "could not be wiled with money nor driven by punishment," and as these were chiefs who worked at his road, Stevenson was touched to the heart.

It was his last great pleasure. "It does give me a sense of having done something in Samoa after all,” he said. In December of the same year, 1894, he died, and was buried on the top of the mountain overlooking his home, carried there by the strong-armed Samoans, who loved "Tusitala."

IN Bengal, things get strangely associated in one's mind, and somehow that Speech Day at a Bengali school is mixed up for me with the crocodiles I saw during the long ride we made to get to the school. I believe that the crocodiles interested me more than the speeches. That is no reflection upon the speeches. Crocodiles have a fascination for me, and they are certainly fixed in my memory far more than any of the other creatures I saw in Bengal. They are so much more numerous than any of the other creatures, such as tigers or snakes. One hears a good deal about the snakes there, but one sees very little of them at any time, and in the cold weather nothing at all. Indeed the only snakes I saw were two great pythons which a planter kept in one of his indigo vats for his private delectation. He loved to watch them and feed them, and poke them with a stick, and see their flat vicious heads drive at it with the speed and force of a steam-hammer. His wife liked them less because one of them had once escaped from the vat and wandered into her bedroom. It was daytime and she was resting from the heat, and hearing it advance, breathing heavily, she thought it was her somewhat asthmatical foxterrier and told it to lie down. As it seemed to be making for her bed instead, she looked up to find that it was one of the pythons looking for a warm place in which to lie up. Her

screams brought her husband, who, annoyed by this escapade of a pet which his wife had never properly appreciated, thoughtlessly seized it by the neck, with the result that in a twinkling it had knotted itself round his arm and nearly pulped it before his bearer could arrive and get it by the tail. Two men, it seems, can deal with a python fairly effectively, by grasping each an end of it, thus preventing it weaving itself into the coils that crush. But no single man is of much use, for the reason that he cannot in the nature of things grasp and keep taut an eighteen-foot length of writhing muscle. The planter told me that, as it was, his arm had turned black and blue all over, as if it had been squeezed into a heavy door, and it was weeks before he could use it. But he still loved his python. I do not think any one could love a crocodile, and personally I could never become even indifferent to them. They are such nightmares of creatures, especially when seen in quantities as I saw them that day. We were twenty or thirty miles from the station, and the Collector and I were walking our ponies through a great stretch of grass jungle, in which nothing was to be seen but a few feet of the track ahead, when there appeared to our right a sudden gap in the grass. Riding up to it, we found that it marked the brink of a big unmapped river which ran in its bed some four feet below. There, on a

sandbank, so that you could have dropped pebbles on to their noses, lay not less than fifty crocodiles of all shapes and sizes, muggers and fish-eaters, sprawled side by side or at right angles, some only a few feet long, some looking to be fully eighteen feet. The Collector declared that no up-country crocodile attained that length, though the muggers of the Sunderbunds do, so I will only repeat that they looked it, as they lay there on the whitishyellow sand, the jungle grass barely quivering above them, basking in the sun as they might have basked at the beginning of time. The nearest village was miles away, and the whole scene was as it might have been a thousand years before. Neither then nor now had these creatures any enemy to fear except for the few jungle beasts that might prey on their eggs. Why should they not grow big at their ease, these scavenging lords of a great secret river, which was probably crammed with fish as all the rivers of Bengal are? I did not notice any musky smell of them on the air, as I had somehow expected; they did not therefore offend one's sense of smell, which is, I believe, the origin of repugnance and loathing. Yet creatures more calculated to raise these emotions I have never seen. Their sprawl, their gape, their cold-blooded lethargy-in spite of "their four-chambered heart, distinct sockets for the teeth, and traces of a diaphragm showing an approach in organisation to warm - blooded animals"-and most of all, that

reptilian smile, form a revolting combination. What extraordinary pathological state can that old Egyptian civilisation have been in which treated. these creatures as divinities, worshipping them alive and embalming their hideous carcases after death? Was all that world mad together, and was it the germ of a spiritual sense which nourished itself on such appalling fancies and by the transfiguring of things so abominable?

Even the writer of Job seems to have taken a horrific joy in the crocodile.

"Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about. His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron.

His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone. . . .

The arrow cannot make him flee: sling-stones are turned with him into stubble.

Darts are counted as stubble: he

laugheth at the shaking of a spear."

A little later in the morning we came to a place where the river crossed the track, and had to wait while the ferry boat was baled to take us across. A herd of buffaloes were swimming the river as we waited beside the landing-place. They were nothing but a line of noses in the water, with their drover shouting directions from the opposite bank. or two natives, also waiting for the ferry, watched apathetically from the hot landing-place; a troop of porpoises bobbed away up-stream, and several crocodiles, each on his own beat, as it were, of the bank, slept

One

through the process, or seemed to. But they slept, head to stream, slanted for the dive in, and I said to the Collector

"Aren't the men afraid of some of those brutes seizing their animals?

"I expect there is too much noise going at present for anything to happen," said he, and asked the ferryman, "Do the muggers here take cattle?" "Yes, Huzoor." "Many?" "A few."

"And have you known them known them to seize people too?"

"There have been seven taken this year," said the ferryman without concern. "Usually it is a big mugger who takes them, of a light colour. Five days ago he took a woman who went to wash. He is a big mugger, and sits close by. To-day he does not show himself."

"No one has shot at him?" inquired the Collector. "No, Huzoor."

"It's a pity we sent the guns ahead," said the Collector, having translated this to me. "We might have tried to shoot some of the brutes while we were waiting. Not that one or two more or less would have made much difference."

"Do you mean to say it's a fact that seven people have been killed at this ferry in the year?" I asked.

"It's not at all unlikely," he said. "According to the figures of the district, crocodiles get three hundred victims per annum. Of course the crocodiles may be helped to have them in some cases, but on the other hand we probably don't learn of all the people that get

carried off in out-of-the-way parts. They're absolutely careless about crocodiles. You've seen the way they will go in?"

I had seen it. At just such a place as this, with a crocodile staring at him from the opposite bank, a Bengali wishing to make ablutions will walk down into the water, wade out waist deep and dip completely under the requisite number of times. Afterwards he will stand in the river and wash his garment, if it happens to need washing, as unconcerned as a man in a swimming-bath. I have seen very cautious people before they advanced into the water pick up a stone and throw it in to frighten any mugger that might be lurking in the immediate vicinity. But this is a mark of rare foresight and prudence. So, as the Collector said, it was hardly to be wondered at if the figures for the district showed three hundred victims of crocodiles in

the year. Some of these would be washerwomen seized while they were pounding clothes on a board stretched over the river, as one sees them so often and and so picturesquely doing, and others would be little girls. Not infrequently silver bangles are found inside the bodies of shot crocodiles the silver bangles with which the small girls are adorned from their earliest years. I suppose being small they are easy to seize and drown-easier than the ponies and buffaloes' calves which are also taken in great quantities in the marsh lands. Not that the mugger is slow in action. I was amazed, when I went shooting them a week or two