Entered as second-class matter. July 3, 1917, at the post office at New York, N. Y., under $5.00 Per Year the act of March 3, 1879 Single Copy. 50 Cent College of St. Elizabeth NEW YORK MILITARY Convent Station, New Jersey 45 Minutes from New York Catholic College for Women Registered by Regents Standard College Preparatory Courses Academy of St. Elizabeth Send for Catalogue Headmaster, The Shipley School Faculty are specialists in preparing for Bryn Mawr and other colleges. Situation opposite Bryn Mawr gives special educational and social advantages. Supervised sports, modern gymnasium, school farm. The Principals, Alice G. Howland, Eleanor O. Brownell Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania CHESTNUT HILL A Preparatory School for Boys In the Open Country, 11 Miles North of Philadelphia Excellent Record in College Preparation T. R. HYDE, M.A. (Yale), Head Master SEVERN SCHOOL A country boarding school for boys. Ideal location on Severn River near Annapolis. Prepares for College, West Point and Annapolis. Exceptionally thorough work given and demanded. Students taught how to study. Water sports and all athletics. Limited to fifty. Catalogue. ROLLAND M.TEEL, Ph. B., Principal, RUTGERS PREPARATORY SCHOOL RUTGERS PREPARATORY SCHOOL has main- WILLIAM P. KELLY, HEADMASTER PREPARATORY SCHOOL PRINCETΟΝ Preparatory for all colleges. Rapid progress. Limited number of pupils and freedom from rigid class organization. Excellent equipment. Special attention to athletics and moral welfare. New gymnasium. 53rd year. For catalog, address Box D, Princeton, N. J. ACADEMY. CORNWALL ON HUDSON, N. Y. A famous preparatory school FOR CATALOGUE WRITE TO THE PRINCIPAL BORDENTOWN MILITARY INSTITUTE Thorough preparation for college or business. Effi- COL. T. D. LANDON, Principal NEWTON ACADEMY, NEWTON, N. J. A mili- PHILIP 8. WILSON, A.M., Principal The Illinois Military School A mid-west school with a distinctive cultural atmosphere. Separate Junior and Senior Schools. Trip to Europe at end of year. For catalogue, address: Col. CLYDE R. TERRY Box 25 Aledo, Illinois Episcopal A select home school for BOYS of the GRADES. Ideally situated on a beautiful tract of 180 acres. MILITARY. All sports under supervision. Parental care. Limited number. Small classes. Individual attention. Graduates enter all leading secondary schools. 25th year. For catalogue address FREDERICK E. JENKINS, Headmaster Box S. Faribault, Minnesota Virginia Episcopal School LYNCHBURG, VIRGINIA prepares boys at cost for college and university. Modern equipment. Healthy location in the mountains of Virginia. Cost moderate, made possible through the generosity of founders. For catalogue apply to REV. WILLIAM G. PENDLETON, D. D., Rector Massie School A College Preparatory School for Boys, in the blue grass section of Kentucky, near Lexington, Thorough instruction, new equipment. Out-of-door sports. For catalogue, address: R. K. Massie, Jr., M. A., Headmaster Second Educational Section, Third Cover Page passed in few places of the globe for volume and continuity throughout the year. An important river finds a weak spot in the mountain barrier, and makes a crowded and freakish passage through the scrum from Central Asia to the ocean. In this puzzling natural obstacle no immediate problem of invasion seemed possible at the time of which we write. As long as the belt had an Indiaward orientation, and the people beyond were either too lazy or too unmilitary to bother about it, all was well. But, following on a long period of Central Asian complication, the Power on the other side sent orders to its westernmost province to raise and equip an army for the effective occupation of a certain territory recently acquired by treaty. This occupation involved the movement of a force of some twenty thousand men for several months across the most inhospitable portion of Central Asia, where climate, transport, and local resources had hitherto limited movements to the compass of an occasional caravan. The problem at first appeared insurmountable, and pretty well paralysed the provincial Viceroy, who knew all about a province, but not the first thing about a platoon. Luckily, the occasion produced the man-a small provincial Taotai, one Chao ErhFêng. Within a year this extraordinary man had raised, equipped, and thoroughly disciplined a good-sized army. With this he launched out across the wastes, heedless of cold; of obstacles in mountain, river, or desert; of almost negligible transport and supplies. With it he reached his destination, leaving a well-garrisoned line of communications behind him as he went. It was an epic achievement, of which we find traces in other great movements of Mongol armies of the past, each more astonishing than the one before. The details of Chao's exploit are on record in the Imperial archives of the Wai-Wu Pu, but they have never been given to the world. It may be possible to do so some day. His expedition failed, through no fault of his own. The main striking force was smashed and scattered; the tattered but still efficient remnants, largely from the line of communications, were presently rolled up to the starting-point, where, nobody wanting them, they became an incubus. They were well-armed, unpaid, and with a clear notion of what they wanted, and Chao himself was the only man in the province who could deal with them. He, like all other unsuccessful generals, was beheaded; but before he died he found time to save from starvation the troops whom he had raised, and who appear to have regarded him as a demi-god. Under the guise of a frontier force, he split them up into small stockaded detachments of from one to three hundred rifles apiece, on the arc of a wide circle from the Burmese frontier to the Himalayas. Here they were told to live on the country and to make the best of it. They commenced on the side of the jungle no-man's-land remote from India, and, gradually absorbing local resources, which were always scanty, worked inwards. The absorption was incidental to the state of affairs, and was in no way planned, nor had it any ulterior object. Each ragged brave had his rifle and a good supply of ammunition; the bare presence of both was sufficient to secure an adequate livelihood among a primitive jungle population with a respect for firearms. A considerable time later this unsuspected state of affairs came to light. A certain English officer, let us call him X., journeyed overland from the Yangtze in search of takin, till then inadequately described or shot at. His passport described him as a bug-hunter, under a Mongol euphemism which raised the status to one of the learned professions. The country traversed was, and still is, some of the most dangerous to be found in the unmapped world. A cheerfully aggressive population lives on terms of equality or scarcely veiled superiority with the local officials, who in their turn are hysterically hostile to any foreign traveller who may tie himself up in an unmanageable situation. X., however, bluffed and wheedled himself to a point where bluff would work no longer, and then His light-hearted attitude to dangerous travel is best seen in what happened next, in that he plunged head-foremost into the tangled thicket which separated him from the nearest point in India. Two marches in, he came on traces of Chao Erh-Fêng. A week later he found himself in the midst of a state of affairs which would have given even the youngest frontier officer food for anxious thought. He trod through it like Agag, and mostly by night, later leaving it behind him and making the better speed for it. A long time later he reappeared, westward. He had finished a year's leave in this extraordinary way. His watch and his calendar had both of them long gone the way of the missing two-thirds of his kit, which may have accounted for his overstaying his leave by a considerable period. But the information he brought set the wires to headquarters buzzing. His journey was a feat, and yet it seems to have gone with a whimsical lilt from start to finish, as cheerily casual as the incomparable traveller who brought it off. His arrival can only be touched on here. Starved and exhausted, lame and swollen with septic leech |