"Thenceforward, Sahib, I fed him every day for half a month, and slept and lived within touch of his trunk. He cried no more, but would put out his trunk to me and ask, and if I walked to one side or the other he would turn his head and look at me. I could pet and scrub him and put my arm around his neck and my cheek against his cheek. Then came to see him my father, and we made him smell my father all over, and his dah and cloak and bag, as he had done to me many times. "And so we moved him, leading him to another place close by. The next day, after scrubbing him well, I jumped upon him, pulling myself up by his ear, and I lay upon his neck. I patted and talked to him and scrubbed his back. After that, every day before the sunset he let me ride him to the stream near by, where in a deep pool we bathed together; he lay down till the water covered him and only the tip of his trunk was above the water, and I climbed upon him and washed his skin with split bamboo. Then I taught him to kneel down for me to get upon him, and we both played there by the stream. And soon thereafter, Sahibwell, we rode him home together. "Now my little brother, the one that helped me slay the panther, rides him as I do. One day, when he is old enough, he and I will go and catch just such another. But none in the herd, Sahib, were so black and beautiful or had flashing tusks as Mom. such See, the stars are turning. The Swordsman 1 crosses the heavens. I must go and sleep by him-he will not sleep without me yet. If I go not now, he will break into the village gardens before dawn and eat five hundredweight of fruit from their trees, and the Nai will have to pay much compensation." From which it appeared that Mom's education was not yet entirely completed. 1 Orion. IN HANGING GARDEN GULLY. BY C. E. MONTAGUE. To climb up rocks is like all the rest of your life, only simpler and safer. In all the rest of your life, any work you may do, by way of a trade, is a taking of means to some end. That end may be good. We all hope it is. But who can be sure? Misgiving is apt to steal in. Are you a doctor-is it your job to keep all the weak ones alive? Then are you not spoiling the breed for the future? Are you a parson or politician or some sort of public improver, always trying to fight evil down? May you not then be making a muff, every day, of somebody else who ought to have had his dragon to fight, with his own bow and spear, when you rushed in to rob him and the other little St Georges of discipline and of victory? Anyhow, all the good ends seem a good long way off, and the ways to them dim. You may be old by the time you are there. The salt may have lost half its savour. No such dangers or doubts perplex the climber on rocks. He deals, day by day, with the Ultimate Good, no doubt in small nips, but still authentic and not watered down. His senses thrill with delight to find that he is just the sum of his own simple powers. He lives on, from moment to VOL, CCXI,-NO, MCCLXXVI, moment, by early man's gleeful achievement of balance on one foot out of four. He hangs safe by a single hand that learnt its good grip in fifty thousand years of precarious dodging among forest boughs, with the hungry snakes looking up from the ground for catch, like the expectant fieldsmen in the slips. The next little ledge, the object of all human hope and desire, is only some twelve feet away— about the length of the last leap of that naked bunch of clenched and quivering muscles, from whom you descend, at the wild horse that he had stalked through the grass. Each time you get up a hard pitch you have succeeded in life. Besides, no one can say you have hurt him. Care will come back in the end; the clouds return after the rain; but for those first heavenly minutes of sitting secure and supreme at the top of Moss Ghyll or the Raven Crag Gully, you are Columbus when he saw land from the rigging, and Gibbon when he laid down his pen in the garden house at Lausanne. It's good for you too; it makes you more decent. No one, I firmly believe, could be utterly mean on the very tip of the Weisshorn. I could, if I had known the way, have written a lyric I 2 as I sat by myself in the tiny inn at Llynn Ogwen, where Telford's great London-to-Holyhead road climbs over a pass between three-thousand-foot Carnedds and Glyders. I was a convalescent then, condemned still to a month of rest cure for body and mind. But it was June, and fine weather. Rocks had lately become dry and warm. about these agreeable truths the practice heretical. Certainly some of them-Whymper, Tyndall, and others climbed by themselves when they had a mind to. Thus did King David, on distinguished occasions, relax the general tensity of his virtue. But these exceptions could not obscure the general drift of the law and the prophets of mountaineering. Then came another pause-giving reflection. If, as the Greeks so delicately put it, anything incurable happens while you are climbing alone, your clay is exposed, defenceless and dumb, to nasty obiter dicta during the inquest. "Woe unto him," as Solomon says, "who is alone when he falleth." Insensate rustic coroners and juries, well as they may understand that riding to hounds in a stone-wall country is one of the choicer forms of prudence, will prose and grumble over extinct mountaineers. Their favourite vein is the undesirable one of their brother, the First Clown in 'Hamlet,' who thought it a shame that Ophelia (she seems to have slipped up while climbing a tree) "should have countenance in this world to drown or hang herself more than her even Christian." There are places in Britain where rock-climbing cannot be honestly called a rest cure. I mean, for the body. Look at the Coolin-all the way that a poor invalid must tramp from Sligachan southward before he gets among the rough, trusty, prehensible gabbro, the best of all God's stones. Think of Scawfell Crag, the finest crag in the world, but its base cut off from the inn by all that Sisyphean plod up the heart-breaking lengths of Brown Tongue. From Ogwen you only need walk half an hour, almost on the flat, and then-there you are, at the foot of your climb. The more I considered the matter, the more distinctly could I perceive that my doctor, when saying, Avoid all violent exercise," meant that if ever I got such an opening as this for a little "steady six-furlong work," as it is called in the training reports, I ought to take care not to miss it. But I was the only guest at the inn. And to climb alone is counted a sin against the spirit of the sport. All the early fathers of climbing held No mean impediments these to a sensitive, conscientious, nature's design for seeking health and joy among the attractive gullies and slabs that surround Llyn Idwal. Against them I marshalled all that I could remember of St Paul's slighting observations on the law; also any agility that I had gained in the Oxford relation, really," he humbly Greats school in resolving dis- assured me. His father was agreeable discords into agree- only some obscure squire. The able higher harmonies. Black son's Christian name had been was certainly not white. Still, Charles at the font, but, on as the good Hegelian said, coming of age, the dear fellow black might, after all, be an had felt it immodest to prey aspect of white. In time it any more than he need upon was duly clear to my mind his eponymous hero's thricethat sin lies not in the corporal honoured names. So he had act, but in the thoughts of meekly converted the Charles the sinner. So long as the by deed poll into Thomas. This heart sincerely conversed with lowly and beautiful gesture the beauty of the truths on convinced me, as you may which rested the rule of never suppose, that here was the climbing alone, it mattered man to go climbing with. He little what the mere legs did: was indeed one of the innocent, your soul was not in your legs. one-thoughted kind that wake One of casuistry's brightest up happy each day and never triumphs had been fairly won, turn crusty, and always think my liberty gained, my intel- you are being too good to lectual integrity saved, my them. luncheon sandwiches ordered for eight in the morning, when somebody else arrived at the inn. He stood confessed a botanist -he had the large green cylindrical can of the tribe, oval in section and hung by a strap from the shoulder, like the traditional vivandière's little cask in French art. He was also, I found while we smoked through that evening together, a good fellow. He had, too, a good leg, if one only. The other was stiff and unbendable at the knee. He had broken it last year, he said, and the bones seemed to have set only too hard, or else Nature had gracelessly grudged to the mended knee-joint of her lover a proper supply of whatever substitute she uses for ball bearings. His name was Darwin. "No One lure alone had drawn him to these outworks of Snowdon. Some eccentric flower grew on these heights, and a blank page in one of his books of squashed specimens ached for it. Was it so lovely, I asked, like a goose. He was too gentle to snub me. But all that fellow's thoughts shone out through his face. Every flower that blew to this effect did his soul mildly rebuke mine-was beauteous beyond Helen's eyes. All he said was: "No, not fair, perhaps, to outward view as many roses be; but just think!-it grows on no patch of ground in the world but these crags!" "It is not merely better dressed," said I, “than Solomon. It is wiser.' It was about then, I think, that the heart of the man who had gone mad on the green-stuff and that of the man who knew what was what, in the way of a recreation, rushed together like Paolo's and Francesca's. What had already become an entente cordiale ripened at tropical speed into alliance. Darwin had found a second, half-invalided perhaps, but still the holder of two unqualified legs, for to-morrow's quest of his own particular Grail. To me it now seemed to be no accident that Darwin had come to the inn: it was was ordained, like the more permanent union of marriage, for a remedy against sin, and to avoid climbing alone. My noitred the gully well from below, and if any flower knew how to tell good from bad, in the way of a scramble, it would be there. I ended upon a good note. The place's name, I said impressively, was Hanging Garden Gully, no doubt because of the rich indigenous flora. His eyes shone at that, and we went straight to the kitchen to ask Mrs Jones for the loan of a rope. I had none with me that journey: the sick are apt to relinquish improvidently these necessaries of a perfect life. Now, in the classics of mountaineering, the right thing in such cases of improvised enterprise is that the landlady lends you her second-best clothes-line. Far happier we, Mrs Jones having by her a 120-foot length of the right Alpine rope, with the red worsted thread in its middle. It had been left in her charge by a famous pillar of the Scottish Mountaineering Club till he should come that way again. "The gentleman," Mrs Jones told us, said I was always to let any climbing gentlemen use it." Heaven was palpably smiling upon our attempt. We got down to business at once. A charming gully, I told him, led right up the big crag over Cwm Idwal. Not Twll Du, the ill-famed Devil's Kitchen. That, I frankly said, was justly detestata matribuswet and rotten and lethal, and quite flowerless too. gully, though close to that man-eating climb, was quite another affair. Mine was the place for town children to spend a happy day in the country; the very place also for starting the day's search for the object of Darwin's desire. In saying this, too, I was honest. Lots of plants grow in some gullies; ferns, mosses, grasses, all sorts of greens flourish in a damp cleft; why not one kind of waste rabbit-food as well as another You see, I had not been a casuist merely, before Darwin came. I had used the eyes Heaven gave me, and recon "A The sun smiled benedictively, too, on the halt and the sick as they stood, about nine the next morning, roping up at the foot of their climb. fisherman's bend," I took care to explain, as I knotted one end of the rope round Darwin's chest. "The replied, |