I OFTEN Wondered who the old man in the rickshaw was with the ample white beard, square and broad rather than long in the distance one might mistake it for a newspaper spread over his lap. Some part of him was paralysed, I believe; yet there was something leonine in the poise of his head and shoulders; he never leant back. The most remarkable thing about him was his eyes. They reminded me of the eagle owl. It was impossible not to notice their intensity as one passed. He did not look at you; he saw you. Whether he noticed you or not you were not quite sure. He did not withdraw his eyes from you, but his gaze was quite impersonal. The middleaged lady behind the rickshaw, who never kept up, I took for his daughter.

I met him on the Mall nearly every day of my first week in Kifri Pahar, but in the Club I always forgot to ask who he was. Yet when I heard them talking about "old Bogle," I jumped to it at once. Bogleit was just the name that caught my ear. I had not heard what they were saying, but I instinctively associated it with the man with the white beard. And Amelia Amelia, of course, was the lady who couldn't keep up. I learnt

afterwards that she was his niece.

The doctor had been to his bungalow. No one else ever went near it. Bogle, I gathered, was in a bad way. I remembered that I had not seen him on the Mall for the last two or three days. They were dischances of recussing his covery, rather unfeelingly, I thought.

Anyhow," I heard Manson, "the the Club Secretary, say, new Cantonment Act will draw his teeth. We will see what is decided at the Committee meeting this afternoon.'

"Bogle "I asked him. "Is that the old man with the white beard who looks several years older than the hills?

Manson nodded. "That's the trouble," he said. "He is older than the hills, or rather he is older than the hill-station. He got here before Kifri had time to spread itself. He has cramped the place."

"Cramped it?" I asked, with the guilelessness of the newcomer.

Here it was pointed out to me not by Manson only, but by several other men in the smoking-room, that one couldn't get anywhere in Kifri without making a detour round the Bogle estate. The old man had bought it in pre-cantonment days, before the cart

road was made, or the depot or the signalling and musketry courses even thought of.

Bogle seemed to have no personal existence so far as Anglo-Indian Kifri was concerned.

He impinged on the small self-centred hill-station as some physical obstruction, like Clodd's Nose, the profile cliff that served as an extinguisher of the sun half an hour before the regulated time. He wouldn't see people, didn't answer letters, was as unaccommodating as the rock on which his bungalow was built. Kifri was all rock. Like other hillstations, it was abominably congested. There was no flat place where one could let a horse out. The Club had only two tennis courts.

"Who was Bogle ?" I asked, slipping unconsciously into the past tense.

I gathered that he had been an author of sorts, though what he wrote no one seemed quite sure. The general idea was that it must have been dry-asdust stuff. He had been associated with several universities.

“ Yes. What exactly is Bogle's claim to distinction?" the padre demanded superciliously.

"Are there any of his books in the club?" I asked. Manson sent for the library Babu. Bogle had always been taken as a matter of course. It never occurred to Kifri that the forbidding-looking ghost in the rickshaw could have counted. His longevity and his adhesiveness to the estate

gave him an accidental local importance.

"I believe he wrote travel books," Osborne the G.S.O. 1 observed. "Some one told me he was the only Englishman who had been somewhere. Where was it now ?-not Mecca, somewhere in Africa"

"You don't mean Balkh ? I gasped. And it dawned on me for the first time that the derelict nonagenarian must be the Bogle.

I knew now that I had been conscious all along of something subtly reminiscent in the bent figure in the rickshaw, in that forward-leaning leonine poise of the shoulders which even in the paralytic gave one the idea of a frame charged and dynamic, of movement suddenly arrested, like a gesture in a soldier or an athlete preserved after death, when death has been instantaneous.

I had once met Bogle. It was in the early 'eighties, when he was at the zenith of his fame, and I a lad of fourteen. He had spoken to me. Balkh he had just come back, and I, a small schoolboy, had had the supreme honour of hearing him talk about it, as if it had been an ordinary place just the other side of the common, like Ipswich or Bungay.

It was at least forty years ago, and Bogle must then have been nearly fifty. I had a vision of myself, a very romantic, shy, yet in a way precocious little boy in Eton

jackets. It was a great cross that for economical reasons I might not have two kinds of clothes, and had to wear Etons all the holidays-fish in them, climb trees in them, and grub for chrysalises. I had literary ambitions, and used to write reams of verse on the Byronic model, imagined I was in love, devoured the novels of Whyte Melville and Harrison Ainsworth. I had read all the novels of Sir Walter Scott before I was thirteen. There was not a heath or a clump of Scotch firs, or an old inn or a spinney, that I did not people with highwaymen, knights-at-arms, or damsels in distress. Wayland Smith and Flibertigibbet, Gurth and Friar Tuck, were my familiars at the age of ten. It was not a wooded, hilly, or particularly picturesque district in which I lived, so that any salient feature in it, like a secluded copse or gravelpit, or an overgrown disused quarry, soon became congested with ghosts.

I longed to see a mountain or a forest or a desert, particularly a desert. The nearest thing to a forest in the neighbourhood were the Felmersham preserves, less than eighty acres of rather thin oak wood on a clayey soil, a carpet of primroses in spring. Here I was permitted to wander by the squire of the parish, the only big landowner in the district. Among realities as distinguished from figments, Lord Felmersham filled a large place in

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my imagination. my imagination. said, I was a very romantic little boy, and if having a great respect for a lord was snobbish, I was certainly a little snob. But then I had no suspicion of how the generality of lords were made. The Baron at Felmersham, through his association in my mind with the tradition of Bois-Guilbert, was a personage allied to the immortals of romance. I remember my discovery, about a year after the Bogle encounter, of the sordid details of the ennoblement of the original Baron, Felmersham's immediate forebear; with it went one of the first heads of illusion that the guillotine of experience lopped off.

The second Lord Felmersham, whatever failings his predecessor may have had, had acquired, if he had not inherited, the properties of the past. One could not tell that he did not belong to the old aristocracy. He had the grand manner; he excelled in field sports; he had a great love for wild creatures, and killed them in the approved and orthodox way; and he was very kind to small boys and dogs. He must have had a certain sense of humour and a great deal of humanity, or he would not have interested himself in the precocity of the child of the curate of a neighbouring parish. Every Christmas he gave me an illustrated book of travel. I used to read grown-up travel books, and really enjoyed them.

The mere names of the places were a source of delight, and I used to wander among the oaks and elms, repeating the expressive nomenclature of far countries-"Onwards to Hua Hua, How many miles to Babylon!" "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan." More wonderful than the heroes of books were the writers of them. At the age of ten, next to meeting Ivanhoe, I would have chosen to meet Sir Walter Scott. I

am not sure that I would not rather have hobnobbed with Defoe than with Robinson Crusoe. Authors and explorers were the gods of my youth, and they were as remote from experience as gods. I had never seen an explorer or a real author. The only person who wrote, or who was connected in any way with the production of a book, whom I was privileged to see in the flesh, was a friend of my father, also a parson, who had edited "Tacitus ' and written an article on Roman roads for the Quarterly Review.' I was dumb in his presence.

father. My sense of adventure was now heightened by the fear of meeting Felmersham. I was conscious that I had abused the great man's hospitality, but nothing could keep me away from the woods. I was engaged in the fourth traverse. This penetration of Felmersham took me from the west lodge to a corner of the lake in front of the house, and directly bisected the large shallow pond with the moor-hens' nest in it. This entailed wading, and at least a quarter of a mile's burrowing through brambles, for I carried a compass, and with the true instinct of the explorer would not allow myself to be diverted.

In the last lap I must have made as much noise as a rhinoceros scrambling through briers and hazel scrub so thick that one couldn't see a yard in front of one; for when I laid a victorious hand on the hurdles on the wood side of the boundary ditch I found myself looking straight into the eyes of the lord of the manor. He was sitting with a stranger on a bank commanding the spot where I emerged, evidently. drawn there by the commotion.

Retreat was, of course, impossible. I slipped over the fence, jumped the ditch, and stood erect in front of him. Covered with burs, scratched, bleeding, perspiring, splashed all over with mud, trying not

my heart slipping into my boots, I awaited judgment. The thing that made me feel

most abject was the sense of my ingratitude.

But Felmersham smiled. Not a word about those damaged trees. Have you come to pay us a visit?" he asked, as if the manner of my appearance on the edge of his lawn were quite natural. "You would have found the drive simpler."

I breathlessly explained that I was working through the wood north-east by east by the compass; the drive did not lie in the direct line of approach to the lake.

Here my attention was drawn for the first time to the stranger by Felmersham's side. He had spoken to me, or rather of me. "Evidently," he said, "this young man dislikes thoroughfares ?

"He's your sort, Bogle,' Felmersham explained. "A young explorer."

Bogle-could it possibly be the Bogle? I wondered. But I had not the courage to ask.

And now, after forty years, I was asking myself the same question at Kifri Pahar. Oh yes; the old man in the rickshaw was Bogle all right, the Bogle. There could be no mistake about that.

The tall man with the golden beard who leant back smiling on the bank might very well be a great author or explorer. I felt that if it were really the Bogle, I was in the presence of the greatest man of the age. My last Christmas gift from Felmersham had been his 'Travels in Afghan Turkistan.'

Felmersham laughed. "Our young friend is already half an Oriental," he observed.

This was, of course, absurd. Flattery or propitiation had not entered my head. Nor was my choice of Balkh as a destination a mere stratagem to put my hopes as to the identity of the stranger to the test. Balkh was the one place I wanted to go to more than any other in the East. I had just read Bogle's book.

"And why do you want to go to Balkh ?" he asked.

Without mentioning his book I was able to give him several satisfactory reasons-reasons, however, which could only be known to a careful student of his work.

"This is fame," he exclaimed,