upon society. It is a strong statement to make: it is absolutely true. It was fear of this that reinforced my selfrespect, and often kept me from begging when I sorely needed food. I was worn out, and I asked my acquaintance where the bedrooms were. "Door's locked," he said. "Can't go to

bed yet." "Door locked? How's that?" "Stop anyone goin' to bed till they've paid."

It was a relief when a man flourished a bunch of keys and called out: "Anny wan fur bed?"

I at once went to him, and, taking an empty beer bottle into the neck of which a piece of candle was stuck, he conducted me to my bed-one of eight or nine in a low, not very clean-looking room. Following advice given me by the Yorkshireman, I folded up my clothes and placed them under the mattress, then, getting into bed, with a sigh of relief lay down to rest.

I thought at first I was the sole occupant of the bed, but very soon I discovered my mistake. There were many other occupants already in possession, and resenting my intrusion they seemed determined that, if they could not drive me out altogether, at any rate they would make me suffer for my temerity. And so far as my suffering was concerned their efforts were crowned with success. When I rose next morning one of my arms was swollen to an extent I had not deemed possible from such a cause. Throughout the night also a drunken man in the next bed-not a yard away -tried to murder sleep by periodically giving vent to an awful yell. Altogether the "comfortable night's rest" I had looked forward to was rather a failure, and I was very glad when morning came and I could rise. There was a large tub in the yard in which to wash, and for towel a piece of sacking, already very dirty and very damp. Fortunately I had a clean pocket

handkerchief, but the wash was not a conspicuous success, as in a lodginghouse each man provides his own soap, or does without.

"Got any breakfast?" asked "Yorkshire."

"Not yet."

"Well, yo (you) get hauve a loaf. Ah've getten some bacon fat and tay an' sugar."

I did so, and by toasting thick slices of bread and spreading on them the bacon fat, I enjoyed a cheap meal. But it would take a large volume if I tried to detail the whole history of my tramp. In the rest of the article I propose to give one or two detached incidents.

Three nights in succession after leaving Sheffield I had spent in the open air-one of them in the pouring rain. I had had very little food, and at last I began to lose heart and hope.

It seemed to me that in all the world there was no charity, neither kindness of heart nor sympathy. I had begged for work a thousand times, and because I was a tramp, out of work, I received barely a kindly word. I was a suspicious character. The very fact that my evenings had been spent with books instead of beer told against me. "There's somethin' queer about you," I was told by one man of whom I had asked work. "You look like a gentleman an' you speak like a gentleman, an' you're askin' for a laborer's job at sixteen bob a week." In vain I offered references. I might as well have reasoned with the hog he SO much-outwardly-resembled. "You

won't suit," was all he would say.

It was heartbreaking. It seemed to me that in spite of boyish dreams of high endeavor and noble achievement, in spite of all my struggles now, I was doomed to become a poor broken outcast, as many another had that I had met on the road.

What was the use of struggling any longer? "It is written!" Why not beg as others-plunder, if need be? Why keep tramping on, hungry, footsore, heartsick, when thousands around had enough and to spare?

Thoroughly miserable, I walked on until I came to a workhouse, and at the gate I stopped. It meant food, rest, and at last, yielding to the temp tation, I got a ticket from the police station, went through the gate to a pauper's shelter and a pauper's dole. After a long inquisition I was provided with a tin of glutinous stuff I was informed was skilly, and a piece of brick-like bread, and shown into a large room in which were a number of other unfortunates. Helped by the salt which stood on the table, I succeeded in swallowing my food, and began to take an interest in the conversation going on around. The greater part of the men appeared to be comparing the various workhouses whose hospitality they had enjoyed; several, apparently respectable unemployed, were talking of their efforts to find work. One was a young fellow-a cabinet-maker. He said: "When a chap's down he don't get half a chance to get on his feet again. Look at my boots (worn out); my clothes are gettin' worse an' worse, an' a boss don't want a man who looks like a scarecrow. I come in 'ere to get some grub an' a bed. We're out at eleven to-morrow. You've to 'pad it' ten miles before you can get in another spike, so if you want to get in before they're full up you don't get a chance to look for a job. If you stop an' look for one-don't get one-you've to sleep out-no grub. It soon pulls you down." I have heard the same complaint very often since. The workhouses are too bad and too good-too bad for the honest unemployed; too good for the habitual vagrant, who ought to be segregated and forced to work.

At many workhouses a man is turned out at eleven o'clock in the morning. It's not much use looking for a job then. A man ought to be at the works when work commences in the morning. And so he starts off to tramp the necessary ten miles to the next workhouse, and so avoid sleeping out, hungry. Soon it gets into a habit, and the man doesn't try for work-doesn't want it, in fact. And an honest workman is lost to SOciety.

Seven o'clock was bed-time, and we were conducted to the bath-room. I was expected to go into water which did not appear to have been changed for a month. It was filthy, and I refused. The attendant merely glanced at me: "You don't need a wash," handed me night shirt and blankets, which had evidently been stoved often but not washed, and I went to bed. Twenty of us slept in the same room, and before morning the atmosphere was horrible.

For breakfast we had skilly and bread, and in return for the miserable accommodation and poor food had to break a pile of stones. At eleven the task was finished. I was free, and I no longer wondered why men avoided the workhouse when possible

respectable men, I mean. Only a week or two ago I met an old sailorsixty-eight years old-who, with but one exception, had a continuous record of "good" discharges, but is now too old to do a seaman's work, who was going to pass the night in the snow rather than enter the casual ward.

"If I go into the tramp ward," he said, tears streaming down his face, "they'll put me to breaking stones or picking oakum, work I'm not fit to do; an' if I can't do all my task they'll fetch a policeman an' have me locked up.

"There's nothin' for the old man but

to die on the road." This in wealthy England!

I had been tramping some hours through the countryside without food, but I did not feel hunger so much as thirst, and I could not find a stream in which to quench it. I was nearing Ross, and, unable to bear it any longer, I asked a dainty, fragile old lady, who was standing at a garden gate, for a glass of water; and she took me, a road-stained tramp, into her quaint, old-world dining-room, and with her own hands placed food in front of me, waiting on me as though I were an honored guest. When I was leaving her she said: "I am old, and perhaps you won't mind me saying this. Remember always that if your mother is alive her heart will, be aching for her boy; and so don't lose hope and go down altogether."

That was one of the few occasions on which human sympathy has lightened the road for me. On another occasion a night watchman at whose redhot brazier I had stopped to warm my chilled body, insisted on sharing his food with me, protesting, when I re.fused, "I'd choke if I tried to eat it myself-an' I'd deserve to."

In a doss-house a tramp has shared
The Cornhill Magazine.

his stew with me. A policeman, who caught me sleeping in a haystack, instead of taking me to the lock-up took me to his home and fed me.

On the way to Ilfracombe, tired, I sat down by the wayside to rest. As I sat a gentleman passed, eyeing me keenly. Absorbed in my Own intensely miserable thoughts, I did not notice that he had turned back until he asked me: "Have you walked far?" I told him. He asked me several questions, then: "Had anything to eat lately?" I had had a piece of bread that morning.

"Well, if you care to come with me I can provide you with some food."

Thanking him, I followed him to a large house, entering which he handed me over to a man, telling him to see that I was well looked after. I had a splendid feast, and when I tried to thank the gentleman on his coming into the room: "Don't thank me," he said; "it was for my own comfort I did it. It made me so d-d uncomfortable to see a young fellow like you on the road."

So, although my tramp was a terrible experience, there are some incidents to which I can look back with pleasure and gratitude.

J. A. H.

XIX.

I have spoken of Energy as a virtue, but reflection suggests a doubt as to how far that term can with accuracy be applied to it. A virtue, I take it, is a quality that can be brought into being in a man's soul in the course of that eternal conflict between the forces which Thomas à Kempis names Nature and Grace, a quality which, once generated, is thereafter capable of infinite

development. If this definition be correct, it is clear that Energy cannot be placed in the category of the virtues, since Energy is merely a transmuted form of some existing force which, in one shape or another, has had its being since the Creation. In other words, Virtue is a growth, Energy an adaptation: the former is drawn from a limitless reservoir, the latter from a certain well-defined supply. The one

may be produced in defiance of Nature, the other is a dole which Nature grants from her store of hoarded forces.

The point is interesting, because the possession of Energy is the accident which will be seen principally to differentiate the people of the temperate zone from the people of the tropics; and the reason is not far to seek. In the temperate climates the ability of mankind to exist has depended upon the maintenance of an eternal, but on the whole successful, struggle with Nature. Nature has had to be pillaged to provide clothing, food, shelter; Nature has had to be overcome in a thousand ingenious ways to reduce her to servitude; Nature has been stern, inimical, waiting only for her opportunity to slay, and in the ages of man's earliest developments a constant watchfulness was necessary to ward off her blows and to frustrate her sinister designs. Farther north and farther south, in the arctic and antarctic regions, Nature has secured the victory, and mankind has accepted defeat, has been eliminated, or has merely clung to life and to the frozen earth as lichen clings to a rock, an impotent parasite, powerless to mould or alter its unyielding habitat. In the tropics alone has Nature adopted the rôle of the great Mother, suckling her offspring tenderly, lavishing upon them her best in return for a minimum of languid effort, aiding them at every turn, and wooing them to idleness. In all their history, the peoples of the tropics have never been called upon to accept sustained exertion as the alternative of extinction. To the white man's thinking, Nature, sparing the rod, has gone far to spoil the child.

And there we have forthwith the whole key to the difference between the men of the temperate and the men of the tropical regions. The former, having found in the transmutation of natural forces into Energy his only

means of survival in his fight with Nature, has learned to make an idol of his preserver; the latter, having been taught to lean on Nature, to look to her for all his necessities, to claim her aid rather than to rely upon his own efforts, has learned to idolize Ease. These widely divergent points of view have long ago become stereotyped, and are fused now into the innate characters of the peoples. The natives of the tropics and the natives of the temperate zones cherish ideals diametrically opposed one to the other: their sacrifices are burned in the shrines of rival and mutually inimical deities. Yet if the summum bonum sought by mankind from the beginning be the greatest happiness of the greatest number, then surely the apostles of Ease, "on the hills like gods together," lying

beside their nectar, while the bolts are hurled

Far below them in the valleys,

are nearest to the achievement of the desired end. A divine discontent is undoubtedly the beginning of all progress, but who shall deny that it is for many the end of all happiness.

So think the Malays, typical children of the heat-belt, and so also thought Saleh when he at last arose from his bed of sickness. He had sampled the work which the white men were doing in the land that was his by inalienable right, had sampled it in the office and in the field, and had found it little to his taste. Office work bored him, wearying his mind: field work tired him, putting upon his physical energy a strain greater than anything for which the history of his ancestors had made adequate preparation. He was not only a Malay, but a Malay râja,— the breed which has been pampered by man, as the race has been pampered by Nature, and always he was conscious of the feeling that an indignity

was put upon him when he was required to make an expenditure of energy, in obedience to the white men's will, for the better accomplishment of ends with which he increasingly felt himself to have but scant sympathy. "Why?" he asked himself,

Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?

Day by day his love for the Malaya which of old had existed before the white men came to break in upon its æon-long sleep, grew and strengthened; but now it was the peace, even more than the freedom from foreign interference, which appealed to him. Even white men, now and again, when the muscles of their spirits have been worn slack by the long effort and their souls are borne down with weariness, ask themselves the grim question, Cui bono? as they think upon the unending toil in which in Asia they are engaged, and find at such moments scant comfort in the answer. Saleh asked it too, and unlike the white men whose lives are devoted to the work they have in hand, had no inducement to nail himself to a faith in the utility of British endeavor. The twin demons which had haunted his bed of sickness clung still to his skirts, and Râja Pahlawan Indut and Râja Haji Abdullah fostered his discontent. Saleh could only see that the white men had spoiled his life for him, that there was no place for a Malayan râja who desired to rule as his fathers ruled aforetime, in the new scheme of things which the English had evolved, and a keen sense of injustice-keener far than it would have been but for his training in Englandfanned his hatred of the present and his longings for a bygone time. was dropping back more and more into a Malay, and into a Malay of royal birth and tradition. His sympathies were now wholly with the old order; and, surrounded by the monotonous

He

peace which the white men had 'imposed upon the land, it was not easy to reconstruct in imagination the evils, the horrors, and the uglinesses of native rule from which that land had by the same agency been freed.

XX.

Meanwhile Saleh accumulated some curious experiences.

The girl Münah had helped to nurse him while he lay sick in his mother's household, and after his recovery she renewed her former advances. Saleh had learned to be pleased by her presence about him, and was grateful to her for her kindness. When he returned to his bungalow on the opposite bank of the river, he missed her; and his parasites, who from the first had felt something akin to shame on account of their master's determined celibacy, urged him to take the girl into his house. But Saleh, albeit many of the impressions which he had received during his sojourn in the Le Mesurier family were wearing thin, had acquired certain prejudices (incomprehensible to his entourage) of which he could by no means be rid. The memory of Alice Fairfax, too, had stood hitherto between him and every other woman's face, but now the vision of Alice was fading. It is not in youth to cherish a vain hope eternally. At the end of a few weeks of indecision he made up his mind to marry the girl,—a step of no great moment in itself, since Muhammadan unions are dissolved without difficulty if they prove to be unsat isfactory.

Accordingly he sent for Râja Haji Abdullah, and asked him to celebrate the marriage. Râja Haji hummed and hawed a great deal, showed symptoms of obvious uneasiness, and eventually referred Saleh to his mother, to whose household Mûnah belonged, and in whose gift she was. But news of what was afoot had already spread across