a moment's warning, for a coup de vent is a rapid traveller and does not dawdle on its way. We had many false alarms during my stay, for it sometimes happens that the hurrying winds are diverted from the track they started on, and so we escaped quitte pour la peur. When the first warning gun fired, all the ships in harbor began to get ready to go outside, for the greatest mischief done in the big hurricane of 1868 was from the crowded vessels in the comparatively small harbor of Port Louis grinding against each other; to say nothing of those ships which, as Kipling sings, were flung to roost with the startled crows. At the second signal gun, which meant that the force of the wind was increasing and travelling towards us, the ships got themselves out of harbor, and every business man who lived in the country betook himself to the railway station, as after the third gun, which might be heard within even half an hour, the trains would cease to run. I chanced to be returning from Port Louis on one of these occasions, and certainly the railway station presented a curious sight. All my acquaintances seemed to be there, hurrying home with anxious and preoccupied faces. Each man grasped a ham firmly in one hand and his despatch-box in the other, whilst his pion, or messenger, was fol lowing closely laden with baskets of bread and groceries, and attended by coolies with live fowls and bottles of lamp oil! My own head servant "Monsieur Jorge," always made the least sign of a "blow" an excuse for demanding sundry extra rupees in hand for carriole money, and started directly in one of these queer little vehicles for a round of marketing in the neighborhood. At the first gun heard at Réduit an army of gardeners used to set to work to move the hundreds of large plants out of the verandas into a big, empty room close by. They were followed by the house-carpenter and his mates, armed with enormous iron wedges and sledge hammers. These worthies proceeded to close the great, clumsy, hurricane shutters, which so spoil the outer effect of all Mauritian houses, and besides putting the heavy iron bars in their places, wedged them firmly down. It really looked as if the house was being prepared for a siege. Happily, my own experience did not extend beyond a couple of days of this state of affairs, nor was any storm I assisted at dignified by the name of a hurricane, but I could form from these little experiences only too good an idea of what the real thing must be like. Personally, my greatest inconvenience arose from the pervading smell of the lamps, which were, of course, burning all day as well as all night, and from our never being able to get rid of the smell of food. One was so accustomed to the fresh-air life, with doors and windows always open, that these odors were very trying. But the noise is, I think, what is least understood. Even in a "blow" it is truly deafening, and never ceases for an instant. At Réduit there was a long, well-defended corridor upstairs, and I thought I would try and walk along its length. Not a breath of wind really got in, or the roof would soon have been whisked off the house; but although I flatter myself I am tolerably brave, I could not walk down that corridor! Every yard or so a resounding blow, as if from a cannon-ball, would come thundering against the outer side, whilst the noise of many waters descending in solid sheets on the roof, and the screams of the shrieking, whistling winds outside, were literally deafening. It was impossible to believe that any structure made by human hands could stand; and yet that was not a hurricane! Never shall I forget my last outdoor glimpse, which I was invited to take just before the big halldoor on the leeward side was finally shut and barricaded. I could not have believed that the sky could be of such an inky blackness, except at one corner, where a triangle of the curtain of darkness, with sharply defined outlines, had apparently just been turned back to show the deep, blood-red coloring behind. It was awful, beyond all words to describe; but "Monsieur Jorge," who held the door open for me, said, "Dat not real bad sky." He seemed hard to please, I thought. However, a couple of days' imprisonment was all we suffered that time, and the instant the gale dropped, at sunrise on the second day, the rain ceased and the sun shone out. It was a curious scene the open shutters revealed. Every leaf was stripped off the trees, which were bare as midwinter. A few of the smaller ones had been uprooted bodily and whisked away down the ravine. Some were found later literally standing on their heads a good way off. It was quite a new idea to me that roots could be snowy white, but they had been so completely washed bare of soil by the downpouring rain that they were absolutely clean and white. A few hours later I was taken for a drive round some Of neighboring cane-fields. course the road was like the bed of a mountain torrent, and how the pony managed to steer himself and the gig among the boulders must ever remain a mystery. Already over three hundred Malagashes (coolies) were at work covering up the exposed roots of the canes, for each plant stood in a large hole partly filled with water, which was rapidly draining away. The force of the wind seemed to have whirled the cane round and round until it stood, quite bare of its crown of waving leaves, in the middle of a hole. Had the sun reached these exposed roots, nothing could have saved the plant. But my memories must not be all meteorological. Rather let me return in thought to the merry and happy intercourse with pleasant friends, of which so many hours stand brightly out. In all the colonies I know hospitality is one of the cardinal virtues, and nowhere more so than in pretty little Mauritius. I heard many lamentations that in these altered times the gracious will far outran the restricted possibilities, but still there were pleasant chasses, most amusing fishing déjeuners, and dances without end and number. cameron It was always great fun when the flagship of the East Indian squadron paid us an all too brief visit; and, indeed, the arrival of any man-of-war would be made an excuse for a little extra gaiety. I used to specially delight in getting the midshipmen to come in batches and stay at Réduit, although I often found myself at my wits' end to provide them with game to shoot at, for that was what their hearts were most fixed on. They all brought up weird and obsolete fowling-pieces which, the moment they had finished breakfast, they wanted to go and let off in the park. What fun those boys were, and what dears! One chubby youth, being questioned as to whether midshipmen were permitted to marry, answered: "No, but sometimes there was a candlestick marriage." "A what?" "A candlestick marriage, sir-not allowed, you know." "Clandestine" was the proper word, but it had a great success as a joke. My young soldier guests were quite as gallant and susceptible to the charms of the bright eyes and pretty, gentle manners of my pet French girls, but I often felt disconcerted to find that at my numerous bals privés there was a difficulty in getting them to dance with each other, because the red-coated youths would not or could not speak one word of French, whereas that difficulty never seemed to weigh with the middy for a moment. I dare say that it is no longer the case now, and that improved mail and cable services have changed the loneliness of my day, when there was no cable beyond Aden, and only a mail steamer once a month. I always felt The Cornhill Magazine. as though we ourselves were on a ship anchored in the midst of a lonely ocean, and that once in four weeks another ship sped past us, casting on board mail bags and cablegrams. But even as we stood with stretched-out hands, craving for more news or more details. of what news was flung to us, the passing steamer had sunk below the horizon, and we were left to possess our souls in what patience we might until the next mail day came round. TRIBUTE TO THE FLAG. "From him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." It is two o'clock in the afternoon, and a blaze of scorching sunlight is beating down on the cracked yellow plaster walls of the hotel. The brown leaves of the vine that clambers over the lattice-like roofing of dried reeds, which shades the stone terrace below, are crisp and brittle with the heat. The little blue waves are lapping softly against the red of jutting rocks and the sharp white line of the landing-place belonging to the opposite villa. It seems as though the landscape, in a fit of that frothy French patriotism of which we hear so much, has turned itself red, white and blue, like the dingy old flag which hangs at the door of the café. The dingy old flag is not there to-day, and the café is deserted. A few skinny fowls scratch about among the stones and hard-baked earth. A dragon-fly darts like a green flame across the sunshine, and down towards the peacockblue bay. Do you want to know why the eternal tricolor has been taken from the café door? I will tell you. My story begins years ago, on a bare 396 LIVING AGE. VOL. VII. hillside blotched here and there by a They Here, on the hillside, beyond the dead belt of the vines, some one had built a queer little shanty-built it of broken stones, of split bricks, of all kinds of odds and ends of rubbish. It had been erected very long ago, for there were holes in the walls, into which had been thrust bunches of dried reeds-the tall reeds whose feathery heads wave over the little river below, like the crests of ghostly knights and paladins in some old forgotten romance. Here was no snug garden-plot, gay with yellow marigolds and nasturtiums, and fenced round with a hedge of scented privet, such as we see before the door of a country cottage in England. The earth was all baked and beaten down before the door, and a little yellow grass showed in sickly patches upon the burnt soil, from which the cicalas sprang up in clouds at every footstep, twirling their blue and red petticoats in the sunshine like innumerable different colored ballet-dancers. On the day I remember, a woman was standing by the door harnessing a small, dusty-looking donkey to a broken-down kind of cart. In the cart was a supply of milk-bottles-the neat tin can of our civilized areas is here a thing unknown. The donkey had a weary, patient air, as though he had never known thoroughly-rested bones, or a thoroughly-satisfied appetite. The woman with her shabby dress, of which no atom of distinctive color remained beneath the fierce onslaughts of the sun, and her big country hat tied about her ears, seemed a creature of labor, a thing of seeming endless and hopeless toil. Yet I remember that when I spoke to her she had the quick cheerfulness of her race, and all its childish disposition towards loitering gossip. Yes-she lived there. She was the milk-woman of the district, driving down at six o'clock every morning to the little toy station by the hotel, more than a mile away, and then, climbing all the sloping heights around to carry milk to the tiny huts, or sometimes villas, perched upon them. She got very little by this mode of living, she said, in her breezy, cheerful way, as though it hardly mattered to her. Every one was poor. She had almost always enough for the children and her husband, and she did not look for more. Of herself she did not speak, and I felt that there were times when she and the dusty, patient donkey kept their fast together. A Then she opened the door of her little shanty and showed me the interior-a strange, dim place, which had a poverty-stricken weirdness of its own. paralyzed man, some years her senior, was sitting near the tiny slit of window with the light falling on his pale face and vacant eyes. This was the husband of whom she spoke. On the floor a boy of three or four was eating wild figs, and playing with a battered tin trumpet. This was her youngest child. The other, some years older, was gone to pick mushrooms. As she spoke he came in, his basket brimming with zampignans, as he called them in his queer childish patois. These children hardly understood civilized French. They were small and pale, like all Southern children, with an underfed air, and big, sad eyes. They sat munching their figs, and handling the toy trumpet with a strange, old-fashioned solemnity. Yes, she said, they would be a help to her by-and-by, when they had done their service and come back to their old home. They could get work in the quarry over the hill; and, when she was too old, one of them would help her with the milk. Odd, simple dream of rest and content! Only to leave off trudging up the rough hillsides where the cart could not go only to drudge a little less bitterly in old age than she had done in youth! To sit in the sun sometimes and stare at the blue sky and the sea, and be at peace-what a little thing it seems! Who would think that so humble an ambition could never be realized? I remember always, when I think of her, the senseless husband, staring at us with unmeaning eyes—the two children on the earthen floor playing with the tin trumpet. Perhaps it was an omen, that tin trumpet! I have seen her many times since then. I have seen her driving down to the little station in the cool, fresh morning, with the milk-bottles in shining rows behind her, or trudging up the narrow, winding path, beset with dancing cicalas and shining black bees, and here and there by glorious swallowtailed butterflies like flames of brocaded gold. Sometimes I have seen her digging in the valley below, where the melons lie yellow in the sun, and thyme and southernwood grow as weeds beside the way. But, wherever and whenever I have chanced to see her, she has always been at work, and alone. She always wears the same dressor one like it-faded to the color of the brown earth. The straw of her wide, flapping hat is burnt to the same tint. She is grayer now than when I first saw her, and her face is scorched and wrinkled into the appearance of extreme old age; and the vacant husband still sits in the hovel on the hill like a grim, speechless vampire sucking the poor fruit of her labor. But the tin trumpet has hung on the wall for many a year. They went out, those little pickers of zampignans and figs, into the world beyond the sunny, herb-scented Esterel. The elder, released from his service, drifted away into other paths-going in the end, of course, to swell the ruffianism of lowest Paris. The younger came back, broken down by fever, poisoned by the deadly miasma of some pestilential African marsh-back to the mother whom he was to help, and the little bare hut on the hillside. Neither of these two men had ever struck a blow at an enemy. Neither had lifted a finger in the defence of his country. Yet both were to die for itone, years later, by the hand of the executioner-one, only to-day, in the grip of disease. For the last act in this humble drama ended to-day. As I came through the lonely rough road, leading through the forest to St. Raphaël, only an hour ago, I heard the cracking of a whip in the stillness, and the rumble of wheels. Presently one of the great stone carts of the quarry came in sight, rocking stormily among the ruts, and drawn by a couple of mules; and I looked up in sudden surprise, for, upon the high seat, holding the reins in her motionless hands, sat my old milk-woman of the hill. Her face was still, and gray, and impassive as stone under the shadow of the faded hat. Her bent, brown figure hardly moved to the jolting of the cart. Her eyes, staring past me, had the look of some dumb beast of burden which has been goaded beyond even despair. Three or four quarrymen ran beside the cart with whips in their hands, urging the mules on with an occasional cut, and a resonant Italian curse; and in the cart lay a coffin over which some one had flung the dingy French flag from the door of the dirty little café— fit covering for a soldier of France whose life had been offered up on the altar of his country's folly. I stood aside, and the strange procession swept past me. There was something infinitely savage and barbaric about it-infinitely savage, but infinitely sad. The big, black mules with their high, peaked collars, the shape of which had, perhaps, never changed since the days of the Saracens-the brass laurel wreaths worked upon the leather trappings, dim survivals of Roman conquests; the running men, with their dark, unmoved faces, and their brutal exclamations; and, high above all, the jaded, motionless figure, sitting alone with its desolation and despair; and behind it, the rough coffin covered with a flag, torn by the fingers |