stick to anything. He is too fond of novelty and too impatient to wait for the interest that is to be got out of almost any work in the world, provided a man has patience to get to the heart of it. This implies a certain superficiality which is his chief weakness, but in most respects his is rather a strong type; and in his wanderings about the world he often does a lot of useful work, which is of economic value to the Empire, although it seldom puts money in his own purse. If the rolling stone gathers no moss, he gathers few prejudices either. He is neither pompous, nor over grave, nor hypocritical. He will not, like the stayat-home Pharisee, condemn what he does not understand, or be unable to see the value of lives other than his Own. The mark of routine is not upon him.

His

Where he is vicious, his vices are of the more generous order. He might see reason for killing, but never for cheating, a fellow-creature. varied experience makes him a most entertaining companion; and here and there among the older bushmen you will find a man-generally a Scotsman -with a pleasant vein of philosophy, who will put the tropical sun to rest with you in talk: telling you with a twinkling eye that, were it given him to choose whether he would live his life again or no, he would give a negative answer; but as it is, being entered upon life, and now somewhat in the vale of years, he cannot justly say, balancing good and bad, that on the whole he has been treated badly by the world. These wanderers over the earth, though in many superficial ways the most unconventional of men, yet keep the roadway loyally in all the great old-fashioned things. There is no excessive intellectual independence about them: they are good conservatives at heart, loyal to all things that have borne the touch of time. Impatient with the ceremonial pettiness of civil

ization, they are yet very far removed from that pitiful class of men who reject convention simply because it is convention, and, forgetting that no man may go about to sweep off the dust from antique time before he has noticed the pearls in it, set up, with the aid of a few superficial tags and without any real thought at all, their own ignorant prejudices against the traditions of centuries.

But whatever may be our estimate of the rolling stone, it is as well to recognize that he is incorrigible. No consideration of the temporal prosperity that perseverance in things unpleasant may bring has the slightest power to influence him. Reprove his restlessness, shut him up with a ledger in your office chambers, you will not make him content that came not thither so. He has no fear of being set adrift in the world without resources, for of his chief resource-his readiness to seek adventures brave and new-no man can ever deprive him. He cannot be fitted to our ordinary measures. His delight is set upon a different kind of life. I once heard such a man witlessly asked why he did not settle down in England. He replied that it was too abominable a climate. The humor of his answer lay in his choosing West Africa as a substitute: but he meant that he had other good reasons, which he did not choose in that company to explain.

In voyaging along the West Coast of Africa we are barely given a glimpse of Lagos, the largest and most important settlement of all. The ocean steamers cannot go close in shore here, but are obliged to tranship their cargo into a branch boat. This is a lengthy and unexciting business, and by the time the boat leaves Lagos the majority of passengers have had enough of the Coast ports, and are quite ready to disembark at the mouth of the river Niger next day. Some ten hours after

one to enter and follow again in the footsteps of Miss Kingsley to see the ants and the snakes and the caterpillars and the butterflies and the ferns. But the indifferent steamer cares for none of these things; and, if it had stopped to please you, it is certain that the multitude of insects would have persuaded you soon to change your mind. The insects of Africa are expert disease-carriers, and they come in such numbers on the Niger that one hardly dares to use one's lamp or go too near a light of any sort at night. These forests on the Niger are deadly places for all their haunting attraction, and take a big toll both of European and native life. Yet the first three days on the Niger, with all its mud and its smell and its mangrove flies and its frogs and its crickets, are enough to give the newcomer an inkling of the drawing power, the fascination, of what is probably the most unhealthy country in the world.

As we approach Lokoja-a matter of from four to six days' journey from Burutu-the country changes in character. From Idda onwards the tropical woods give way to a hilly country strewn with big loose boulders and thin, poor-looking trees. Idda itself lies on rising ground on the right of the river as you go up-stream, fenced by a cliff of red rock covered with all manner of dependent creepers, while on the left the Niger stretches away to the hills which herald Lokoja. Lokoja lies opposite the point where the crystal waters of the Benue join the muddy current of the Niger. Behind the cantonment rise the slopes of a wooded and lofty hill, which, to the astonishment of the native, the true-born Englishman at once desires to climb.

At this place, formerly the capital of Northern Nigeria and still an important centre, the voyage of which I have tried to give some impressions came to an end. It is not my intention to des

cribe life in Lokoja, for my experience of it has been too brief. Any man unused to the Tropics and their effect upon the European is apt to acquire a very false impression of life there on his first arrival. Grumbling is very often the order of the day, but it has nearly always a humorous reservation at the back of it which takes away half its sting. An Englishman is often the happier for a grievance upon which to vent the ill-humors induced by the tropical sun; and he will grumble at his work without abridging one whit the energy he bestows upon it. Yet it is a bad policy to grumble overmuch, for if you but cry down a country often enough you will come to think it as unlovely as you say. An open and frank enthusiasm was never a quality greatly favored by the reserved temperament of Englishmen; and it will certainly find short and merciless shrift at Lokoja. Woe betide the young man who is prodigal enough to lend his tongue words too readily there! Let him but say he cherishes bright hopes of the country's future, or that he has left England with the expectation of shaping for himself a career in Africa, and older Africans will tell him, as men may who chaff a child, that West Africa is no more than a place of refuge from the courts of bankruptcy or divorce, a place to which a man's family may conveniently relegate him, by a persuasive stoppage of funds, to outlive some naughty act committed at home, and take for a time his fill of heat in Africa until things grow cooler for him in England; that so he may find time, living alone, to correct and look into his heart a little. He fares badly among Englishmen everywhere who throws off too carelessly his armor of reserve; but nowhere does he meet with so little mercy as in Africa. Yet it is probable that, when we scoff at the high hopes of another, we reserve in our hearts for him a friendly

corner. Enthusiasm is good to see, before time has qualified the spark and fire of it; and, if we cannot refrain Blackwood's Magazine.

from rebuking it under a tropical sun, it may yet command our secret respect, and even, perhaps, our envy.

W. B. Thomson.

A hundred years ago one might talk more gliby of American literature than it is safe to do at present. The ships that pass each other on the Atlantic do more than lift a handful of Americans and Englishmen from one shore to another; they have dulled our national self-consciousness. Save for the voice and certain small differences of manner which give them a flavor of their own, Americans sink into us, over here, like raindrops into the sea. On their side they have lost much of that nervous desire to assert their own independence and maturity in opposition to a mother country which was always reminding them of their tender age. Such questions as Lowell conceived-"A country of parvenus, with a horrible consciousness of shoddy running through politics, manners, art, literature, nay religion itself" and answered as we may guess, no longer fret them; the old adjectives which Hawthorne rapped out-"the boorishness, the stolidity, the self-sufficiency, the contemptuous jealousy, the half sagacity [&c., &c.] that characterize this strange people"-are left for their daily Press in moments of panic; for international criticism, as Mr. Henry James has proved, has become a very delicate and serious matter. The truth is that time and the steamboats have rubbed out these crudities; and if we wish to understand American art, or politics, or literature, we must look as closely as we look when blood and speech are strange to us.

The men who 'were most outspoken

"Oliver Wendell Holmes." By Lewis W. Townsend. (Headley, 2s. 6d. net.)

against us brought about this reasonable relationship partly because we read their books as our own, and partly because literature is able to suggest the surroundings in which it is produced. We are now able to think of Boston or Cambridge as places with a life of their own as distinct and as different from ours as the London of Pope is different from the London of Edward VII. The man who contributed to this intimacy, which is founded upon an understanding that we differ in many ways, as much as any of the rest, was undoubtedly Oliver Wendell Holmes, although he did it by means that were very different from theirs. He was, in some respects, the most complete American of them all.

He was born in 1809 of the best blood in the country; for his father, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, came from an old Puritan stock which might be traced to a lawyer of Gray's Inn in the sixteenth century, and his mother, Sarah Wendell, had distinguished blood from many sources, Dutch and Norman and good American. His father was stern and handsome, and taught "the old-fashioned Calvinism, with all its horrors"; his mother was a little sprightly woman, inquisitive and emotional. People who knew them said that the son inherited more from her than from his father. It was one of the charming characteristics of the mature man that he was always looking back to his childhood, and steeping it in such shade and quaintness as "gambrel-roofed house" built in 1730 will provide; like Hawthorne he had a pathetic desire to mix his childish