tered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb; wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the sudden hush that had fallen upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.

"And we men also looked at her; at any rate I looked at her. She came abreast of the steamer, stood still and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water's edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb fear, mingled with the pain of a struggling, half-shaped, emotion. She stood looking at us without a stir, and, like the wilderness itself, with an air of implacable brooding over an inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed. and then she made a step forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped. Had her heart failed her, or had her eyes, veiled with that mournfulness that lies over all the wild things of the earth, seen the hopelessness of longing that will find out sometimes even a savage soul in the lonely darkness of its being? Who can tell? Perhaps she did not know herself. The young fellow by her side growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back. She looked at us all as if her life depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance. Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and, at the same time, the shadows of her arms darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace. Her sudden gesture seemed to demand a cry, but the unbroken silence that hung over the

scene was more formidable than any sound could be.

"She turned, walked on, following the bank, and passed into the bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk of the thickets, and she disappeared.

"If she had offered to come aboard, I think I would have tried to shoot her,' said the man of patches, nervously. 'I have been risking my life every day for the last fortnight to keep her out of the house. She got in once and kicked up a row about those miserable rags I picked up in the store room to mend my clothes with. I was not decent. At least it must have been that, for she talked to Kurtz for an hour, pointing at me now and then. I don't understand the dialect of this tribe. Luckily for me, Kurtz felt too ill that day to care, or there would have been mischief. I don't understand. . . . Noit's too much for me. Ah, well, it's all over now.'

...

"At this moment I heard Kurtz's deep voice behind the curtain. 'Save me-save the ivory, you mean. Don't tell me. Save me. Why, I've had to save you. You are interrupting my plans now.

Sick. Sick. Not so sick as you would like to believe. Never mind, I'll carry my ideas out yet-I will return. I'll show you what can be done. You with your little peddling notions-you are interfering with me. I will return. I . . .'

"The manager came out. He did me the honor to take me under the arm and lead me aside. 'He is very low, very low,' he said. He considered it necessary to sigh, but forgot to be consistently sorrowful. 'We have done all that we could for him-haven't we? But there is no disguising the fact, Mr. Kurtz has done more harm than good to the company. He did not see the time was not ripe for vigorous action. Cautiously, cautiously, that's my principle. We must be cautious yet. The

district is closed to us for a time. Deplorable! Upon the whole the trade will suffer. I don't deny there is a remarkable quantity of ivory—mostly fossil. We must save it at all eventsbut look how precarious the position is -and why? Because the method is unsound.' 'Do you,' said I, looking at the shore, 'call it "unsound method?"' "Without doubt,' he exclaimed, hotly. 'Don't you?' 'No method at all,' I murmured. 'Exactly,' he exulted. 'I anticipated this. A complete want of judgment. It is my duty to point it out in the proper quarter.' 'O,' said I, 'that fellow-what's his name?-the brickmaker, will make a readable report for you.' He appeared confounded for a moment. It seemed to me I had never breathed an atmosphere so vile, and I turned mentally to Kurtz for relief-positively for relief. 'Nevertheless, I think Mr. Kurtz is a remarkable man,' I said, with emphasis. He started, dropped on me a cold, heavy glance, said very quietly 'he was,' and turned his back on me. My hour of favor was over. I found myself lumped along with Kurtz as a partizan of methods for which the time was not ripe. I was unsound. Ah! but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares.

"I had turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz, who, I was ready to admit, was as good as buried, and for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night. The Russian tapped me on the shoulder. I heard him mumbling and stammering something about 'brother seamancouldn't conceal-knowledge of matters that would affect Mr. Kurtz's reputation.' I waited. For him evidently Mr. Kurtz was not in his grave. I suspect that for him Mr. Kurtz was one of

the immortals. 'Well!' said I, at last, 'speak out. As it happens I am Mr. Kurtz's friend-in a way.'

"He stated, with a good deal of formality, that had we not been 'of the same profession he would have kept the matter to himself without regard to consequences. He suspected there was an active ill-will toward him on the part of these white men that-' 'You are right,' I said, remembering a certain conversation I had overheard. The manager thinks you ought to be hanged.' He showed a concern at this intelligence which astonished me at first. 'I had better get out of the way quietly,' he said, earnestly. 'I can do no more for Kurtz now, and they would soon find a pretext. What's

to stop them? There's a military post 300 miles from here.' 'Well, upon my word,' said I, 'perhaps you had better go, if you have any friends amongst the savages near by.' 'Plenty,' he said. "They are simple people-and I want nothing, you know.' He stood biting his lip then. 'I don't want any harm to happen to these whites here, but of course I was thinking of Mr. Kurtz's reputation-but you are a brother seaman and ' 'All right,' said I, after a time. 'Mr. Kurtz's reputation is safe with me.' I did not know how truly I spoke.

"He informed me, lowering his voice, that it was Kurtz who had ordered the attack to be made on the steamer. 'He hated sometimes the idea of being taken away-and then again. . . . But I didn't understand these matters. I am a simple man. He thought it would scare you away-that you would give it up, thinking him dead. I could not stop him. O, I had an awful time of it this last month.' 'Very well,' I said. 'He is all right now.' 'Ye-e-es,' he muttered, not very convinced, apparently. "Thanks,' said I; 'I shall keep my eyes open.' 'But quiet-eh?' he urged, anxiously. 'It would be awful for his repu

4

tation if anybody here. .' I promised a complete discretion with great gravity. I have a canoe and three black fellows not very far. I am off. Could you give me a few Martini-Henry cartridges?' I could and did, with proper secrecy. He helped himself, with a wink at me, to a handful of my tobacco. 'Between sailors-you know-good English tobacco.' At the door of the pilot house he turned round. 'I say, haven't you a pair of shoes you could spare?' He raised one leg. 'Look.' The soles were tied with knotted strings, sandalwise, under his bare feet. I rooted out an old pair, at which he looked with admiration before tucking it under his left arm. One of his pockets (bright red) was bulging with cartridges, from the other (dark blue) peeped Thompson's Enquiry,' etc., etc. He seemed to think himself excellently well equipped for a renewed encounter with the wilderness. 'Ah, I'll never, never meet such a man again. You ought to have heard him recite poetry -his own, too, it was, he told me. Poetry!' He rolled his eyes at the recollection of these delights. 'O, he enlarged my mind!' 'Good by,' said I. He shook hands and vanished in the night. I ask myself whether I had ever really seen him-whether it was possible to meet such a phenomenon.

"When I woke up shortly after midnight his warning came to my mind Blackwood's Magazine.

with its hint of danger, that seemed in the starred darkness, real enough to make me get up for the purpose of having a look round. On the hill a big fire burned, illuminating fitfully a crooked corner of the station house. One of the agents with a picket of a few of our blacks, armed for the purpose, was keeping guard. But deep within the forest, red gleams that wavered, that seemed to sink and rise with the ground amongst confused columnar shapes of intense blackness, showed the exact position of the camp where Mr. Kurtz's adorers were keeping their uneasy vigil. The monotonous beating of a big drum filled the air with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration. A steady droning sound of many men chanting each to himself some weird incantation, came out from the black, flat wall of the wood as the humming of bees comes out of the hive, and had a strange, narcotic effect upon my half awake senses. I believe I dozed off leaning over the rail, till an abrupt burst of yells, an overwhelming outbreak of a pent-up and mysterious frenzy, woke me up in a bewildered wonder. It was cut short all at once, and the low droning went on with an effect of audible and soothing silence. I glanced casually into the little cabin. A light was burning, Kurtz was not there."

Punch.

"The limitations of the lay mind," growled the Professor, as he leaned back in his chair and cut himself off from the ebb and flow of my conversation behind a thick curtain of tobacco smoke. At the best of times he was not a man of prepossessing appearance, the Professor. His deeply-lined face, overgrown with a stubbly thicket of reddish hair, his unkempt beard and whisker, the bristling fringe of his upper lip, and the thick penthouse of his eyebrows, beneath which a pair of small black eyes glittered restlessly, taken together with his rough, alert, thick-set figure, suggested the likeness of an aggressive Irish terrier. Nor to the average visitor was his demeanor more propitiatory than was his appearance. His ordinary response, when entrapped into conversation, sounded like a short, snappy bark. In the gathering gloom of a winter's evening, dimly outlined through the writhing whorls of blue smoke issuing from the china bowl at the end of a monstrous pipe an abomination he was believed to have acquired during his student days in Germany-and surrounded by the unholy instruments of his craft, a very little imagination made him seem something inhuman, forbidding and grotesque.

He never encouraged the advances of acquaintances. His contact with the outside world was purely official, forced on him by the duties of his position.

Twice a week he lectured to classes of medical students attending the great institution to which he was attached. As a lecturer he was not, I believe, popular. Throughout his discourse he barked his contempt of his audience. In the scale of his contempt he rated the average medical student a degree or so lower than even the lay mind. To

the irreverent among them he was known under the style and title of Micrococcus prodigiosus-perhaps a reflection on the reddish tinge which pervaded all that was visible of his person, except his hands. They were so entirely out of keeping with the rest of him that they seemed to have been grafted on his knobbly wrists for some more delicate organism. They were exquisitely moulded and carefully tended, with long supple sensitive fingers, the hand of a man who does delicate work. Great surgeons have such hands. What faint traces of human vanity he had, lingered, I think, in his finger tips. He was, too, a very eminent man, although his name was only known to the inner ring of the world of science. His professional reputation was apparently the only thing he regarded; against any other opinion he was immune.

Whether the great ones of the earth, whose hands turned the fount of honor on and off, had ever heard of his work, was a vain speculation, in which he never wasted a thought. It is told of him that when once a Prince of the Blood passed through his laboratory and manifested a desire to learn more about it, he only looked up from his microscope to scowl at the intruder. He was, however, so primitively ignorant of the great and subtle art of self-advertisement that I can find some germ of truth in the legend. That fair ladies and other butterflies of the social world, on the rare occasions on which they flitted across his path, greeted his approach with a shiver of curiosity and apprehension-for there was an air of power and of set purpose about the man-was a phenomenon he had never noticed.

He first attracted my notice because I chanced to see-it was at some tedious

scientific conversazione or other-the effect he produced on a very charming and enlightened woman of the world. He had appeared on her horizon, too, quite suddenly, intent on peering into a case of some pickled nastiness on which no one else had wasted a glance. At the first sight of him she gathered skirts, rustling alarm, around her, as one prepared for flight. Seeing that the Professor was altogether unconscious of her existence-an experience new to her-and, apparently, not dangerous when unprovoked, she decided, after a moment's hesitation, on keeping her seat, and fell to studying him intently through a long-handled eye-glass. This scrutiny had no effect on him; he was, to all seeming, unaware of it. Then her curiosity came into sharp conflict with her dwindling alarm. Curiosity, of course, got the better of it, and she fired a pretty intelligent little question at him. Turning round on her swiftly, he barked-just one short, sharp yapand then returned to his specimens in peace. She afterwards explained that the bark had conveyed, in the plainest possible language, that the Professor was not inclined for conversation. Later on, I tried to get his views on the incident, but though he talked about the pickled unpleasantness with enthusiasm and by the hour, he had obviously forgotten all about it. It would, however, never have struck him that he had been rude. If it had, the knowledge would not have troubled him.

He had, however, still some faint traces of human weakness. Whenever some remote German savant, in an obscure and very abstruse periodical, attacked-as he invariably did whenever occasion offered-the Professor's latest thesis, and reviled his newest and most cherished microbe, then there arose the sound of weeping and of gnashing of teeth in the laboratory. Those who crossed his path when he was digesting one of Dr. Hagebitter's gentle remon

strances, usually had reason to wish they had not.

Conversation with him in normal times had something of the excitement attendant on tickling a bulldog with a straw. He might take the remarks of the lay mind with tolerant and contemptuous indifference, or he might bite and bite hard. To what I owed the perilous distinction of familiar converse with him I never quite knew. If he did not encourage my visits, he bore with them patiently. A point in my favor was that, being altogether innocent of any and every scientific knowledge, I stood for the lay mind in his view of the world. The lay mind, as personified in me, was able to swallow the most daring speculations with never a quiver of the eyebrows. For the Professor was a pioneer. Eminent practitioners, who grew sleek in the grooves their fathers had worn smooth for them, and when confronted with anything beyond their sky line told the relatives of the deceased that there were mysteries it was hopeless to attempt to discover to the lay mind, held his methods and his manners in a like abhorrence. For my own part I am inclined to think that the Professor mistook naked ignorance for an enlightened superiority to empiricism. He also fondly imagined that the lay mind was deeply interested in his work. This was the only form of cozening under which he thawed.

Our conversation in the evening in question skirted round the recent outbreak of the plague in Europe. I have called it conversation, though it was rather a monologue, punctuated by an occasional growl from the Professor, in which I rehearsed the details I had culled from the daily papers. The lay mind was encouraged to go on by the certain knowledge that when the banality of its comments had irritated him beyond all endurance he would turn and scarify it. Then it would