as if it were a visible stream.

"Remembrance of this sharpened the wish to be present at the first meeting of a House which on one side had fallen to pieces and then had been entirely re-made up. That it would fall to pieces was revealed to many; that it did fall to pieces was known to all; that it had been brought together again was generally understood. But neither in my neighbours nor my newspapers could I find any sensible knowledge of how the re-make had been accomplished. Blinds were drawn down upon that subject which seemed strange, but not unaccountable. There is lack of knowledge, and there is lack of acknowledgment - a state of feeling better known as a disposition to 'ignore.' We who have lived in affairs have learnt that such a feeling may be universal, and yet without any understanding to make it so. No man says to another, 'Let us keep this matter dark,' but darkness there is an unspoken agreement even between friend and friend to speak not of it. So it seemed to be in the matter of the ranching of the Liberals, who had gone wild and leaderless, and how it was done and by whom. All knew it, none spoke of it; but, thought I, in the House of Commons on the first night of meeting it is a silence that will speak for itself; and I'll be there to hear.

"And I was: fortune and a right honourable member giving me a place in the House with a commanding view of the benches

Thence could I look down upon the unhappy remnant seated there attenuate, futureless, their leaders falling out and falling away, their very principles a spoil to the enemy and yet not unhappy now. There was so little misery in the look of them, indeed, that my first thought, after contemplating them awhile, was of my cat basking in the unexpected sunshine of a winter day. If it was not hope that gave them that appearance (which could hardly be) it was relief. Sensible of being a coherent party again, now that they had two leaders the less, they were conscious of what had made them whole though it had left them weak; and it was a consciousness that filled the air about them in a speaking silence of complacency. As the grains in a horn of gunpowder may be separated by a paralysing intermixture of coal-dust, so these poor gentlemen had been divided from each other; but now, now they could come together again in working order, because that which divided them was withdrawn, dissolved, washed out. Home Rule might now be thrown off by the many with whom it was always a livery at best, and no longer was it essential to good Radicalism to play the Little Englander. A word had gone forth which, even though it sounded as the voice of 'personal proscription' to here one and there another (or so they said), was emancipation to thousands: a lightening of hearts, an easing of consciences, reconciliation with the master-spirit a call to closer union among themselves.

"That it must have been all this seemed plain and certain even to such retired folk as your servant who now addresses you. If it lacked acknowledgment, we knew how naturally acknowledgment might be withheld. Yet that it could not be concealed wherever two or three erstwhile Gladstonians were gathered together might as easily be suspected; and gladly I found at Westminster, as I tell you, that it was not concealed because it could not be. It may last little longer than the sunshine of a winter day, but there it wasit would beam through. The lightened hearts and the eased consciences sang together as the stars sing in their courses, and I heard them: believe me or believe me not. But if you ask what audible or visible recognition there was of him whose word had brought this blessed change to pass, I am constrained to say that there seemed to me not much. But here also there were natural reasons for silence at presentprudential reasons, kindly reasons, and such as most fitly commend the saying De mortuis. It is something, too, that Lord R. (I name no names) shuns rather than seeks recognition, apparently. And then, again, and to conclude, gratitude for service rendered is so much more easily dissembled than joy in its receipt.

"Now it is not at all in my way to prate of politics, but these impressions taken in the

of a new departure may interest you perhaps as confirming your own. We shall not agree, however, if you think that the greater compactitude, confidence, cheerfulness of the Radical Opposition betokens a victorious time for it. What can a conquered party do when all its more respectable or more fascinating principles are gathered up and carried off ?

"From harmony to harmony. Music was the second great object of my visit to townmusic and certain pictures; as to which a good judge and possessor of such treasures had written to me, 'If it would please you to view in one day the most exemplary display of masculine and feminine art that was ever looked upon in this world, come and see the Rembrandt collection in the morning and the Burne-Jones exhibition in the afternoon. The contrast is perfection and the lesson beyond price.' And so it was; and perhaps it is there still for willing minds to profit by. But for me it was both bad and good; for having a natural inveterate dislike of Sir Edward's pictures, - a dislike which lies deeper (I know) than judgment ever reaches, and is even (I think) rather animal, -it was not well that this gentle if unreasonable passion should be warmed into hate. There is a sort of music that corresponds with the Rossetti and BurneJones picture, but no one ever said that it was great or even true; and in that fact I find some justification for the prejudice (which, however, is not a musical or even artistic prejudice, but something else and something different) against both.

"It was a mistake to go from the Burne-Jones exhibition to an afternoon concert where the attraction was a player on the pianoforte. Only by rare good fortune could it be the soothing change required, and that should have been considered in time. But it was not, and the consequence was injustice not only to myself, but perhaps to the young man who was the attraction. Had it been necessary to hear him play that afternoon, so soon after leaving the New Gallery, the fair thing to him would have been an hour of preparation at the Bath Club: a bracing douche, a mutton-chop, a glass of fortifying burgundy. In any event that could not have been harmful; for, let the performer be who or what he may,

no

an

concert-room Broadwood should be encountered by persons in an irritable or lapsing condition of the nervous system. Set wide open, and with a shock-haired young man advancing toward it with swinging hands, it immediately becomes more object of terror than delight. The machine we know: what is to be expected of those hands? The hall is large; in it are many, many ladies; two violins and a 'cello await the doom of the drowned; and the Attraction has yet to make an English reputation: how much, then, there is to fear! Yet it is possible to hope, for with skill, 'touch,' and restraint,

very pleasing music may be drawn from an instrument which in that form is the most brutal that genius has anything to do with. Does genius, or genius not in want of bread, ever write now for the concert grand? Would genius ever have written for the pianoforte had it come into existence as the concert grand? If these foolish questions, explain their folly by an ear that finds more soul in the drum than in the concert grand, when banged as no professor of the humbler instrument thumps out its truer voice of nature.

are

the

"With studied awkwardness, the shock -haired young man takes his place; the stringed instruments lead off, their lovely voices no more strained, no more conscious, than the perfume streaming from the rose, the brier-rose, and the violet; and it goes to my heart to mark how humbly the 'cello 'cello, which hasn't its match in this world as a singing instrument seems to wait upon the mechanical monster by which it is to be devoured. He begins, the distinguished Attraction, very playfully, very prettily; but not without the nimbleness which is one of the most admired and detestable characteristics of a performance on the concert grand. Why, I cannot tell; but it reminds me of the male opera-dancers who, in days that I remember, figured in the ballet in attire shaped like Harlequins, but cut low in the neck! (Is this an extravagant resemblance? Do you suppose it put into my head by the BurneJones collection?) It was some time, indeed, before the crash came; but it was foreseen, foreknown, its place in the score fatally provided years ago by a composer whose deafness would have been much less afflicting to him in these days than it was in his own. The Attraction, his opportunity arriving, justified expectancy to the full. From the time when the thumping began legitimately, his action was the action of a man who would shampoo an unwilling tiger. At every stroke the artist's head was jerked forward from the second vertebra (vertebra dentata, the pivot-bone, you know), so violently did he throw himself upon the keyboard; and when dislocation seemed possible in consequence, the music which might have soothed and compensated our alarms was a mere ill-mixed noise of percussion and reverberation. The thump was more audible than the note.

"But it pleased. The audience applauded vehemently, and again applauded and again. But I-I could have cried for

pity of the violins, and for the 'cello's sake and my own (for we are lovers) could have murdered the concert grand. Yet I would not have you think me contemptuous of the pleasure of the audience. It was sincere and improving in every way; and I hope to die in the opinion that the sensitive taste which is also supercilious is in the first place stupid, in the second place vulgar, in the third inhuman. 'We rise upon the stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things.' It is the hammerer of concert grands, not even the grand itself, that really offends, and what cares he for music, or anything but marvellous execution? If he would only make it all léger-demain!

"But perhaps if I had not gone to the New Gallery that morning, or if the Bath Club had been subsequently visited However, it is useless to follow out these speculations, and herewith concludes-Yours very faithfully,

"CHAS. WINTERLEY."

It is a mark of the nature of the British empire, and of the conditions under which we hold it, that hardly a month passes, certainly never so much as half a year, but some place which the average well-educated person cannot even find on the map leaps into sudden publicity, and is on every newspaper placard and in every one's mouth. Yesterday they were unknown, to-morrow probably they will be forgotten. Fashoda made a somewhat deeper impression; yet for a week or so last year eyes were fixed on Borgu and Mossi just as keenly as they were later on the Bahr-el-Ghazal-and with good reason, for there was more serious danger of a conflict over the Niger than ever arose over the Nile. Now the strain has been forgotten: the men out there who were doing the empire's work on its frontiers are no longer actors before a great theatre; but the work goes on all the same, and it is just as well to set on record what was done and is being done.

The Convention signed last July in Paris between Great Britain and France ended suddenly and summarily a chapter of history which has not yet been written the story of French aggressions on territories claimed by us in West Africa, and of our too-long-deferred resistance to those aggressions. The encroachment proceeded steadily

VOL. CLXV. - NO. MI.

from the Berlin Conference in 1884-85. Within ten years from that date the French, working south and south-east from Senegambia and the Upper Niger, had interposed themselves between the protectorate of Sierra Leone and the Niger so completely that there was nothing to be done but fix a frontier by joint commission, which left that colony practically resourceless; and they were pushing with feverish activity into the regions north of the Gold Coast. In the meanwhile Dahomey, conquered in 1890, had become another base, and expeditions from it were moving northward. Thus in the acute period of the struggle the French were making their way southeast from their posts of Ségu and Bandiagara in the French Sudan, and north and northwest from Carnotville in Upper Dahomey. By 1896 their forces had joined hands behind the Gold Coast, and were striving to retrench as far as possible the hinterlands of that colony, and of German Togoland, while at the same time they endeavoured to make themselves masters of the west bank of the Niger and secure a port on its waters accessible direct from the sea. Thus there were two distinct points of friction between English and French: first, the hinterland of the Gold Coast (Mossi,

2 R