perhaps, if instead of watching

ing old man in a blue blouse was planting rose-bushes, and we asked permission to make tea under his olive-trees. He granted it readily, and talked with pride of his bit of land while we waited for our kettle to boil. It had been over three hundred years in his family, he said, and some of the gnarled, twisted, hoary - looking trees, barren now of fruit, were, he declared, a thousand years old. If this were so, they must have been planted over a hundred years when William the Conqueror came over to our islands. What strangely garbed figures of invading soldier or wandering Crusader, of medieval robber or pilgrim saint, may have rested under their shade in days past; what bloodstained or what holy hands may have plucked their olives long ago!

On occasions we went farther afield than Pierre could take me, and drove to - to see the Battle of Flowers and the Carnival, or into the mountains for what we called the Mimosa Picnic. The Battle of Flowers disappointed me a little, I confess.

The flower-decked carriages were pretty enough, and pretty sparkling faces looked out from many of them, but the flowers one flung looked pathetically wilted, and it seemed a shame to toss the little sprays of mimosa or heartsease into the dust of the road. It was pretty, but to a lover of flowers it might hardly seem worth the slaughter of so many innocents. But,

a garden I had been one of the pretty English girls in the procession of carriages, who were so evidently out for a frolic, I might have had a different opinion.

The Carnival, however, was like a revelation of the spirit of the Midi to us. The kaleidoscope of colour, the grotesque figures of bird and beast, the masked domino - clad figures, the utter abandonment to light-heartedness of young and old, were things we could not have imagined. In the streets they no longer walked-they danced; tripping in their brilliant garbs to some ridiculously catching air, and flinging their coloured confetti and streaming paper ribbons over every passer-by. At night the town was a maze of fairy lamps, and the stars from a cloudless vault of dusky blue looked down on a people halfintoxicated with gaiety, dancing under the trees on the Place. Pierre was wild with excitement for a week beforehand, and danced there with the best. Indeed, he danced himself into a feverish cold and came home with a sore throat, which made his merry countenance just the least bit rueful for some days afterwards.

The Mimosa Picnic will linger long in our memories. We drove to it through a rugged hilly country, not unlike parts of our own Highlands, through pine woods that climbed up the hillsides, and beside mountain streams that tumbled over bare and stony

beds. And from the cool green of the pines we emerged at the hilltop into a perfect blaze of colour. The day was a brilliant one, the sky was a bright deep blue, and below us the Mediterranean shone like sapphire, while all over the hill and dipping down the side of it to the sea the dazzling sun-kissed gold of the mimosatrees waved in the breeze. Distant towns and villages gleamed marble white, and the houses round the bay below us might almost have been built of snow. We halted at the edge of the hill above the water, and watched the gold dip to the blue, and sniffed the fragrance in the air, and almost envied the life of the mimosa growers in the little cottages we had passed. Some of them had been lopping off branches for the flower-market as we drove along, cutting down a cartload in a short time. They lived in plain little houses under the golden trees, and looked as if they had nothing to do except gather wealth from the branches in the short spring season. We made a fire and drank tea, and our cocher piled the carriage high with mimosa branches, and we drove home by a different road this time, down by the water and through the sunny town to our little village among the olivetrees. Old M. K— had bought chocolates for us that

night, I remember, and he handed them round among the ladies after dinner. Sometimes he laid little buttonholes on our serviettes, going himself into the salle à manger before dinner to put them in their places.

Kind old M. K—! He suffered terribly from rheumatic gout, and went in great fear of becoming crippled, but he had, as the pensionaires said, "beaucoup d'esprit," and his gallant thoughtfulness contributed not a little to the geniality of the Villa Paradis. My last remembrance of him is a pleasant one. We had all assembled in the hall to say good-bye to our Dutch friend, who went away just before we did. There had been some talk of religion at table d'hôte a few nights before, with the unselfconscious frankness about sacred things so strange to the Anglo-Saxon. M. K referred to it as he said goodbye to her. "Au revoir, mademoiselle, I often think of what you said-that we do not thank the good Lord enough for everything." "Yes," said monsieur the Freethinker earnestly, "that was a good thought." Every one chorussed it. Strange, kind, volatile French folk, with their perennial gaiety and their unexpected seriousness. We said goodbye with regret to them and to the Villa Paradis.

THEY were sinking the fifth big cylinder of the Periyakulum railway bridge, when Bruce, the engineer in charge of the job, passed the word shoreward that he stood in need of divers.

The cylinder-a great iron tube, twelve feet in diameter, coated inside with a layer of solid concrete a dozen inches thick, and bolted together in lengths of eight feet each had already sunk down through the mud and ooze of the riverbed to a depth of over five fathoms below the water-level. For days the heavy grab had been busy plunging down through the cylinder into the soft bottom, grasping huge mouthfuls of dirt in its steel jaws, lifting them clear, and dropping them overboard; and all the time the big metal and concrete pipe, held erect by stays and scaffolding, had subsided slowly, inch by inch, into the slime. But now, though nearly a hundred tons of rails had been stacked, spelikinfashion, across the mouth of the cylinder to add artificially to its already tremendous weight, it could not be induced to budge. Hard bottom of a sort had been struck, but at too shallow a depth to satisfy Bruce as to its permanency. He knew from the borings that the cylinder must be sunk through this stratum and another layer of mud before

the bed - rock below would be finally reached.

After a short delay two of the divers, Bunny Fitch and Tom Mair, came off in a dugout.

no

They belonged to a class by

means numerous in the East-white men who perform hard manual labour for a wage; but they were further distinguished from the majority of their fellow-workers by the fact that the craft they plied is one which, even in temperate latitudes, must be reckoned among the dangerous and unhealthy trades. East or West, the element of danger remains more or less constant; but in a tropical climate the unhealthiness, discomfort, and strain of a diver's work are raised to the power of n.

Fitch and Mair had worked together as mates for the best part of a decade, travelling up and down the world from one engineering job to another; varying the monotony by doing a spell of salvage work here and there on sea-bottoms that were like gigantic artificial aquaria; or by putting in time at some garish tropical seaport, where they groped their way among the mooring-buoy anchors in the fouled waters of the harbour.

They were not only mates, but pals,-close pals, as men who live and work together in fair weather and rough are

bound to become if the enforced comradeship does not breed sheer, unreasoning hatred.

Fitch was a big, heavy fellow, slow in his movements and his thoughts, steady as a rock, and grudging of his few words. He had saved a good part of his pay, month in and month out, more because he had never contracted the habit of spending money than because he cherished any ultimate ambition which his slow economies were designed to gratify. He drank sparingly and never touched tobacco, not even when the eye-flies made life wellnigh unendurable to a non-smoker. He was reputed never to have been in love, nor to have so much as looked sideways at a

woman.

Mair, on the other hand, was a short, dark, wiry little fellow, marvellously strong for his inches, active as a cat, and as volatile as a drop of quicksilver. His black hair grew low down upon his forehead, and his wide mouth and blunt features had in them the energy of a bull-terrier and the vivacity of a London streetArab. He had little vice in him, but much intemperate wickedness, bred of high spirits and an overflowing vitality which sought blindly and crudely for some means of self-expression. His pleasures were few and primitive, and he wallowed in them shamelessly when the opportunity served. Fitch, panting in his wake, sought clumsily to mother and chaperon him. He had nursed him through bouts of fever and other ills, had

shielded him frequently from the logical consequences of his manifold evil-doings, and had got him out of more scrapes than either cared to count.

"There's no booking-off for me," Fitch used to grumble to himself. "Not when Tom's about. It's a twenty-four hours' shift all the time, and hard at that."

Yet he took a certain vicarious pride in the other's excesses

things for which he himself had no taste; laughed with grim, slow appreciation of his mate's quickness, cunning, and ingenuity; and respected him as the better craftsman of the two. Much of their work was necessarily done in pitch darkness, the sense of touch, not the sense of sight, alone guiding them; but Mair seemed to carry an eye at the end of each nimble finger-tip. Working blindly with chisel and hammer under water, he wrought as surely and almost as quickly as if he were performing his task unhampered. Fitch knew himself to be a good, careful, and skilled workman, but he knew also that for all his plodding steadiness he was a child beside his small, mercurial mate, who could do more in a four hours' shift than he could accomplish in a shift and a half.

Arrived at the wooden staging, the two divers prepared for business. They cast aside their overcoats, kicked off their shoes, and stood revealed clad in the thick worsted sweaters, drawers, and stockings which divers always affect. Such wear for a tropical climate was

appallingly heavy and warm, and both men were already sweating freely. When inside the diving-dress the temperature of the air they breathed would soon run up to well over 90° F., in spite of the watercoolers on the air-pumps, and their work would be done in an atmosphere resembling that of the hot-room in a Turkish bath. They would, of course, be unable to wipe their faces or bodies, and while the worsted clothing would absorb most of the moisture from the latter, the red head-cap of the same material, which Bunny Fitch now proceeded to put on and to pull low down over his eyebrows, was designed to keep, at any rate, some of the perspiration out of his eyes.

With Mair's help he got into his diving-dress, fixed his helmet, and opened the valve. Lifting his leaden-soled feet painfully, he began to descend into the cylinder. With his strange globular headpiece, ungainly bulk, and slow movements, he resembled a gigantic automaton worked by reluctant and ineffectual clock-work. His bare hands, red and slightly congested by the tight rubber bands about the wrists, alone retained the mobility which we associate with the alert vitality of man. Presently the muddy waters closed over him, and a little later the air-pipe ceased to pay out. He had reached bottom, and the ladder was withdrawn to give him more room in which to move and work.

One and the best part of a second hour crept by, and Tom

Mair, his back resting against the side of the cylinder, sat smoking his pipe on the staging above water-level, while his invisible mate toiled silently nearly forty feet below him. Mair's duty was merely to stand by on the chance of his mate needing his assistance. The space at the bottom of the cylinder, where Bunny Fitch was slowly chipping away the rock round the edges with chisel and hammer, was confined to admit of more than one man working there at a time.

The hour was near midday, and the sun, soaring high in the heavens, was a white-hot disc upon which the eye could not rest for more than a fraction of a second. The sky was white-hot, too,-colourless, yet vivid with heat. The slow waters of the river, purring around the stays and stagingpiles, refracted the sun-rays with a blinding intensity. There was not a square inch of shade anywhere, and the palmyra palms on the riverbanks, standing ankle-deep in rank, parched underwood, lifted ragged clusters of fronds that stiffened and crackled in the dry and quivering atmosphere. Bruce and most of the coolies had gone to attend to work on one of the neighbouring cylinders. Mair could see the former moving about the staging and directing the men, clothed only in a big sun-hat, a flannel jumper, and a pair of canvas shorts. Even at that distance his face and his bare arms and legs showed black where the sun had tanned