Next morning visitors began to drop in-grizzled havildars and naiks, with an occasional grey-haired pensioned officer from each of the old frontier regiments. From the mouth of each came the cheery salutation of the borderland, welcoming the visitor to their country with the courtesy of a marquis of the "ancien régime." 66 it to their own advantage. land. Then a picture came The least positions in the swarm- up in his mind of two young ing official ants'-nest are the Punjabi girls, who, fired by the prize of examination passers, example of their brothers, briband every sticky palm that ing a doctor, enlisted in a Sikh handles public money is on regiment. Contrasted with this the hand of one of the para- was another. In the same sites. week, late in 1917, in the messhouse of a Regiment which might have been spared the indignity, a "tribunal" assembled before which all the able-bodied white civilians of the district claimed total exemption." The great German offensive was even then on the stocks, and Russia had tumbled into ruin. Several districts of Hindustan, holding each a million souls, had even gone so far as to provide a recruit apiece, for non-combatant service, be it well understood. The Great Indian War Effort did not cease at that, for some devoted administrations, after months of talk, identified their high ideals with certain labour corps, at treble the emoluments of the By the time the tea was brewed in the Russian teapot and the cigarettes were being passed round, a dozen patriarchal but straight-backed old gentlemen were sitting round the room on three-legged chairs, boxes, and bags, inquiring after the fate of a nephew last heard of in Flanders, a son in East Africa or Palestine, or a young brother in Mesopotamia. Not one seemed to think it at all unusual or even a matter for comment that every ablebodied young man should still be overseas in 1921, or that the numbers of killed in the old frontier regiments should be the greatest in the Army. Incidentally, the soldier bethought him that the percentages of voluntarily enlisted men killed from these three unassuming districts of Attock, Jhelum, and Rawalpindi were at least twice as great as those of any county in Eng hand, now over shingly torrent beds, now up rocky scarps, resulted in a shameful miss at a fine big ram that carried a head of fully thirty-two inches. Old Arsala Khan, who directed the stalk, was too polite to say what he thought, but he looked reproachful enough to abash a Bolshevik commissar. So it was a less sprightly party that got back to the little stone post in time for tea. Another traveller had arrived by then, who occupied a spare room. A civil official he was, a pleasing change from most of them, since he was a Pathan himself, and not a flat-chested Hindustani. The room that he sat in was crowded with widows, all in the uniform dress of the Baraks and Bangi Khel, mostly holding chubby fair-haired children, who, thumb in mouth, watched the proceedings with judicial gravity, in silence and short shirts. The revenue man, for such he was, was busy distributing doles subscribed by distant kind-hearted English people, six thousand miles away, to the poor mothers of sons lost in the King's cause. The young soldier learnt much in the next hour. The Punjabi soldier has no wellorganised Record Office or Ministry of Pensions to look after his home interests, nor any separation allowance to feed hungry mouths in a manless countryside, ravaged by drought and foreign raiders. So the young soldier was entrusted by as many grave old ladies with a dozen commis sions to carry out. For Fatima Begum, he was to find out what had become of her second and only surviving son Mukarrab; for Farakh Jan, he was to do something to solve the problem of filling eight infant or greybeard mouths on a pension of a few shillings a month, less than a merchant in Calcutta or a Deputy Secretary in Simla pays to feed his dogs. When business was ended, and the quiet widows, gathering up their children, had passed out to their homes, a cavalryman came in, one of the very few enlisted from that valley. He was a dafadar, invalided from shell wounds, of one of those regiments that the man in the street delights to call "Bengal Lancers,' as if they had some connection with Bengal, or Bengal with the Army. His last fight had been Gouzeaucourt, where his Brigade, alongside the Guards, had filled the gap left by a couple of panic-stricken divisions of other mettle. Tales like this filled the long evening round the blazing fire of thorn logs, and it was long past their usual bedtime when the last of the old gentlemen tottered away home. The young soldier had better luck with the sheep next morning, and brought a useful young ram home, and it was not long before hunks of mutton were roasting in a dozen near-by houses. Leave was drawing to a close, and the cold morning after saw the soldier on the move again, still westwards, whisked him into the front seat to hit the main frontier road of the trap. Niamat and Yakub that skirts the "administra- climbed into odd corners; the tive" border, beyond which driver, still dumb, sat on the the King's writ does not run. step; another passenger reThree hours over rocky ridges, marked curtly that the soldier along goat-tracks, and at the could not, of course, be allowed bottom of tumbled, dry, torrent to walk, and the whole circus beds led suddenly round a rattled off towards Lachi. At corner to a graceful little white- this metropolis an old gentlewashed shrine topped by a man, a squireen of those parts, dome of the cleanest outline, with a long grey beard and a whose atmosphere brought back piercing blue eye, an old cavalry that of the tiny grey granite officer, seized the traveller again churches of some remote parish and sat him down before a large in Wiltshire or Devon. Its brass tray of biscuits, samovar, guardian was quite ready for and fruit in the Post Office, a little talk, and an hour whose official business was suspassed before the party re- pended to do honour to the sumed their tramp. Soon more guest. hills led down to the broad white dusty road, overlooked by a crag of rock. Amongst the boulders of this there reclined four cheerful greybeards, armed with Martinis, who kept watch for the comings and goings of raiders-an honorary duty allocated to them in turn by the votes of the district. Once on the main road the milestones showed but five miles to Lachi, a little post town of the border, where a conveyance could be hired to Kohat. The party had scarcely covered a mile, when the sound of wheels was heard, and a two-wheeled, hooded trap pulled up, its wiry nags streaming with sweat. Out from the shandrydan there hopped a curious figure of fun, whip in hand, with an extraordinarily ugly though cheery face. He seized the young soldier by the arm, and without a word Small boys and ancient serving-men flew and hobbled back and forth on various missions, now to collect apples, now for some more tea, and now to get ready a conveyance for the drive into Kohat. Meanwhile the old officer demanded news of older colonels of his acquaintance. Where was Colonel Fitzblood, who commanded the 11th Punjab Infantry on the ridge before Delhi, in the Great War! Where were Daly and Keyes and Wilde ? It took a little explaining to make it clear to the old man that the Reaper who had spared his silver locks had gathered in many an old soldier to his fathers. In the middle of all this a phenomenon appeared, a young able-bodied man, a junior N.C.O., straight home on leave from his regiment on the Russian frontier. By this time the trap was ready, and the visitors, bundling has stuck up a tricoloured barthemselves in and to a chorus of "staremashayes," drove off, the young soldier thrilled with the pride of a new appreciation of the gallant race it was his good fortune to serve with: a pride mingled with a regret that such a race, Nordic Aryans, cousins of his own, should be threatened with extinction by a fungus of Orientalised bureaucracy, a Dravidian wave sweeping up from the eastward, from degenerate Hindustan. He thought of whitened bones lying in pride of place far ahead of the British line, on the slopes of Aubers and on the ridges by St Julien. For the real racial frontier between Europe and Asia is not where a pedantic Chenovnik ber's pole on the Ural slopes or in far Lenkoran, but on the Sutlej watershed, on the passes of Baltistan or the untrodden Mariong Pamir, in distant Khurasan, in the rugged foothills of Kasbek, where Aryan Georgian struggles with Mongol Turk; and finally, on the banks of the Niemen and the Vistula, in the North Ukraine, and amongst Lettish lakes and the tundras of Finmark. These are the tracts that divide the Aryan of Western Europe, Persia, Afghanistan, and the Punjab from the Mongol of Prussia, Muscovy, Finland, and Angora, and from the base Dravidian of Hindustan, and the sons of Shem from Arabia, Sind, and the Gulf shores. A SHOOTING TRIP IN THE EMERALD ISLE. BY A. W. LONG. FOR some time past my brother Charles and I had been thinking seriously of taking a shooting-lodge in the wild West of Ireland for the winter, and after a long correspondence, had at last hit on what seemed a sportsman's paradise. According to the owner, game of every kind seemed to be touching each other on this particular estate-grouse, snipe, geese, plover, duck of all kinds, hares, curlew, and woodcock. Poachers were unheard of, the shooting-lodge a home from home; and as for the setters -well, it would seem that they could do anything bar talk. Our first effort to take a shooting, an advertisement in the Irish Times,' was most unfortunate; for, though it produced many answers from different parts of Ireland, hardly one had any reference to the kind of shooting we required. One man was willing to let us a hunting-box in Co. Kildare, and was quite sure that rough shooting could be rented in the neighbourhood; another offered us fishing in Co. Cork; and one lady was most anxious to let her little cottage on the shore of some large lake, where there was excellent bathing and the best of free I. fishing, but only to careful tenants. Our only sister, Mary, declined to venture to a shootinglodge forty miles from the nearest station, and as the owner described it, "divil another decent house between it and America - from which description we concluded that the lodge must be somewhere in the vicinity of the Atlantic Ocean. But though Mary was going to stay at home, yet she took the greatest interest in our expedition, and bought every book on the West of Ireland she could find. The evening before we were to start for Ireland, Mary read us out a description of the Kingdom of Connaught from one of her numerous books-one she had picked up in a second-hand bookshop: "It lieth under a dark-grey cloud, which is evermore discharging itself on the earth, but like the widow's cruse, is never exhausted. It is bounded on the south and east by Christendom and part of Tipperary, on the north by Donegal, and on the west by the salt say. It abounds in bogs, lakes, and other natural curiosities: its soil consists of equal parts of earth and stone, and its surface is so admirably |