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it to say that only after two years of hazard and suffering did I succeed in returning to civilisation. One circumstance I may mention. I had hoped to land in America a scientific world-conqueror. In fact, I arrived in San Francisco from Hong-Kong as a blackleg fireman on board a tramp steamer. Such are the strange turns of fortune's wheel.

"During all this time Dædaloid 673 had never been far from my thoughts, and I was never without the hope that I should still earn fame and fortune by it. But my foolish egotism had long since abated; I was resolved to seek out one or more collaborators, and was further determined that I should allow another the glory involved in the next flight through space. So much had my two years' Odyssey done to overcome my stiff-necked and self-centred pride.

"Behold me, then, arriving back in London, penniless but hopeful. The brigands, of course, had long since relieved me of Parke Hopkinson's gold. I had left London a pale student of science; I returned a bronzed and bearded ruffian, unused to the ways of civilisation. Since my years in the highlands of China I find that one who has killed men with his naked hands beside the smouldering embers of a campfire can never quite slip into the humdrum life of cities again. But I must really apologise. I shall omit any further reference to my bandit days. I

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come without more delay to

the close of the Dædaloid narrative.

"Throughout my adventures I never doubted that I should find my treasures safe in Mrs Buckley's keeping. Mrs Buckley was a woman whose very appearance suggested permanence and solidity; amid a world of change she at least would remain unmoved. And beneath her roof-tree reposed the works of Baldermann, the formulæ, and the Dædaloid 673. Reposed, I say, and for all I know they may repose there even now. For when I sought out her house where it stood amid a row of its fellows in the remoter wilds of Cricklewood, it had gone. . . . Yes, gone, and left not a wrack behind. There was an irregular hole in the ground where its foundations had been, a few boards untidily put together in front to keep out the unwary, and, gaping at the void, a small crowd of inquisitive idlers. They hung upon the words of a woman who was addressing them. I drew nearer, and recognised Mrs Buckley. Happily, she did not recognise me.

"It so 'appened,' she was saying, in the tones of one rehearsing an oft-told tale, the day the earthquake 'appened two weeks come Monday next as ever was, my little nephew Willy, 'oo was stoppin' with me, 'auled the great bottle out of the cupboard wot the gent as give up my lodging two years ago left be'ind 'im, with strict injunctions it wasn't to be touched. Don't touch

that, Willy, says I, but with that the brasted child drops the bottle and spills the stuff all over the floor; but though I was real angry with 'im, it seems it didn't 'arf 'elp us no end, for I slips out with ''im into Mrs Rogers', 'oo lives over the way, to get a cloth to wipe it up, and, pore lamb, it wasn't 'is fault reely, but the fault of the gent for goin' away and leavin' it all that time, and never payin' me a 'a'penny neither.'

"This, I may remark in parenthesis, was untrue. I paid the woman well, and she was to have more should I find my belongings safe on my return.

And I just stopped at Mrs Rogers' a minute talkin' like, wen as we comes out, wot should we see but this 'ouse rocking like a haspen in the wind, and then wot 'appened next I can't 'ardly say, but off it went shootin' in the air like a ruddy comick, and 'ere was Mrs Rogers and me lyin' flat on our back in the road, blown over by the wind it made. The 'ole perishin' 'ouse was gawn.'

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6

'Cripes!' said one of the loafers, the Gov'ment didn't ought to allow it. In Cricklewood, too,' he added with a derisive laugh.

In

hopes of ever being a scientific success. My brain, always a delicate mechanism, sustained a shock from which it has never, I think, thoroughly recovered. I had lost all powers of application. Work has since been distasteful to me. short, sir, my life has not prospered. If you could see your way to come in some degree, however modest, to the assistance of one who may claim to have sacrificed his fairest prospects on the altar of science, I shall be deeply grateful."

It was weak of me, I know, but I succumbed, and a tenshilling note changed hands.

"I shall be ever in your debt," said the stranger, who on this occasion certainly spoke the truth. "Good-night, sir, good-night, and God bless you.'

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And he slipped from the lounge almost as unobtrusively as if Dædaloid had removed him.

I sat for a few minutes thinking over his story. He had told it with a great air of conviction, and I thought with pity of all that he had undergone. Then I rose to go in to dinner. As I passed by the office of the hotel my eye was caught by a notice on which, in large letters, an advertisement bore that there would be a lecture that night in the Grigmore Hall on "Some Fallacies in the Theory of Constructive Stymies." The name of the lecturer, I noted with interest, was "Professor A. Hopkinson, LL.D.

"At this point I slipped away. Parke Hopkinson had won another triumph, and Dædaloid 673 had now proved itself only too successful with an inanimate object. Gone was the formula, gone the Parke Dædaloid, and gone my last (Wigan)."

YOUTH AND THE EAST.

XIII.

doctor, who chose his practice by 'Bailey's Hunting Direc tory,' and had just put in three years' shooting and polo, with intervals of war on mi crobes and cholera in a tea garden in Assam.

IT is no good pretending bers of other professions. that I enjoyed the doorstep. Bangs, for instance, now a It had its humours, but there were too many disappointments. I had no qualifications for any kind of livelihood beyond my very ordinary degree. This and Carter's testimonial might have gained me a mastership in some second-rate school in England; but I refused to contemplate such a premature surrender. Perhaps when one had lived a little one might fall back on it. When one reached the ripe age of thirty the future would not matter so much if one had a past to look back to. But to be bogged and marooned at the age of twenty-four! My nomadic soul abhorred the notion.

I used to frequent a Scholastic Agency in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly, in the hope that I might get out East again. I remember that waiting-room, and the appearance of some of the young men who came and went, even the colour of their hair and details of their clothes, dressy young men about town some of them who I felt sure would have been supremely miserable if the portals of any academy had opened to receive them. Blind mouths --and I was as blind and hungry, no doubt, as any, and equally innocent of the pretence of a vocation. I envied the mem

The stiff, precise, whiskered, and cravated old gentleman who received us must have been a retired headmaster. He spoke to me as if I were a very small boy. "I under stand, Mr Tau, that you are waiting for an appointment in the Antipodes." He said this with a starchy patronage. and the implication that I might continue to wait.

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Ushers cannot be choosers" is what he would liked to have said. The head of The Vampire Agency had a quite unfair and illogical faculty of making one feel worthless. Nobody else could have infected me with a sensitiveness to the snobbish contempt our grandfathers used to entertain for Usherdom. But I used to leave him almost sore about it. I had forgotten that the word existed until I heard through an open door, "The last usher you sent me, Mr V

was unsatisfactory." How I should have enjoyed being in a position to tell the old Vampire that, instead of having to enter his room as a

candidate for favours, "Ushers ought to be as glad of crumbs as sparrows or beggars." I can imagine him saying, "Ushers, if they are deserving and submissive, are selected, Mr Tau. They do not select." I had put myself out of court, I am afraid, by declining to present myself, on approval, at a school for the sons of decayed apothecaries at Margate.

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'No, Mr Tau; I am afraid we have nothing suitable for you this morning. If you leave your address

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He affected to wince at the address, and asked me to spell

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I stolidly admitted it. "And W.C.?"

"I am afraid so."

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last pair of boots in that quest, and often had to satisfy my hunger with a twopenny sausage-roll at a railway refreshment-stall. I used to call on friends about dinner-time, and when they asked me to stay and take pot-luck with them, I was ashamed, and made some excuse and went away hungry.

I

The appointments abroad all went to Honours men. I had not the luck to meet another Carter. But I nourished a thin hope. I used to answer advertisements in the papers, and cultivated the art, modestly and by inference, of self-commendation. One of these letters produced an answer. It was did you from a schoolmaster who was looking out for an assistant to go with him to Umtoko, or Umtobo, or Umtoto. forget the name of the place. It was somewhere in Zululand. Things went so far as an appointment. I cannot say an interview, for I saw him, but he did not see me. He seemed to have had some difficulty in completing his staff, for he wrote to me by return of post asking me to meet him at Cannon Street station under the clock. He would be wearing a green label, he told me, as a mark of identity. I felt that there was something unpropitious about the green label. However, I went to Cannon Street, and found him waiting aggressively for me under the clock. In addition to the large green label, like a bookmaker's ticket, stuck in the brim of his bowler hat, he wore a flam

"Well, Mr Tau, it will be unnecessary for you to call again in person. Should we hear of a suitable vacancyin the tropics, did you say? Cancer or Capricorn? I take it it is immaterial which, Mr Tau-"

Such is my dream interview with the Vampire Agency. Coloured, perhaps, as dreams are, but with the pigments of truth. Only the other night I dreamt of that gaunt starched old man, so unsympathetic to youth, a notorious vampire in the days before the existence of Appointment Boards. One might have forgiven him if a little of the blood he sucked had entered into his system.

I wore out the soles of my

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