trifle rococo, perhaps, but you have caught the spirit of it." Jimmy was both pleased and puzzled. His manner in our infrequent interviews became more ironical and humorously quizzical after that, as if I were a half-tamed barbarian in process of apprivoisement, potentially corrigible, with a turn of freakish wit, though hardly an eligible candidate for Classical Honours. I used to write verses for The Granta and The Cambridge Review,' and these, apparently, he read. He taxed me one day with a lampoon on himself. It was an adaptation of Catullus (XVII.) into Browningese. "Mr Tau," he asked me with an affectation of reproach," are you the author of this pasquinade ? " "The Cambridge Review' lay open on his table, and he read the offending passage aloud, slowly and hesitatingly, as if it had been an acrostic or conundrum over which he had been puzzling when I knocked at his door.

""Tis a bridge that you want then to

leap and to play on,

But you fear the shanks that are cranked and crazy,

That prop up the structure you're standing to-day on,

With posts that knew Hannibal, reckon the days he

But a truce to his shade-Props, a

shame 'tis to tease ye,

Lest the thing should give where most rotten the rail is,

And recline in the swamp, I will build one to please ye

Fit for the rites of a Salisubsalis.

But I crave of ye this, and this only condition;

A most capital joke my good men of
Verona,

were in a position to harass the down-trodden undergraduate. Still it pleased my tutor to construe the allusion as personal.

66

Jimmy Latham heaped coals of fire on my head. After an interval of a week or so he said to me, Mr Tau, you must go up for the Classical Tripos.' But, as we have seen, it was too late. Jimmy, with all his gifts, had not the makings of a good handicapper.

My advice to the Georgian undergraduate is to energise, specialise, concentrate; yet, as a matter of fact, I was never made to suffer for that Poll degree. By all the laws of retribution a dreadful Nemesis should have overtaken me, but the Providence that watches over the philosopher on the doorstep was, and always has been, my good friend. The appointment I most desired, which was to unbar the golden gates of the East for me, was in the hands of an Oxford man, and he, God rest his soul, thought that a first-class Special at Cambridge was equivalent to his own first in Greats, and gave me the post. Parents who read these reminiscences should take care that they do not fall into the hands of the young; but such are the rewards of indolence, ignorance, and irresponsibility.

Three masters were required to complete the staff of St Paul's, Darjeeling, one of the most important of those establishments for the sons of Englishmen and Eurasians who are denied an education at home. I was appointed Classical Master. Carter, the Oxford man, who selected the candidates, gurgled with amusement two years afterwards when he discovered his mistake. I, with my native optimismhad I not felt all along that "something fat" would turn up-entered upon my duties quite innocently and in all good faith. And my classics, for that matter, were good enough; I can say it quite modestly. Even Jimmy Latham, most conscientious of souls, stood sponsor for that. And, what is more more important, I had the genuine qualification of zeal.

.

I joined my two outwardbound colleagues on a P. & O. at Naples. It was the first time I had left England. I had never seen mountains before, never climbed a hill higher than the Peak. And I woke up to see dawn break on the mountains of Savoy, pink snow arched like masses of crimson rambler above the black pines in an air more translucent than I imagined possible. The train was passing Culoz. There was barely a second to catch the name of the station. Magic inscription! Letters indelible! Culoz has become a spiritual landmark. I have seldom seen a sunrise or a sunset in the snows without thinking of Culoz. I wrapped myself in my blankets and became glued to the corridor windows until we reached Modane. At Modane we had hot steamy coffee in glasses. This, too, was an adventure. The taste for food, drink, or tobacco, associated with these happy initiations, endures. A caporal cigarette with one's morning coffee in France has a virtue of its own like the hallowed smell of cowslips and primroses.

The stark Apennines were another delight, and the Mediterranean; and it was almost as exciting as the Culoz revelation to see daybreak at Rome after the second night in the train. A week later, exhausted with adventure, I slept through "Lohengrin " at the Opera House at Naples. I had seen Pompeii and Vesuvius, and in less than a week I should see

the East. Port Said was another landmark; it seemed to me the most romantic place in the world. I looked for Madame Binat, who "could cause things to be accomplished," and I was disappointed not to find her and the Zanzibari girls who danced for Dick Heldar. A little imagination, a deal of ignorance, a sufficiency of conceit, and an undiscriminating appetite for experience, are the ingredients of beatitude in youth. We reached Aden after dark, and Hagger, the Mathematical Master, and I went ashore. We were the only passengers who left the ship. As we anchored at nine and sailed at midnight, and it took at least half an hour to reach the jetty by boat, nobody else thought it worth while. Crampshaw, the third of our party of pedagogues, as untravelled as myself, remained on board. I pitied his sluggish soul.

Hagger had been a gunner, and seen service in the East. He was fifteen years older than I, a bit of a self-conscious play-actor, of the order of

We

were running it close. I looked at my watch; it wanted only twenty minutes to midnight. Hagger was splendid. He took out a revolver, which until then had lain unsuspected in his pocket-he was always dramatic, and covered stroke. It was like a picture in the 'Strand Magazine,' Hagger the hero of the frontispiece. He commanded his temper, and spoke a few quiet impressive words to the Ethiops in their own tongue. They took up their oars and rowed on, submissive as slaves chained to their galleys. Soon they broke into a melancholy disciplined chanty, known to their forbears when Ur was the port of the Chaldees.

bed."

Hagger's heavy patronage rather spoilt the adventure for me. I disliked this kind of tutelage; it took the conceit out of one. I would not have minded so much if it had not been a pose. I determined that if the East was to be my stage, the next time I figured as a white man trying conclusions with Asiatic hordes I should be alone. I saw myself penetrating to the secret places of Asia in disguise, a Strickland or a Warburton, or, better still, a Waring, an Avatar in Vishnu-land, "assuming the god," with hordes at my feet grown European-hearted. But Hagger made me feel like a precocious schoolboy who had been taken to the Adelphi,

"It was an Arab proverb,' he replied carelessly. "I picked it up in the Sudan. A good thing to remember when you are in a tight hole. You saw how it crumpled them up."

I didn't believe in that Arab proverb; I had a suspicion that Hagger had never been in the Sudan, and I was a little doubtful about the "tight hole." Imchi, boukra, bint, was probably the extent of his Arabic; it is quite possible that this was the formula he used.

enough to have spent a much happier evening at the St James' or Savoy. However, I had some one to despise. As I clambered into my upper bunk I gave the supine Crampshaw, who was snoring too loudly, a dig in the tummy with my toes. His sails "were never to the tempest given."

Looking back it seems that the youth of our generation were ingenuously romantic and adventurous. I often wonder how much we gave ourselves away. Did we wear masks like the impassive, enigmatic young Georgians, who seem incapable of joy? One must have had some kind of mask or one would never have survived ridicule. The trouble with the