you stayed. Some scoundrel crept into the camp one night and knifed him to death. I saw his body the next morning, and it was a horrible sight-all his breast and face slashed to pieces."

Paris and the twentieth century straightway fell from the Traveller, and he was back once more in Persia of the Middle Ages, and was talking to Abdulla the beggar beneath the caravanserai wall in the shadow of the coming night. And again that picture rose before his eyes-the crouching figure of the beggar, half seen, half lost in the gathering gloom, the upturned face working with wild triumph, and the dagger, its haft still quivering with the furious energy of the last blow, buried in the ground.

...

With a wrench he brought himself back to the present, uttering polite condolences for the untimely end of the DeputyGovernor's cousin.

"And the murderer" (the word hardly expressed his sentiment, but under the circumstances there was none other), "and the murderer was not caught?"

"No; the guards were asleep as usual-the sons of burnt fathers-and the murderer got away without being discovered. There was no clue as to who he was, for of course my cousin was a sakht man, as you know, and had many powerful enemies."

The Traveller nodded absently. "Yet," he was think

VOL. CCI.NO, MCCXVI.

It gave him a pleasant sense of power to think that he had but to say a few words and Abdulla's life would not be worth more purchase than it took a letter to get from Paris to Persia. It titivated his feeling for the dramatic and the bizarre that here in Paris, far removed in time and space as he was from the actual oceurrence, he nevertheless held the secret of that dark and bloodstained mystery. It called forth his admiration for the "indomitable soul" in man, that one such fellow-mortal, triumphing over all difficulties, should at the end have come to his self-appointed goal.

He would have given much to have asked whether Abdulla sat at his accustomed place near the caravanserai gate calling for alms, but feared to arouse suspicions.

The Deputy-Governor broke in on his thoughts.

"Oh, mon ami, your glass is empty. You will have another? Bon! Garçon !"

When his liqueur was brought the Traveller lifted his glass.

"A votre sainté," he said, and the Deputy - Governor bowed and sipped his poison. But in his heart the Traveller drank a different toast to one Abdulla, crippled beggar, who had dealt justice to the governor of a province with a thousand men at his back.

M

IF Walter Greenway thought that British folk would admire his pluck when he told the story of his service as a spy, printed in 'Blackwood's Magazine' for June 1916, he was right. But he went wrong in imagining that any mortal's nose would turn up regarding the Arab wife he worshipped. His letter had scarcely been read in my house, when my wife and her friends were busy wondering what tokens of affection and esteem they could send to a dark-skinned sister, whose heroic patriotism and pureness of soul her husband so well described, and to the children of whom he was SO proud. A parcel went off in April to a queer address near Mocha, given in his last letter -an address which did not stimulate great confidence in the delivery of anything sent to it. Absence of news of the fate of that small consignment had awakened some anxiety, when several readers of 'Maga' generously wrote to me, offering to repeat what my wife and her friends had done. It seemed unsafe to risk more parcels without better hope of the address than I had come to entertain. A more pleasing matter was the strong testimony I had on every hand of the pride and affection which

people felt for Walter and his family. That a few here and there regarded his story as too strange to be true only heightened my delight. I knew how he would have enjoyed their unbelief.

There was no response to a letter I sent him when forwarding the June number of 'Blackwood.' I had set him down as dead from the results of that torture and privation he had told about, when, in the middle of October, a package of botanical specimens reached me, evidently the gift of some friend abroad.

I have a good many friends abroad just now. Some of them credit me with hobbies and attainments to which I cannot lay the least claim. There is one who mistakenly thinks I care about beetles, another who has got it into his head that I dote on spiders, and a third that I am learned in the wisdom of the Egyptians and adore mummies. As I care about as much for the study of botany as of beetles or spiders or mummies, my gratitude at being remembered was greater than my interest in the botanical specimens the postman brought me.

Neither writing on label nor postmark were illuminating. Opening the package, I found

it to consist of coarse grasses, surrounding a single stalk of a plant of the orchid tribe, the closed dry leaf of which might hide a flower. As a matter of fact it hid fragments of paper rolled into pellets, which I have smoothed out, and from which I have laboriously pieced together three distinct letters, all full of further news of Greenway, all jumbled up when they came into my hands, and all legible only with difficulty in many parts. I have made the best I can of them, and I believe my version represents what he wrote, if not quite, at least tolerably accurately.

The letters speak for themselves. There is no need for me to say that any further botanical specimens from the East would have my closest attention. Alas, Walter will send me no more!

Here is the letter written first, and dated April 10, 1916:

"That Bedouin mute I told you about he had a job to get home. The windows of heaven were open day and night. He toiled and waded, slipped and slurred, through mud-bottomed lagoons and miry sloughs. Dysentery returned. He struggled along on hand and knees till strength gave out, and he was compelled to wriggle along like a snake, groaning in the morning, 'Would Allah it were even!' and at even, 'Would Allah it were morning!' from sorrow of heart.

"His pace, when he crawled out of the region of perpetual rain, was the pace of a snail.

Now, frost by night and a scorching sun by day only varied his misery. Most men would have prayed to die, but not he. Soft, beautiful brown eyes, blazing with love, peered beseechingly into his own through all. He pressed on, though it cost him excruciating torture.

He was deter

mined to kiss again the sweet brown face those eyes were set in. He would feel once more the rapture of those soft delicious cheeks laid upon his own. The music of children's voices stirred him to tears. Fancy must be clothed in reality. He would not die till once again those darling heads had nestled their curls upon his breast, and once again those sweetest lips had breathed into his ears the magic word father.

"He reached Basra more dead than alive, where by the grace of Allah he met his father-in-law, whose ship made sail for Mocha within two days, calling at Aden late in March. Better than he felt at Basra, but still weak and ill, he set out instantly for his home, coming up to the fringe of date-palms in front of his little place one evening as the sun sank. Resting as much from lack of strength as lack of light, he waited for moonrise, then crawled through the trees, weariness all gone from ecstasy at getting home, which even gave him energy to rise to his feet and run a few paces. But the sight which met his gaze made him cry out in terror. A heap of ashes were where

his dwelling-place had been. Instinct told him what had chanced. The enemy had discovered and avenged his service to Britain, firing his home and harrying his crops. Where, where were wife and children? Had the destroyers come by night while they slept? Did their dear bones mingle with those silent ashes?

"Down he went like the most ancient of human sufferers upon his heap of ashes in an agony of grief. Surely he had died of a broken heart, but merciful nature, refusing to endure more, wrapped him in a swoon. He woke presently in drowsy fashion. A tender arm supported his head. A gentle voice coaxed him. He swallowed a preparation of arrowroot. His eyes were opened. He recognised his angel of deliverance. Sitting beside him, holding his head upon her breast, her face now gazing upward in devout thanksgiving, now cast down to sprinkle his own with tears falling from those wondrous eyes, her soft arms clasped about him as they might have clasped a little child, was she whose spirit had accompanied him in all his wanderingshis precious, lovely, womanly wife.

"She would not let him speak a word. The children were at hand, she told him, safe and well. He was very poorly, and must rest. Desiring no more, he let her cover him with rugs, and sank to sleep in her arms. Afterwards they carried him by easy stages to her father's

place, miles away, where health and strength came back.

"Turks, they told him when he could bear it, had swooped down from the north-horsemen, fifty strong. By the mercy of Allah, his wife, working in the field at noonday, her babies with her, was warned of her danger by the burning house to flee into the wilderness. When she went back to the place at night everything was destroyed or taken-house, plantation, coffee crop-all they had. She took refuge with a neighbouring Arab woman, sending her babies to her mother, whilst herself awaiting her husband's return.

"She was weighed down at first by a feeling that somewhere he suffered torture either from disease or man. Then it was shown her in a dream that, maimed, broken, now reeling from weakness like a drunken man, now creeping on his belly like a snake, he toiled towards her, and her soul revived. Thenceforward she slept not night nor day. Cordials and arrowroot were at her hand in readiness for the hour of his coming. She watched and waited three whole weeks, only leaving the ashes of what was once her home for scanty refreshment between sunset and moonrise. Had he delayed his exit from the palm-trees but a few seconds, he would have been spared much. She must have found his senseless form within a very little while of his fainting away.

"It was well for him she