The next great business was to square up the accounts and get money, first by grant from Parliament, and then by loan on the credit of it. There had been trouble about this for some time. Many of the leading naval men were personally involved in the bitterness of party politics, and also the methods of the Board had been various, and sometimes peculiar. A Committee of the House that had been appointed to examine the accounts was far from satisfied. Another Committee was appointed to inquire into "the miscarriages of the war." Pepys held his own with them better than any of his colleagues. He had more knowledge than they of the details of what had been done. He had been more diligent, and perhaps wiser; but, above all, he was in complete sympathy with those who wanted to see the Navy in better working order. He cared about his business with all his heart, and by degrees he was left to answer alone for the Board.

He was bothered almost out of his life. He had himself done things that looked queer. At one time, finding that the contractors were cheating the King in the matter of flags for the Navy, he had taken the business into his own hands, advanced £500 of his own, and cleared over £50 for himself on the transaction. "And earned it with due pains and care, and issuing of my own money, and saved the King

near £100 on it " (28th January 1665). But long afterwards, on 25th September 1666, we read that: "Looking over the book that Sir G. Carteret intends to deliver to the Parliament of his payments, I find my name the very second, for flags, which I had bought for the Navy, of calico, once, about £500 and odd pounds, which vexed me mightily. At last I concluded of scraping out my name, and putting in Mr Tooker's, which eased me, though the price was such as I should have had glory by.”

This had been a very distressful period. On 2nd October 1666 "the Committee met and appointed me to attend them to-morrow, to examine our lists. This put me into a mighty fear and trouble-they doing it in a very ill humour, methought. When come home, I to Sir W. Pen's, to his boy, for my book and there find he hath it not; but delivered it to the door-keeper of the Committee for me. This, added to my former disquiet, made me stark mad, considering all the nakedness of the office lay open, in papers within those covers. But, coming to our rendezvous at the Swan tavern, I found they have found the house-keeper, and the book simply locked up in the Court." 3rd October: "Waked betimes, mightily troubled in mind, and in the most true trouble that I ever was in my life-saving in the business last year of the East India prizes. So up; and by and by,

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This was a typical encounter, and shows the spirit in which Pepys met his critics. During the further troubles Birch was his friend, who is very kind to me, and calls me, with great respect and kindness, a man of business, and he thinks honest, and so long will stand by me, and every such man, to the death" (18th February 1667-8). The Treasurer for the Army, Sir Stephen Fox, confided to him his secret for managing the affairs of that branch of the service. He said: "They give him 12d. per pound quite through the Army, with condition to be paid weekly. This he undertakes upon his own private credit, and to be paid by the King at the end of every four months. If the King pay him not at the end of every four months, then, for all the time he stays longer,

The more their accounts were questioned, and the longer Parliament delayed about the details of taxes by which money was to be raised, the more reluctant men were to advance their cash. "Sir G. Carteret asked me whether £50 or £60 would do us any good; and when I told him the very women must have £200 he held up his eyes as if we had asked a million. The Duke of York did confess that he did not see how we could do anything without a present supply of £20,000, and so we broke up, and all parted. Nothing but distraction and confusion in the affairs of the Navy; which makes me wish, with all my heart, that I were well and quietly settled, with what little I have got, in the country, where I might live peaceably, and study, and pray for the good of the King and my country."

He was continually expecting to be turned out, but he was not. The climax came at last, when all the dirty linen had been examined and the accounts looked into, and all the Committees and Sub-Committees and Commissioners had reported; and Pepys, in the

name of his Board, was summoned to appear at the Bar of the House of Commons, some new storm having arisen about their expedients to get money. He lay awake all night, worrying about it, till at six in the morning he got his wife to talk to him to comfort him, "which she at last did," with a castle in the air about his retiring. "So, with great trouble, but yet with some ease from this discourse of my wife's, I up, and at my office, whither come my clerks, and so I did huddle the best I could, some more notes for my discourse to-day (he had only been given a week in which to prepare it), "and by nine o'clock was ready, and did go down to the Old Swan, and there, by boat, to Westminster, where I found myself come time enough, and my brethren all ready. But I full of thoughts and trouble about the issue of this day; and, to comfort myself, did go to the Dog and drink half a pint of mulled sack, and in the hall did drink a dram of brandy; and with the warmth of this did find myself in better order as to courage, truly. So we all up to the lobby; and between eleven or twelve o'clock, were called in, with the mace before us, into the House, where a mighty full House: and we stood at the bar. I perceive the whole House was full of expectation of our defence, what it would be, and with great prejudice. After the Speaker had told us the

dissatisfaction of the House, and read the Report of the Committee, I began our defence most acceptably and smoothly, and continued at it without any hesitation or losse, but with full scope, and all my reason free about me, as if it had been at my own table, from that time till past three in the after noon; and so it ended, without any interruption from the Speaker, but we withdrew" (5th March 1668).

It was evidently a very good speech. All his own party were delighted, and he was immensely complimented. The Commons seem to have been impressed, and their prosecution dropped off after it. Apparently the Board had done on the whole as well as could be expected of them in the circumstances, for the Inquiry had been very searching, and there was a general wish to find a scapegoat. The effect on Pepys' mind was to give him a great desire to become a Parliament man himself

-a wish that was afterwards gratified, though not till after failing eyesight had obliged him to give up his cipher diary, which he did in May 1669; and he never resumed it.

Of course, these extracts give only one side of his life. The bulk of the diary is made up of the daily interests of a very jolly, sociable, private life, spiced with biting satire and witty sayings, as well as with unsavoury gossip and domestic details. For he recounts

his life whole, unclassified, and unvarnished, and gives his thoughts and fears just as he found them. There is encouragement for us in his record, knowing, as we do, that, on the whole, that discreditable and anxious period of English history was safely passed. And seeing how matters unfolded themselves may help us to face the discouragements of the present day, which is far more glorious than that of Charles II. We have again reached a time of social transition. It is some comfort to remember

that the men who save their country are the steady practical workers who go on adapting and adjusting methods and opportunities, gradually defining the differences between principles and shibboleths, seeing the danger of their times without shrieking or falling into hopeless despair, and keeping the country together by sheer weight of numbers and diligence. Men like Pepys, in short, and they are none the worse for being able and ready to enjoy themselves.

A. C. COMPTON.

WE had been told that the Kelat of the Emperor Nadir Shah was a very marvellous place. When we actually set eyes on it, the most extravagant descriptions seemed less than the truth.

The Persians, who, like the Chinese, attach an overwhelming importance to fortresses, shroud it in the greatest mystery, and use every effort to prevent strangers approaching it.

Even travellers with an immense influence behind them had failed to get inside. How ever, in 1919 we were by way of being self-invited allies of the Persians, and as our task was then the defence of Khurasan against the Bolsheviks, they could not very well refuse our commander's entry into Kelati-Nadiri when he asked for it. All the same, they made a great to-do about it, and politely rubbed in the fact that they were conferring a very great honour not accorded to every

one.

To save time, we sent our horses and spare kit, escorted by a few men of the Guides, under Havildar Aslam, a much-scarred Yusafzai veteran of Artois and Africa, a day's march ahead. Next day the Colonel and I set out in the one and only "tin-Lizzie" that the force owned, across the waving green corn of the plain,

The

past the blue-tiled dome of Khwaja Rabbi's shrine that glinted in the morning sun, to Razan. The Ford clanked back to Meshed, and mounting our horses we rode on by a rough track into the mountains. month was April, and it had begun to get hot in the middle of the day in that latitude (36° N.), so we pushed along. The several ranges that here compose the Kara Dagh run athwart the trail, and this scrambles laboriously up the gorges of the streams that burst their way abruptly through the iron cliffs. Almost at once we found ourselves in the first of these grey-walled defiles.

The stream-bed was dry, and though the track was strewn with boulders and rough rocks, our horses could trot. We soon climbed over the little ridge at the head of the gorge, past the tall thin headstones of a Persian graveyard to the shallow valley full of smiling corn and barley in the midst of which lay Kardeh, the last Persian village. As we halted a few minutes to renew the clenches on a loose shoe, the pleasant-spoken Katkhuda brought us a tray of melons. Feroz, my young orderly, smiled his engaging Punjabi smile. He liked melons, though he remarked that they had the disadvantage of making the