These describers are writing for the "general," and so, in order to make

sure of being understood, they ought to use words in their ordinary

sense, or else explain. The word fountain means one thing in Syria,

where there is but a handful of people; it means quite another thing in

North America, where there are 75,000,000. If I were describing some

Syrian scenery, and should exclaim, "Within the narrow space of a quarter

of a mile square I saw, in the glory of the flooding moonlight, two

hundred noble fountains--imagine the spectacle!" the North American would

have a vision of clustering columns of water soaring aloft, bending over

in graceful arches, bursting in beaded spray and raining white fire in

the moonlight-and he would be deceived. But the Syrian would not be

deceived; he would merely see two hundred fresh-water springs--two

hundred drowsing puddles, as level and unpretentious and unexcited as so

many door-mats, and even with the help of the moonlight he would not lose

his grip in the presence of the exhibition. My word "fountain" would be

correct; it would speak the strict truth; and it would convey the strict

truth to the handful of Syrians, and the strictest misinformation to the

North American millions. With their gems--and gems--and more gems--and

gems again--and still other gems--the describers of the Taj are within

their legal but not their moral rights; they are dealing in the strictest

scientific truth; and in doing it they succeed to admiration in telling

"what ain't so."

CHAPTER LX.

SATAN (impatiently) to NEW-COMER. The trouble with you Chicago people

is, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you are

merely the most numerous.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

We wandered contentedly around here and there in India; to Lahore, among

other places, where the Lieutenant-Governor lent me an elephant. This

hospitality stands out in my experiences in a stately isolation. It was

a fine elephant, affable, gentlemanly, educated, and I was not afraid of

it. I even rode it with confidence through the crowded lanes of the

native city, where it scared all the horses out of their senses, and

where children were always just escaping its feet. It took the middle of

the road in a fine independent way, and left it to the world to get out

of the way or take the consequences. I am used to being afraid of

collisions when I ride or drive, but when one is on top of an elephant

that feeling is absent. I could have ridden in comfort through a

regiment of runaway teams. I could easily learn to prefer an elephant to

any other vehicle, partly because of that immunity from collisions, and

partly because of the fine view one has from up there, and partly because

of the dignity one feels in that high place, and partly because one can

look in at the windows and see what is going on privately among the

family. The Lahore horses were used to elephants, but they were

rapturously afraid of them just the same. It seemed curious. Perhaps

the better they know the elephant the more they respect him in that

peculiar way. In our own case--we are not afraid of dynamite till we get

acquainted with it.

We drifted as far as Rawal Pindi, away up on the Afghan frontier--I think

it was the Afghan frontier, but it may have been Hertzegovina--it was

around there somewhere--and down again to Delhi, to see the ancient

architectural wonders there and in Old Delhi and not describe them, and

also to see the scene of the illustrious assault, in the Mutiny days,

when the British carried Delhi by storm, one of the marvels of history

for impudent daring and immortal valor.

We had a refreshing rest, there in Delhi, in a great old mansion which

possessed historical interest. It was built by a rich Englishman who had

become orientalized--so much so that he had a zenana. But he was a

broadminded man, and remained so. To please his harem he built a mosque;

to please himself he built an English church. That kind of a man will

arrive, somewhere. In the Mutiny days the mansion was the British

general's headquarters. It stands in a great garden--oriental fashion

--and about it are many noble trees. The trees harbor monkeys; and they

are monkeys of a watchful and enterprising sort, and not much troubled

with fear. They invade the house whenever they get a chance, and carry

off everything they don't want. One morning the master of the house was

in his bath, and the window was open. Near it stood a pot of yellow

paint and a brush. Some monkeys appeared in the window; to scare them

away, the gentleman threw his sponge at them. They did not scare at all;

they jumped into the room and threw yellow paint all over him from the

brush, and drove him out; then they painted the walls and the floor and

the tank and the windows and the furniture yellow, and were in the

dressing-room painting that when help arrived and routed them.

Two of these creatures came into my room in the early morning, through a

window whose shutters I had left open, and when I woke one of them was

before the glass brushing his hair, and the other one had my note-book,

and was reading a page of humorous notes and crying. I did not mind the

one with the hair-brush, but the conduct of the other one hurt me; it

hurts me yet. I threw something at him, and that was wrong, for my host

had told me that the monkeys were best left alone. They threw everything

at me that they could lift, and then went into the bathroom to get some

more things, and I shut the door on them.

At Jeypore, in Rajputana, we made a considerable stay. We were not in

the native city, but several miles from it, in the small European

official suburb. There were but few Europeans--only fourteen but they

were all kind and hospitable, and it amounted to being at home. In

Jeypore we found again what we had found all about India--that while the

Indian servant is in his way a very real treasure, he will sometimes bear

watching, and the Englishman watches him. If he sends him on an errand,

he wants more than the man's word for it that he did the errand. When

fruit and vegetables were sent to us, a "chit" came with them--a receipt

for us to sign; otherwise the things might not arrive. If a gentleman

sent up his carriage, the chit stated "from" such-and-such an hour "to"

such-and-such an hour--which made it unhandy for the coachman and his two

or three subordinates to put us off with a part of the allotted time and

devote the rest of it to a lark of their own.

We were pleasantly situated in a small two-storied inn, in an empty large

compound which was surrounded by a mud wall as high as a man's head. The

inn was kept by nine Hindoo brothers, its owners. They lived, with their

families, in a one-storied building within the compound, but off to one

side, and there was always a long pile of their little comely brown

children loosely stacked in its veranda, and a detachment of the parents

wedged among them, smoking the hookah or the howdah, or whatever they

call it. By the veranda stood a palm, and a monkey lived in it, and led

a lonesome life, and always looked sad and weary, and the crows bothered

him a good deal.

The inn cow poked about the compound and emphasized the secluded and

country air of the place, and there was a dog of no particular breed, who

was always present in the compound, and always asleep, always stretched

out baking in the sun and adding to the deep tranquility and

reposefulness of the place, when the crows were away on business.

White-draperied servants were coming and going all the time, but they

seemed only spirits, for their feet were bare and made no sound. Down

the lane a piece lived an elephant in the shade of a noble tree, and

rocked and rocked, and reached about with his trunk, begging of his brown

mistress or fumbling the children playing at his feet. And there were

camels about, but they go on velvet feet, and were proper to the silence

and serenity of the surroundings.

The Satan mentioned at the head of this chapter was not our Satan, but

the other one. Our Satan was lost to us. In these later days he had

passed out of our life--lamented by me, and sincerely. I was missing

him; I am missing him yet, after all these months. He was an astonishing

creature to fly around and do things. He didn't always do them quite

right, but he did them, and did them suddenly. There was no time wasted.

You would say:

"Pack the trunks and bags, Satan."

"Wair good" (very good).

Then there would be a brief sound of thrashing and slashing and humming

and buzzing, and a spectacle as of a whirlwind spinning gowns and jackets

and coats and boots and things through the air, and then with bow and

touch--

"Awready, master."

It was wonderful. It made one dizzy. He crumpled dresses a good deal,

and he had no particular plan about the work--at first--except to put

each article into the trunk it didn't belong in. But he soon reformed,

in this matter. Not entirely; for, to the last, he would cram into the

satchel sacred to literature any odds and ends of rubbish that he

couldn't find a handy place for elsewhere. When threatened with death

for this, it did not trouble him; he only looked pleasant, saluted with

soldierly grace, said "Wair good," and did it again next day.

He was always busy; kept the rooms tidied up, the boots polished, the

clothes brushed, the wash-basin full of clean water, my dress clothes

laid out and ready for the lecture-hall an hour ahead of time; and he

dressed me from head to heel in spite of my determination to do it

myself, according to my lifelong custom.

He was a born boss, and loved to command, and to jaw and dispute with

inferiors and harry them and bullyrag them. He was fine at the railway

station--yes, he was at his finest there. He would shoulder and plunge

and paw his violent way through the packed multitude of natives with

nineteen coolies at his tail, each bearing a trifle of luggage--one a

trunk, another a parasol, another a shawl, another a fan, and so on; one

article to each, and the longer the procession, the better he was suited

--and he was sure to make for some engaged sleeper and begin to hurl the

owner's things out of it, swearing that it was ours and that there had

been a mistake. Arrived at our own sleeper, he would undo the

bedding-bundles and make the beds and put everything to rights and

shipshape in two minutes; then put his head out at, a window and have a

restful good time abusing his gang of coolies and disputing their bill

until we arrived and made him pay them and stop his noise.

Speaking of noise, he certainly was the noisest little devil in India

--and that is saying much, very much, indeed. I loved him for his noise,

but the family detested him for it. They could not abide it; they could

not get reconciled to it. It humiliated them. As a rule, when we got

within six hundred yards of one of those big railway stations, a mighty

racket of screaming and shrieking and shouting and storming would break

upon us, and I would be happy to myself, and the family would say, with

shame:

"There--that's Satan. Why do you keep him?"

And, sure enough, there in the whirling midst of fifteen hundred

wondering people we would find that little scrap of a creature

gesticulating like a spider with the colic, his black eyes snapping, his

fez-tassel dancing, his jaws pouring out floods of billingsgate upon his

gang of beseeching and astonished coolies.

I loved him; I couldn't help it; but the family--why, they could hardly

speak of him with patience. To this day I regret his loss, and wish I

had him back; but they--it is different with them. He was a native, and

came from Surat. Twenty degrees of latitude lay between his birthplace

and Manuel's, and fifteen hundred between their ways and characters and

dispositions. I only liked Manuel, but I loved Satan. This latter's

real name was intensely Indian. I could not quite get the hang of it,

but it sounded like Bunder Rao Ram Chunder Clam Chowder. It was too long

for handy use, anyway; so I reduced it.

When he had been with us two or three weeks, he began to make mistakes

which I had difficulty in patching up for him. Approaching Benares one

day, he got out of the train to see if he could get up a misunderstanding

with somebody, for it had been a weary, long journey and he wanted to

freshen up. He found what he was after, but kept up his pow-wow a shade

too long and got left. So there we were in a strange city and no

chambermaid. It was awkward for us, and we told him he must not do so

any more. He saluted and said in his dear, pleasant way, "Wair good."

Then at Lucknow he got drunk. I said it was a fever, and got the

family's compassion, and solicitude aroused; so they gave him a

teaspoonful of liquid quinine and it set his vitals on fire. He made

several grimaces which gave me a better idea of the Lisbon earthquake

than any I have ever got of it from paintings and descriptions. His

drunk was still portentously solid next morning, but I could have pulled

him through with the family if he would only have taken another spoonful

of that remedy; but no, although he was stupefied, his memory still had

flickerings of life; so he smiled a divinely dull smile and said,

fumblingly saluting:

"Scoose me, mem Saheb, scoose me, Missy Saheb; Satan not prefer it,

please."

Then some instinct revealed to them that he was drunk. They gave him

prompt notice that next time this happened he must go. He got out a

maudlin and most gentle "Wair good," and saluted indefinitely.

Only one short week later he fell again. And oh, sorrow! not in a hotel

this time, but in an English gentleman's private house. And in Agra, of

all places. So he had to go. When I told him, he said patiently, "Wair

good," and made his parting salute, and went out from us to return no

more forever. Dear me! I would rather have lost a hundred angels than

that one poor lovely devil. What style he used to put on, in a swell

hotel or in a private house--snow-white muslin from his chin to his bare

feet, a crimson sash embroidered with gold thread around his waist, and

on his head a great sea-green turban like to the turban of the Grand

Turk.

He was not a liar; but he will become one if he keeps on. He told me

once that he used to crack cocoanuts with his teeth when he was a boy;

and when I asked how he got them into his mouth, he said he was upward of

six feet high at that time, and had an unusual mouth. And when I

followed him up and asked him what had become of that other foot, he said

a house fell on him and he was never able to get his stature back again.

Swervings like these from the strict line of fact often beguile a

truthful man on and on until he eventually becomes a liar.

His successor was a Mohammedan, Sahadat Mohammed Khan; very dark, very

tall, very grave. He went always in flowing masses of white, from the

top of his big turban down to his bare feet. His voice was low. He

glided about in a noiseless way, and looked like a ghost. He was

competent and satisfactory. But where he was, it seemed always Sunday.

It was not so in Satan's time.

Jeypore is intensely Indian, but it has two or three features which

indicate the presence of European science and European interest in the

weal of the common public, such as the liberal water-supply furnished by

great works built at the State's expense; good sanitation, resulting in a

degree of healthfulness unusually high for India; a noble pleasure

garden, with privileged days for women; schools for the instruction of

native youth in advanced art, both ornamental and utilitarian; and a new

and beautiful palace stocked with a museum of extraordinary interest and

value. Without the Maharaja's sympathy and purse these beneficences

could not have been created; but he is a man of wide views and large

generosities, and all such matters find hospitality with him.

We drove often to the city from the hotel Kaiser-i-Hind, a journey which

was always full of interest, both night and day, for that country road

was never quiet, never empty, but was always India in motion, always a

streaming flood of brown people clothed in smouchings from the rainbow, a

tossing and moiling flood, happy, noisy, a charming and satisfying

confusion of strange human and strange animal life and equally strange

and outlandish vehicles.

And the city itself is a curiosity. Any Indian city is that, but this

one is not like any other that we saw. It is shut up in a lofty turreted

wall; the main body of it is divided into six parts by perfectly straight

streets that are more than a hundred feet wide; the blocks of houses

exhibit a long frontage of the most taking architectural quaintnesses,

the straight lines being broken everywhere by pretty little balconies,

pillared and highly ornamented, and other cunning and cozy and inviting

perches and projections, and many of the fronts are curiously pictured by

the brush, and the whole of them have the soft rich tint of strawberry

ice-cream. One cannot look down the far stretch of the chief street and

persuade himself that these are real houses, and that it is all out of

doors--the impression that it is an unreality, a picture, a scene in a

theater, is the only one that will take hold.

Then there came a great day when this illusion was more pronounced than

ever. A rich Hindoo had been spending a fortune upon the manufacture of

a crowd of idols and accompanying paraphernalia whose purpose was to

illustrate scenes in the life of his especial god or saint, and this fine

show was to be brought through the town in processional state at ten in

the morning. As we passed through the great public pleasure garden on

our way to the city we found it crowded with natives. That was one

sight. Then there was another. In the midst of the spacious lawns

stands the palace which contains the museum--a beautiful construction of

stone which shows arched colonnades, one above another, and receding,

terrace-fashion, toward the sky. Every one of these terraces, all the

way to the top one, was packed and jammed with natives. One must try to

imagine those solid masses of splendid color, one above another, up and

up, against the blue sky, and the Indian sun turning them all to beds of

fire and flame.

Later, when we reached the city, and glanced down the chief avenue,

smouldering in its crushed-strawberry tint, those splendid effects were

repeated; for every balcony, and every fanciful bird-cage of a snuggery

countersunk in the house-fronts, and all the long lines of roofs were

crowded with people, and each crowd was an explosion of brilliant color.

Then the wide street itself, away down and down and down into the

distance, was alive with gorgeously-clothed people not still, but moving,

swaying, drifting, eddying, a delirious display of all colors and all

shades of color, delicate, lovely, pale, soft, strong, stunning, vivid,

brilliant, a sort of storm of sweetpea blossoms passing on the wings of a

hurricane; and presently, through this storm of color, came swaying and

swinging the majestic elephants, clothed in their Sunday best of

gaudinesses, and the long procession of fanciful trucks freighted with

their groups of curious and costly images, and then the long rearguard of

stately camels, with their picturesque riders.

For color, and picturesqueness, and novelty, and outlandishness, and

sustained interest and fascination, it was the most satisfying show I had

ever seen, and I suppose I shall not have the privilege of looking upon

its like again.

CHAPTER LXI.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made

School Boards.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Suppose we applied no more ingenuity to the instruction of deaf and dumb

and blind children than we sometimes apply in our American public schools

to the instruction of children who are in possession of all their

faculties? The result would be that the deaf and dumb and blind would

acquire nothing. They would live and die as ignorant as bricks and

stones. The methods used in the asylums are rational. The teacher

exactly measures the child's capacity, to begin with; and from thence

onwards the tasks imposed are nicely gauged to the gradual development of

that capacity, the tasks keep pace with the steps of the child's

progress, they don't jump miles and leagues ahead of it by irrational

caprice and land in vacancy--according to the average public-school plan.

In the public school, apparently, they teach the child to spell cat, then

ask it to calculate an eclipse; when it can read words of two syllables,

they require it to explain the circulation of the blood; when it reaches

the head of the infant class they bully it with conundrums that cover the

domain of universal knowledge. This sounds extravagant--and is; yet it

goes no great way beyond the facts.

I received a curious letter one day, from the Punjab (you must pronounce

it Punjawb). The handwriting was excellent, and the wording was English

--English, and yet not exactly English. The style was easy and smooth

and flowing, yet there was something subtly foreign about it--A something

tropically ornate and sentimental and rhetorical. It turned out to be

the work of a Hindoo youth, the holder of a humble clerical billet in a

railway office. He had been educated in one of the numerous colleges of

India. Upon inquiry I was told that the country was full of young

fellows of his like. They had been educated away up to the snow-summits

of learning--and the market for all this elaborate cultivation was

minutely out of proportion to the vastness of the product. This market

consisted of some thousands of small clerical posts under the government

--the supply of material for it was multitudinous. If this youth with the

flowing style and the blossoming English was occupying a small railway

clerkship, it meant that there were hundreds and hundreds as capable as

he, or he would be in a high place; and it certainly meant that there

were thousands whose education and capacity had fallen a little short,

and that they would have to go without places. Apparently, then, the

colleges of India were doing what our high schools have long been doing

--richly over-supplying the market for highly-educated service; and thereby

doing a damage to the scholar, and through him to the country.

At home I once made a speech deploring the injuries inflicted by the high

school in making handicrafts distasteful to boys who would have been

willing to make a living at trades and agriculture if they had but had

the good luck to stop with the common school. But I made no converts.

Not one, in a community overrun with educated idlers who were above

following their fathers' mechanical trades, yet could find no market for

their book-knowledge. The same rail that brought me the letter from the

Punjab, brought also a little book published by Messrs. Thacker, Spink &

Co., of Calcutta, which interested me, for both its preface and its

contents treated of this matter of over-education. In the preface occurs

this paragraph from the Calcutta Review. For "Government office" read

"drygoods clerkship" and it will fit more than one region of America:

"The education that we give makes the boys a little less clownish in

their manners, and more intelligent when spoken to by strangers. On

the other hand, it has made them less contented with their lot in

life, and less willing to work with their hands. The form which

discontent takes in this country is not of a healthy kind; for, the

Natives of India consider that the only occupation worthy of an

educated man is that of a writership in some office, and especially

in a Government office. The village schoolboy goes back to the plow

with the greatest reluctance; and the town schoolboy carries the

same discontent and inefficiency into his father's workshop.

Sometimes these ex-students positively refuse at first to work; and

more than once parents have openly expressed their regret that they

ever allowed their sons to be inveigled to school."

The little book which I am quoting from is called "Indo-Anglian

Literature," and is well stocked with "baboo" English--clerkly English,

hooky English, acquired in the schools. Some of it is very funny,

--almost as funny, perhaps, as what you and I produce when we try to write

in a language not our own; but much of it is surprisingly correct and

free. If I were going to quote good English--but I am not. India is

well stocked with natives who speak it and write it as well as the best

of us. I merely wish to show some of the quaint imperfect attempts at

the use of our tongue. There are many letters in the book; poverty

imploring help--bread, money, kindness, office generally an office, a

clerkship, some way to get food and a rag out of the applicant's

unmarketable education; and food not for himself alone, but sometimes for

a dozen helpless relations in addition to his own family; for those

people are astonishingly unselfish, and admirably faithful to their ties

of kinship. Among us I think there is nothing approaching it. Strange

as some of these wailing and supplicating letters are, humble and even

groveling as some of them are, and quaintly funny and confused as a

goodly number of them are, there is still a pathos about them, as a rule,

that checks the rising laugh and reproaches it. In the following letter

"father" is not to be read literally. In Ceylon a little native

beggar-girl embarrassed me by calling me father, although I knew she was

mistaken. I was so new that I did not know that she was merely following

the custom of the dependent and the supplicant.

"SIR,

"I pray please to give me some action (work) for I am very poor boy

I have no one to help me even so father for it so it seemed in thy

good sight, you give the Telegraph Office, and another work what is

your wish I am very poor boy, this understand what is your wish you

my father I am your son this understand what is your wish.

"Your Sirvent, P. C. B."

Through ages of debasing oppression suffered by these people at the hands

of their native rulers, they come legitimately by the attitude and

language of fawning and flattery, and one must remember this in

mitigation when passing judgment upon the native character. It is common

in these letters to find the petitioner furtively trying to get at the

white man's soft religious side; even this poor boy baits his hook with a

macerated Bible-text in the hope that it may catch something if all else

fail.

Here is an application for the post of instructor in English to some

children:

"My Dear Sir or Gentleman, that your Petitioner has much

qualification in the Language of English to instruct the young boys;

I was given to understand that your of suitable children has to

acquire the knowledge of English language."

As a sample of the flowery Eastern style, I will take a sentence or two

from along letter written by a young native to the Lieutenant-Governor of

Bengal--an application for employment:

"HONORED AND MUCH RESPECTED SIR,

"I hope your honor will condescend to hear the tale of this poor

creature. I shall overflow with gratitude at this mark of your

royal condescension. The bird-like happiness has flown away from my

nest-like heart and has not hitherto returned from the period whence

the rose of my father's life suffered the autumnal breath of death,

in plain English he passed through the gates of Grave, and from that

hour the phantom of delight has never danced before me."

It is all school-English, book-English, you see; and good enough, too,

all things considered. If the native boy had but that one study he would

shine, he would dazzle, no doubt. But that is not the case. He is

situated as are our public-school children--loaded down with an

over-freightage of other studies; and frequently they are as far beyond

the actual point of progress reached by him and suited to the stage of

development attained, as could be imagined by the insanest fancy.

Apparently--like our public-school boy--he must work, work, work, in

school and out, and play but little. Apparently--like our public-school

boy--his "education" consists in learning things, not the meaning of

them; he is fed upon the husks, not the corn. From several essays

written by native schoolboys in answer to the question of how they spend

their day, I select one--the one which goes most into detail:

"66. At the break of day I rises from my own bed and finish my

daily duty, then I employ myself till 8 o'clock, after which I

employ myself to bathe, then take for my body some sweet meat, and

just at 9 1/2 I came to school to attend my class duty, then at

2 1/2 P. M. I return from school and engage myself to do my natural

duty, then, I engage for a quarter to take my tithn, then I study

till 5 P. M., after which I began to play anything which comes in

my head. After 8 1/2, half pass to eight we are began to sleep,

before sleeping I told a constable just 11 o' he came and rose us

from half pass eleven we began to read still morning."

It is not perfectly clear, now that I come to cipher upon it. He gets up

at about 5 in the morning, or along there somewhere, and goes to bed

about fifteen or sixteen hours afterward--that much of it seems straight;

but why he should rise again three hours later and resume his studies

till morning is puzzling.

I think it is because he is studying history. History requires a world

of time and bitter hard work when your "education" is no further advanced

than the cat's; when you are merely stuffing yourself with a mixed-up

mess of empty names and random incidents and elusive dates, which no one

teaches you how to interpret, and which, uninterpreted, pay you not a

farthing's value for your waste of time. Yes, I think he had to get up

at halfpast 11 P.M. in order to be sure to be perfect with his history

lesson by noon. With results as follows--from a Calcutta school

examination:

"Q. Who was Cardinal Wolsey?

"Cardinal Wolsey was an Editor of a paper named North Briton. No. 45 of

his publication he charged the King of uttering a lie from the throne.

He was arrested and cast into prison; and after releasing went to France.

"3. As Bishop of York but died in disentry in a church on his way to be

blockheaded.

"8. Cardinal Wolsey was the son of Edward IV, after his father's death

he himself ascended the throne at the age of (10) ten only, but when he

surpassed or when he was fallen in his twenty years of age at that time

he wished to make a journey in his countries under him, but he was

opposed by his mother to do journey, and according to his mother's

example he remained in the home, and then became King. After many times

obstacles and many confusion he become King and afterwards his brother."

There is probably not a word of truth in that.

"Q. What is the meaning of 'Ich Dien'?

"10. An honor conferred on the first or eldest sons of English

Sovereigns. It is nothing more than some feathers.

"11. Ich Dien was the word which was written on the feathers of the

blind King who came to fight, being interlaced with the bridles of the

horse.

"13. Ich Dien is a title given to Henry VII by the Pope of Rome, when he

forwarded the Reformation of Cardinal Wolsy to Rome, and for this reason

he was called Commander of the faith."

A dozen or so of this kind of insane answers are quoted in the book from

that examination. Each answer is sweeping proof, all by itself, that the

person uttering it was pushed ahead of where he belonged when he was put

into history; proof that he had been put to the task of acquiring history

before he had had a single lesson in the art of acquiring it, which is

the equivalent of dumping a pupil into geometry before he has learned the

progressive steps which lead up to it and make its acquirement possible.

Those Calcutta novices had no business with history. There was no excuse

for examining them in it, no excuse for exposing them and their teachers.

They were totally empty; there was nothing to "examine."

Helen Keller has been dumb, stone deaf, and stone blind, ever since she

was a little baby a year-and-a-half old; and now at sixteen years of age

this miraculous creature, this wonder of all the ages, passes the Harvard

University examination in Latin, German, French history, belles lettres,

and such things, and does it brilliantly, too, not in a commonplace

fashion. She doesn't know merely things, she is splendidly familiar with

the meanings of them. When she writes an essay on a Shakespearean

character, her English is fine and strong, her grasp of the subject is

the grasp of one who knows, and her page is electric with light. Has

Miss Sullivan taught her by the methods of India and the American public

school? No, oh, no; for then she would be deafer and dumber and blinder

than she was before. It is a pity that we can't educate all the children

in the asylums.

To continue the Calcutta exposure:

"What is the meaning of a Sheriff?"

"25. Sheriff is a post opened in the time of John. The duty of Sheriff

here in Calcutta, to look out and catch those carriages which is rashly

driven out by the coachman; but it is a high post in England.

"26. Sheriff was the English bill of common prayer.

"27. The man with whom the accusative persons are placed is called

Sheriff.

"28. Sheriff--Latin term for 'shrub,' we called broom, worn by the first

earl of Enjue, as an emblem of humility when they went to the pilgrimage,

and from this their hairs took their crest and surname.

"29. Sheriff is a kind of titlous sect of people, as Barons, Nobles,

etc.

"30. Sheriff; a tittle given on those persons who were respective and

pious in England."

The students were examined in the following bulky matters: Geometry, the

Solar Spectrum, the Habeas Corpus Act, the British Parliament, and in

Metaphysics they were asked to trace the progress of skepticism from

Descartes to Hume. It is within bounds to say that some of the results

were astonishing. Without doubt, there were students present who

justified their teacher's wisdom in introducing them to these studies;

but the fact is also evident that others had been pushed into these

studies to waste their time over them when they could have been

profitably employed in hunting smaller game. Under the head of Geometry,

one of the answers is this:

"49. The whole BD = the whole CA, and so-so-so-so-so-so-so."

To me this is cloudy, but I was never well up in geometry. That was the

only effort made among the five students who appeared for examination in

geometry; the other four wailed and surrendered without a fight. They

are piteous wails, too, wails of despair; and one of them is an eloquent

reproach; it comes from a poor fellow who has been laden beyond his

strength by a stupid teacher, and is eloquent in spite of the poverty of

its English. The poor chap finds himself required to explain riddles

which even Sir Isaac Newton was not able to understand:

"50. Oh my dear father examiner you my father and you kindly give a

number of pass you my great father.

"51. I am a poor boy and have no means to support my mother and two

brothers who are suffering much for want of food. I get four rupees

monthly from charity fund of this place, from which I send two rupees for

their support, and keep two for my own support. Father, if I relate the

unlucky circumstance under which we are placed, then, I think, you will

not be able to suppress the tender tear.

"52. Sir which Sir Isaac Newton and other experienced mathematicians

cannot understand I being third of Entrance Class can understand these

which is too impossible to imagine. And my examiner also has put very

tiresome and very heavy propositions to prove."

We must remember that these pupils had to do their thinking in one

language, and express themselves in another and alien one. It was a

heavy handicap. I have by me "English as She is Taught"--a collection of

American examinations made in the public schools of Brooklyn by one of

the teachers, Miss Caroline B. Le Row. An extract or two from its pages

will show that when the American pupil is using but one language, and

that one his own, his performance is no whit better than his Indian

brother's:

"ON HISTORY.

"Christopher Columbus was called the father of his Country. Queen

Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other millinery so that

Columbus could discover America.

"The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country.

"The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes and then

scalping them.

"Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country. His life

was saved by his daughter Pochahantas.

"The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.

"The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they should

be null and void.

"Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted. His remains were taken

to the cathedral in Havana.

"Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas."

In Brooklyn, as in India, they examine a pupil, and when they find out he

doesn't know anything, they put him into literature, or geometry, or

astronomy, or government, or something like that, so that he can properly

display the assification of the whole system--

"ON LITERATURE.

"'Bracebridge Hall' was written by Henry Irving.

"Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.

"Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.

"Ben Johnson survived Shakespeare in some respects.

"In the 'Canterbury Tale' it gives account of King Alfred on his way to

the shrine of Thomas Bucket.

"Chaucer was the father of English pottery.

"Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow."

We will finish with a couple of samples of "literature," one from

America, the other from India. The first is a Brooklyn public-school

boy's attempt to turn a few verses of the "Lady of the Lake" into prose.

You will have to concede that he did it:

"The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument made

of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing, for, being tired from

the time passed with hard labor overworked with anger and ignorant with

weariness, while every breath for labor lie drew with cries full of

sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight."

The following paragraph is from a little book which is famous in India

--the biography of a distinguished Hindoo judge, Onoocool Chunder

Mookerjee; it was written by his nephew, and is unintentionally funny-in

fact, exceedingly so. I offer here the closing scene. If you would like

to sample the rest of the book, it can be had by applying to the

publishers, Messrs. Thacker, Spink & Co., Calcutta

"And having said these words he hermetically sealed his lips not to

open them again. All the well-known doctors of Calcutta that could

be procured for a man of his position and wealth were brought,

--Doctors Payne, Fayrer, and Nilmadhub Mookerjee and others; they did

what they could do, with their puissance and knack of medical

knowledge, but it proved after all as if to milk the ram! His wife

and children had not the mournful consolation to hear his last

words; he remained sotto voce for a few hours, and then was taken

from us at 6.12 P.m. according to the caprice of God which passeth

understanding."

CHAPTER LXII.

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined ones.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

We sailed from Calcutta toward the end of March; stopped a day at Madras;

two or three days in Ceylon; then sailed westward on a long flight for

Mauritius. From my diary:

April 7. We are far abroad upon the smooth waters of the Indian Ocean,

now; it is shady and pleasant and peaceful under the vast spread of the

awnings, and life is perfect again--ideal.

The difference between a river and the sea is, that the river looks

fluid, the sea solid--usually looks as if you could step out and walk on

it.

The captain has this peculiarity--he cannot tell the truth in a plausible

way. In this he is the very opposite of the austere Scot who sits midway

of the table; he cannot tell a lie in an unplausible way. When the

captain finishes a statement the passengers glance at each other

privately, as who should say, "Do you believe that?" When the Scot

finishes one, the look says, "How strange and interesting." The whole

secret is in the manner and method of the two men. The captain is a

little shy and diffident, and he states the simplest fact as if he were a

little afraid of it, while the Scot delivers himself of the most

abandoned lie with such an air of stern veracity that one is forced to

believe it although one knows it isn't so. For instance, the Scot told

about a pet flying-fish he once owned, that lived in a little fountain in

his conservatory, and supported itself by catching birds and frogs and

rats in the neighboring fields. It was plain that no one at the table

doubted this statement.

By and by, in the course of some talk about custom-house annoyances, the

captain brought out the following simple everyday incident, but through

his infirmity of style managed to tell it in such a way that it got no

credence. He said:

"I went ashore at Naples one voyage when I was in that trade, and

stood around helping my passengers, for I could speak a little

Italian. Two or three times, at intervals, the officer asked me if

I had anything dutiable about me, and seemed more and more put out

and disappointed every time I told him no. Finally a passenger whom

I had helped through asked me to come out and take something. I

thanked him, but excused myself, saying I had taken a whisky just

before I came ashore.

"It was a fatal admission. The officer at once made me pay sixpence

import-duty on the whisky-just from ship to shore, you see; and he

fined me L5 for not declaring the goods, another L5 for falsely

denying that I had anything dutiable about me, also L5 for

concealing the goods, and L50 for smuggling, which is the maximum

penalty for unlawfully bringing in goods under the value of

sevenpence ha'penny. Altogether, sixty-five pounds sixpence for a

little thing like that."

The Scot is always believed, yet he never tells anything but lies;

whereas the captain is never believed, although he never tells a lie, so

far as I can judge. If he should say his uncle was a male person, he

would probably say it in such a way that nobody would believe it; at the

same time the Scot could claim that he had a female uncle and not stir a

doubt in anybody's mind. My own luck has been curious all my literary

life; I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that

anybody would believe.

Lots of pets on board--birds and things. In these far countries the

white people do seem to run remarkably to pets. Our host in Cawnpore had

a fine collection of birds--the finest we saw in a private house in

India. And in Colombo, Dr. Murray's great compound and commodious

bungalow were well populated with domesticated company from the woods:

frisky little squirrels; a Ceylon mina walking sociably about the house;

a small green parrot that whistled a single urgent note of call without

motion of its beak; also chuckled; a monkey in a cage on the back

veranda, and some more out in the trees; also a number of beautiful

macaws in the trees; and various and sundry birds and animals of breeds

not known to me. But no cat. Yet a cat would have liked that place.

April 9. Tea-planting is the great business in Ceylon, now. A passenger

says it often pays 40 per cent. on the investment. Says there is a boom.

April 10. The sea is a Mediterranean blue; and I believe that that is

about the divinest color known to nature.

It is strange and fine--Nature's lavish generosities to her creatures.

At least to all of them except man. For those that fly she has provided

a home that is nobly spacious--a home which is forty miles deep and

envelops the whole globe, and has not an obstruction in it. For those

that swim she has provided a more than imperial domain--a domain which is

miles deep and covers four-fifths of the globe. But as for man, she has

cut him off with the mere odds and ends of the creation. She has given

him the thin skin, the meagre skin which is stretched over the remaining

one-fifth--the naked bones stick up through it in most places. On the

one-half of this domain he can raise snow, ice, sand, rocks, and nothing

else. So the valuable part of his inheritance really consists of but a

single fifth of the family estate; and out of it he has to grub hard to

get enough to keep him alive and provide kings and soldiers and powder to

extend the blessings of civilization with. Yet man, in his simplicity

and complacency and inability to cipher, thinks Nature regards him as the

important member of the family--in fact, her favorite. Surely, it must

occur to even his dull head, sometimes, that she has a curious way of

showing it.

Afternoon. The captain has been telling how, in one of his Arctic

voyages, it was so cold that the mate's shadow froze fast to the deck and

had to be ripped loose by main strength. And even then he got only about

two-thirds of it back. Nobody said anything, and the captain went away.

I think he is becoming disheartened . . . . Also, to be fair, there

is another word of praise due to this ship's library: it contains no copy

of the Vicar of Wakefield, that strange menagerie of complacent

hypocrites and idiots, of theatrical cheap-john heroes and heroines, who

are always showing off, of bad people who are not interesting, and good

people who are fatiguing. A singular book. Not a sincere line in it,

and not a character that invites respect; a book which is one long

waste-pipe discharge of goody-goody puerilities and dreary moralities; a

book which is full of pathos which revolts, and humor which grieves the

heart. There are few things in literature that are more piteous, more

pathetic, than the celebrated "humorous" incident of Moses and the

spectacles. Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just

that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library

that hadn't a book in it.

Customs in tropic seas. At 5 in the morning they pipe to wash down the

decks, and at once the ladies who are sleeping there turn out and they

and their beds go below. Then one after another the men come up from the

bath in their pyjamas, and walk the decks an hour or two with bare legs

and bare feet. Coffee and fruit served. The ship cat and her kitten now

appear and get about their toilets; next the barber comes and flays us on

the breezy deck. Breakfast at 9.30, and the day begins. I do not know

how a day could be more reposeful: no motion; a level blue sea; nothing

in sight from horizon to horizon; the speed of the ship furnishes a

cooling breeze; there is no mail to read and answer; no newspapers to

excite you; no telegrams to fret you or fright you--the world is far, far

away; it has ceased to exist for you--seemed a fading dream, along in the

first days; has dissolved to an unreality now; it is gone from your mind

with all its businesses and ambitions, its prosperities and disasters,

its exultations and despairs, its joys and griefs and cares and worries.

They are no concern of yours any more; they have gone out of your life;

they are a storm which has passed and left a deep calm behind. The

people group themselves about the decks in their snowy white linen, and

read, smoke, sew, play cards, talk, nap, and so on. In other ships the

passengers are always ciphering about when they are going to arrive; out

in these seas it is rare, very rare, to hear that subject broached. In

other ships there is always an eager rush to the bulletin board at noon

to find out what the "run" has been; in these seas the bulletin seems to

attract no interest; I have seen no one visit it; in thirteen days I have

visited it only once. Then I happened to notice the figures of the day's

run. On that day there happened to be talk, at dinner, about the speed

of modern ships. I was the only passenger present who knew this ship's

gait. Necessarily, the Atlantic custom of betting on the ship's run is

not a custom here--nobody ever mentions it.

I myself am wholly indifferent as to when we are going to "get in"; if

any one else feels interested in the matter he has not indicated it in my

hearing. If I had my way we should never get in at all. This sort of

sea life is charged with an indestructible charm. There is no weariness,

no fatigue, no worry, no responsibility, no work, no depression of

spirits. There is nothing like this serenity, this comfort, this peace,

this deep contentment, to be found anywhere on land. If I had my way I

would sail on for ever and never go to live on the solid ground again.

One of Kipling's ballads has delivered the aspect and sentiment of this

bewitching sea correctly:

"The Injian Ocean sets an' smiles

So sof', so bright, so bloomin' blue;

There aren't a wave for miles an' miles

Excep' the jiggle from the screw."

April 14. It turns out that the astronomical apprentice worked off a

section of the Milky Way on me for the Magellan Clouds. A man of more

experience in the business showed one of them to me last night. It was

small and faint and delicate, and looked like the ghost of a bunch of

white smoke left floating in the sky by an exploded bombshell.

Wednesday, April 15. Mauritius. Arrived and anchored off Port Louis

2 A. M. Rugged clusters of crags and peaks, green to their summits; from

their bases to the sea a green plain with just tilt enough to it to make

the water drain off. I believe it is in 56 E. and 22 S.--a hot tropical

country. The green plain has an inviting look; has scattering dwellings

nestling among the greenery. Scene of the sentimental adventure of Paul

and Virginia.

Island under French control--which means a community which depends upon

quarantines, not sanitation, for its health.

Thursday, April 16. Went ashore in the forenoon at Port Louis, a little

town, but with the largest variety of nationalities and complexions we

have encountered yet. French, English, Chinese, Arabs, Africans with

wool, blacks with straight hair, East Indians, half-whites, quadroons

--and great varieties in costumes and colors.

Took the train for Curepipe at 1.30--two hours' run, gradually uphill.

What a contrast, this frantic luxuriance of vegetation, with the arid

plains of India; these architecturally picturesque crags and knobs and

miniature mountains, with the monotony of the Indian dead-levels.

A native pointed out a handsome swarthy man of grave and dignified

bearing, and said in an awed tone, "That is so-and-so; has held office of

one sort or another under this government for 37 years--he is known all

over this whole island and in the other countries of the world perhaps

--who knows? One thing is certain; you can speak his name anywhere in this

whole island, and you will find not one grown person that has not heard

it. It is a wonderful thing to be so celebrated; yet look at him; it

makes no change in him; he does not even seem to know it."

Curepipe (means Pincushion or Pegtown, probably). Sixteen miles (two

hours) by rail from Port Louis. At each end of every roof and on the

apex of every dormer window a wooden peg two feet high stands up; in some

cases its top is blunt, in others the peg is sharp and looks like a

toothpick. The passion for this humble ornament is universal.

Apparently, there has been only one prominent event in the history of

Mauritius, and that one didn't happen. I refer to the romantic sojourn

of Paul and Virginia here. It was that story that made Mauritius known

to the world, made the name familiar to everybody, the geographical

position of it to nobody.

A clergyman was asked to guess what was in a box on a table. It was a

vellum fan painted with the shipwreck, and was "one of Virginia's wedding

gifts."

April 18. This is the only country in the world where the stranger is

not asked "How do you like this place?" This is indeed a large

distinction. Here the citizen does the talking about the country

himself; the stranger is not asked to help. You get all sorts of

information. From one citizen you gather the idea that Mauritius was

made first, and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.

Another one tells you that this is an exaggeration; that the two chief

villages, Port Louis and Curepipe, fall short of heavenly perfection;

that nobody lives in Port Louis except upon compulsion, and that Curepipe

is the wettest and rainiest place in the world. An English citizen said:

"In the early part of this century Mauritius was used by the French

as a basis from which to operate against England's Indian

merchantmen; so England captured the island and also the neighbor,

Bourbon, to stop that annoyance. England gave Bourbon back; the

government in London did not want any more possessions in the West

Indies. If the government had had a better quality of geography in

stock it would not have wasted Bourbon in that foolish way. A big

war will temporarily shut up the Suez Canal some day and the English

ships will have to go to India around the Cape of Good Hope again;

then England will have to have Bourbon and will take it.

"Mauritius was a crown colony until 20 years ago, with a governor

appointed by the Crown and assisted by a Council appointed by

himself; but Pope Hennessey came out as Governor then, and he worked

hard to get a part of the council made elective, and succeeded. So

now the whole council is French, and in all ordinary matters of

legislation they vote together and in the French interest, not the

English. The English population is very slender; it has not votes

enough to elect a legislator. Half a dozen rich French families

elect the legislature. Pope Hennessey was an Irishman, a Catholic,

a Home Ruler, M.P., a hater of England and the English, a very

troublesome person and a serious incumbrance at Westminster; so it

was decided to send him out to govern unhealthy countries, in hope

that something would happen to him. But nothing did. The first

experiment was not merely a failure, it was more than a failure. He

proved to be more of a disease himself than any he was sent to

encounter. The next experiment was here. The dark scheme failed

again. It was an off-season and there was nothing but measles here

at the time. Pope Hennessey's health was not affected. He worked

with the French and for the French and against the English, and he

made the English very tired and the French very happy, and lived to

have the joy of seeing the flag he served publicly hissed. His

memory is held in worshipful reverence and affection by the French.

"It is a land of extraordinary quarantines. They quarantine a ship

for anything or for nothing; quarantine her for 20 and even 30 days.

They once quarantined a ship because her captain had had the

smallpox when he was a boy. That and because he was English.

"The population is very small; small to insignificance. The

majority is East Indian; then mongrels; then negroes (descendants of

the slaves of the French times); then French; then English. There

was an American, but he is dead or mislaid. The mongrels are the

result of all kinds of mixtures; black and white, mulatto and white,

quadroon and white, octoroon and white. And so there is every shade

of complexion; ebony, old mahogany, horsechestnut, sorrel,

molasses-candy, clouded amber, clear amber, old-ivory white,

new-ivory white, fish-belly white--this latter the leprous complexion

frequent with the Anglo-Saxon long resident in tropical climates.

"You wouldn't expect a person to be proud of being a Mauritian, now

would you? But it is so. The most of them have never been out of

the island, and haven't read much or studied much, and they think

the world consists of three principal countries--Judaea, France, and

Mauritius; so they are very proud of belonging to one of the three

grand divisions of the globe. They think that Russia and Germany

are in England, and that England does not amount to much. They have

heard vaguely about the United States and the equator, but they

think both of them are monarchies. They think Mount Peter Botte is

the highest mountain in the world, and if you show one of them a

picture of Milan Cathedral he will swell up with satisfaction and

say that the idea of that jungle of spires was stolen from the

forest of peg-tops and toothpicks that makes the roofs of Curepipe

look so fine and prickly.

"There is not much trade in books. The newspapers educate and

entertain the people. Mainly the latter. They have two pages of

large-print reading-matter-one of them English, the other French.

The English page is a translation of the French one. The typography

is super-extra primitive--in this quality it has not its equal

anywhere. There is no proof-reader now; he is dead.

"Where do they get matter to fill up a page in this little island

lost in the wastes of the Indian Ocean? Oh, Madagascar. They

discuss Madagascar and France. That is the bulk. Then they chock

up the rest with advice to the Government. Also, slurs upon the

English administration. The papers are all owned and edited by

creoles--French.

"The language of the country is French. Everybody speaks it--has

to. You have to know French particularly mongrel French, the patois

spoken by Tom, Dick, and Harry of the multiform complexions--or you

can't get along.

"This was a flourishing country in former days, for it made then and

still makes the best sugar in the world; but first the Suez Canal severed

it from the world and left it out in the cold and next the beetroot sugar

helped by bounties, captured the European markets. Sugar is the life of

Mauritius, and it is losing its grip. Its downward course was checked by

the depreciation of the rupee--for the planter pays wages in rupees but

sells his crop for gold--and the insurrection in Cuba and paralyzation of

the sugar industry there have given our prices here a life-saving lift;

but the outlook has nothing permanently favorable about it. It takes a

year to mature the canes--on the high ground three and six months longer

--and there is always a chance that the annual cyclone will rip the

profit out of the crop. In recent times a cyclone took the whole crop,

as you may say; and the island never saw a finer one. Some of the

noblest sugar estates in the island are in deep difficulties. A dozen of

them are investments of English capital; and the companies that own them

are at work now, trying to settle up and get out with a saving of half

the money they put in. You know, in these days, when a country begins to

introduce the tea culture, it means that its own specialty has gone back

on it. Look at Bengal; look at Ceylon. Well, they've begun to introduce

the tea culture, here.

"Many copies of Paul and Virginia are sold every year in Mauritius. No

other book is so popular here except the Bible. By many it is supposed

to be a part of the Bible. All the missionaries work up their French on

it when they come here to pervert the Catholic mongrel. It is the

greatest story that was ever written about Mauritius, and the only one."

CHAPTER LXIII.

The principal difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only

nine lives.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

April 20.--The cyclone of 1892 killed and crippled hundreds of people;

it was accompanied by a deluge of rain, which drowned Port Louis and

produced a water famine. Quite true; for it burst the reservoir and the

water-pipes; and for a time after the flood had disappeared there was

much distress from want of water.

This is the only place in the world where no breed of matches can stand

the damp. Only one match in 16 will light.

The roads are hard and smooth; some of the compounds are spacious, some

of the bungalows commodious, and the roadways are walled by tall bamboo

hedges, trim and green and beautiful; and there are azalea hedges, too,

both the white and the red; I never saw that before.

As to healthiness: I translate from to-day's (April 20) Merchants' and

Planters' Gazette, from the article of a regular contributor, "Carminge,"

concerning the death of the nephew of a prominent citizen:

"Sad and lugubrious existence, this which we lead in Mauritius; I

believe there is no other country in the world where one dies more

easily than among us. The least indisposition becomes a mortal

malady; a simple headache develops into meningitis; a cold into

pneumonia, and presently, when we are least expecting it, death is a

guest in our home."

This daily paper has a meteorological report which tells you what the

weather was day before yesterday.

One is clever pestered by a beggar or a peddler in this town, so far as I

can see. This is pleasantly different from India.

April 22. To such as believe that the quaint product called French

civilization would be an improvement upon the civilization of New Guinea

and the like, the snatching of Madagascar and the laying on of French

civilization there will be fully justified. But why did the English

allow the French to have Madagascar? Did she respect a theft of a couple

of centuries ago? Dear me, robbery by European nations of each other's

territories has never been a sin, is not a sin to-day. To the several

cabinets the several political establishments of the world are

clotheslines; and a large part of the official duty of these cabinets is

to keep an eye on each other's wash and grab what they can of it as

opportunity offers. All the territorial possessions of all the political

establishments in the earth--including America, of course--consist of

pilferings from other people's wash. No tribe, howsoever insignificant,

and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not

stolen. When the English, the French, and the Spaniards reached America,

the Indian tribes had been raiding each other's territorial clothes-lines

for ages, and every acre of ground in the continent had been stolen and

re-stolen 500 times. The English, the French, and the Spaniards went to

work and stole it all over again; and when that was satisfactorily

accomplished they went diligently to work and stole it from each other.

In Europe and Asia and Africa every acre of ground has been stolen

several millions of times. A crime persevered in a thousand centuries

ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom,

and custom supersedes all other forms of law. Christian governments are

as frank to-day, as open and above-board, in discussing projects for

raiding each other's clothes-lines as ever they were before the Golden

Rule came smiling into this inhospitable world and couldn't get a night's

lodging anywhere. In 150 years England has beneficently retired garment

after garment from the Indian lines, until there is hardly a rag of the

original wash left dangling anywhere. In 800 years an obscure

tribe of Muscovite savages has risen to the dazzling position of

Land-Robber-in-Chief; she found a quarter of the world hanging out to dry

on a hundred parallels of latitude, and she scooped in the whole wash.

She keeps a sharp eye on a multitude of little lines that stretch along

the northern boundaries of India, and every now and then she snatches a

hip-rag or a pair of pyjamas. It is England's prospective property, and

Russia knows it; but Russia cares nothing for that. In fact, in our day

land-robbery, claim-jumping, is become a European governmental frenzy.

Some have been hard at it in the borders of China, in Burma, in Siam, and

the islands of the sea; and all have been at it in Africa. Africa has

been as coolly divided up and portioned out among the gang as if they had

bought it and paid for it. And now straightway they are beginning the

old game again --to steal each other's grabbings. Germany found a vast

slice of Central Africa with the English flag and the English missionary

and the English trader scattered all over it, but with certain

formalities neglected--no signs up, "Keep off the grass,"

"Trespassers-forbidden," etc.--and she stepped in with a cold calm smile

and put up the signs herself, and swept those English pioneers promptly

out of the country.

There is a tremendous point there. It can be put into the form of a

maxim: Get your formalities right--never mind about the moralities.

It was an impudent thing; but England had to put up with it. Now, in the

case of Madagascar, the formalities had originally been observed, but by

neglect they had fallen into desuetude ages ago. England should have

snatched Madagascar from the French clothes-line. Without an effort she

could have saved those harmless natives from the calamity of French

civilization, and she did not do it. Now it is too late.

The signs of the times show plainly enough what is going to happen. All

the savage lands in the world are going to be brought under subjection to

the Christian governments of Europe. I am not sorry, but glad. This

coming fate might have been a calamity to those savage peoples two

hundred years ago; but now it will in some cases be a benefaction. The

sooner the seizure is consummated, the better for the savages.

The dreary and dragging ages of bloodshed and disorder and oppression

will give place to peace and order and the reign of law. When one

considers what India was under her Hindoo and Mohammedan rulers, and what

she is now; when he remembers the miseries of her millions then and the

protections and humanities which they enjoy now, he must concede that the

most fortunate thing that has ever befallen that empire was the

establishment of British supremacy there. The savage lands of the world

are to pass to alien possession, their peoples to the mercies of alien

rulers. Let us hope and believe that they will all benefit by the

change.

April 23. "The first year they gather shells; the second year they

gather shells and drink; the third year they do not gather shells." (Said

of immigrants to Mauritius.)

Population 375,000. 120 sugar factories.

Population 1851, 185,000. The increase is due mainly to the introduction

of Indian coolies. They now apparently form the great majority of the

population. They are admirable breeders; their homes are always hazy

with children. Great savers of money. A British officer told me that in

India he paid his servant 10 rupees a month, and he had 11 cousins,

uncles, parents, etc., dependent upon him, and he supported them on his

wages. These thrifty coolies are said to be acquiring land a trifle at a

time, and cultivating it; and may own the island by and by.

The Indian women do very hard labor [for wages of (1/2 rupee) for twelve

hours' work.] They carry mats of sugar on their heads (70 pounds) all

day lading ships, for half a rupee, and work at gardening all day for

less.

The camaron is a fresh water creature like a cray-fish. It is regarded

here as the world's chiefest delicacy--and certainly it is good. Guards

patrol the streams to prevent poaching it. A fine of Rs.200 or 300

(they say) for poaching. Bait is thrown in the water; the camaron goes

for it; the fisher drops his loop in and works it around and about the

camaron he has selected, till he gets it over its tail; then there's a

jerk or something to certify the camaron that it is his turn now; he

suddenly backs away, which moves the loop still further up his person and

draws it taut, and his days are ended.

Another dish, called palmiste, is like raw turnip-shavings and tastes

like green almonds; is very delicate and good. Costs the life of a palm

tree 12 to 20 years old--for it is the pith.

Another dish--looks like greens or a tangle of fine seaweed--is a

preparation of the deadly nightshade. Good enough.

The monkeys live in the dense forests on the flanks of the toy mountains,

and they flock down nights and raid the sugar-fields. Also on other

estates they come down and destroy a sort of bean-crop--just for fun,

apparently--tear off the pods and throw them down.

The cyclone of 1892 tore down two great blocks of stone buildings in the

center of Port Louis--the chief architectural feature-and left the

uncomely and apparently frail blocks standing. Everywhere in its track

it annihilated houses, tore off roofs, destroyed trees and crops. The

men were in the towns, the women and children at home in the country

getting crippled, killed, frightened to insanity; and the rain deluging

them, the wind howling, the thunder crashing, the lightning glaring.

This for an hour or so. Then a lull and sunshine; many ventured out of

safe shelter; then suddenly here it came again from the opposite point

and renewed and completed the devastation. It is said the Chinese fed

the sufferers for days on free rice.

Whole streets in Port Louis were laid flat--wrecked. During a minute and

a half the wind blew 123 miles an hour; no official record made after

that, when it may have reached 150. It cut down an obelisk. It carried

an American ship into the woods after breaking the chains of two anchors.

They now use four-two forward, two astern. Common report says it killed

1,200 in Port Louis alone, in half an hour. Then came the lull of the

central calm--people did not know the barometer was still going down

--then suddenly all perdition broke loose again while people were rushing

around seeking friends and rescuing the wounded. The noise was

comparable to nothing; there is nothing resembling it but thunder and

cannon, and these are feeble in comparison.

What there is of Mauritius is beautiful. You have undulating wide

expanses of sugar-cane--a fine, fresh green and very pleasant to the eye;

and everywhere else you have a ragged luxuriance of tropic vegetation of

vivid greens of varying shades, a wild tangle of underbrush, with

graceful tall palms lifting their crippled plumes high above it; and you

have stretches of shady dense forest with limpid streams frolicking

through them, continually glimpsed and lost and glimpsed again in the

pleasantest hide-and-seek fashion; and you have some tiny mountains,

some quaint and picturesque groups of toy peaks, and a dainty little

vest-pocket Matterhorn; and here and there and now and then a strip of

sea with a white ruffle of surf breaks into the view.

That is Mauritius; and pretty enough. The details are few, the massed

result is charming, but not imposing; not riotous, not exciting; it is a

Sunday landscape. Perspective, and the enchantments wrought by distance,

are wanting. There are no distances; there is no perspective, so to

speak. Fifteen miles as the crow flies is the usual limit of vision.

Mauritius is a garden and a park combined. It affects one's emotions as

parks and gardens affect them. The surfaces of one's spiritual deeps are

pleasantly played upon, the deeps themselves are not reached, not

stirred. Spaciousness, remote altitudes, the sense of mystery which

haunts apparently inaccessible mountain domes and summits reposing in the

sky--these are the things which exalt the spirit and move it to see

visions and dream dreams.

The Sandwich Islands remain my ideal of the perfect thing in the matter

of tropical islands. I would add another story to Mauna Loa's 16,000

feet if I could, and make it particularly bold and steep and craggy and

forbidding and snowy; and I would make the volcano spout its lava-floods

out of its summit instead of its sides; but aside from these

non-essentials I have no corrections to suggest. I hope these will be

attended to; I do not wish to have to speak of it again.

CHAPTER LXIV.

When your watch gets out of order you have choice of two things to do:

throw it in the fire or take it to the watch-tinker. The former is the

quickest.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

The Arundel Castle is the finest boat I have seen in these seas. She is

thoroughly modern, and that statement covers a great deal of ground. She

has the usual defect, the common defect, the universal defect, the defect

that has never been missing from any ship that ever sailed--she has

imperfect beds. Many ships have good beds, but no ship has very good

ones. In the matter of beds all ships have been badly edited, ignorantly

edited, from the beginning. The selection of the beds is given to some

hearty, strong-backed, self-made man, when it ought to be given to a

frail woman accustomed from girlhood to backaches and insomnia. Nothing

is so rare, on either side of the ocean, as a perfect bed; nothing is so

difficult to make. Some of the hotels on both sides provide it, but no

ship ever does or ever did. In Noah's Ark the beds were simply

scandalous. Noah set the fashion, and it will endure in one degree of

modification or another till the next flood.

8 A.M. Passing Isle de Bourbon. Broken-up sky-line of volcanic

mountains in the middle. Surely it would not cost much to repair them,

and it seems inexcusable neglect to leave them as they are.

It seems stupid to send tired men to Europe to rest. It is no proper

rest for the mind to clatter from town to town in the dust and cinders,

and examine galleries and architecture, and be always meeting people and

lunching and teaing and dining, and receiving worrying cables and

letters. And a sea voyage on the Atlantic is of no use--voyage too

short, sea too rough. The peaceful Indian and Pacific Oceans and the

long stretches of time are the healing thing.

May 2, AM. A fair, great ship in sight, almost the first we have seen in

these weeks of lonely voyaging. We are now in the Mozambique Channel,

between Madagascar and South Africa, sailing straight west for Delagoa

Bay.

Last night, the burly chief engineer, middle-aged, was standing telling a

spirited seafaring tale, and had reached the most exciting place, where a

man overboard was washing swiftly astern on the great seas, and uplifting

despairing cries, everybody racing aft in a frenzy of excitement and

fading hope, when the band, which had been silent a moment, began

impressively its closing piece, the English national anthem. As simply

as if he was unconscious of what he was doing, he stopped his story,

uncovered, laid his laced cap against his breast, and slightly bent his

grizzled head. The few bars finished, he put on his cap and took up his

tale again, as naturally as if that interjection of music had been a part

of it. There was something touching and fine about it, and it was moving

to reflect that he was one of a myriad, scattered over every part of the

globe, who by turn was doing as he was doing every hour of the

twenty-four--those awake doing it while the others slept--those

impressive bars forever floating up out of the various climes, never

silent and never lacking reverent listeners.

All that I remember about Madagascar is that Thackeray's little Billie

went up to the top of the mast and there knelt him upon his knee, saying,

"I see

"Jerusalem and Madagascar,

And North and South Amerikee."

May 3. Sunday. Fifteen or twenty Africanders who will end their voyage

to-day and strike for their several homes from Delagoa Bay to-morrow, sat

up singing on the afterdeck in the moonlight till 3 A.M. Good fun and

wholesome. And the songs were clean songs, and some of them were

hallowed by tender associations. Finally, in a pause, a man asked, "Have

you heard about the fellow that kept a diary crossing the Atlantic?"

It was a discord, a wet blanket. The men were not in the mood for

humorous dirt. The songs had carried them to their homes, and in spirit

they sat by those far hearthstones, and saw faces and heard voices other

than those that were about them. And so this disposition to drag in an

old indecent anecdote got no welcome; nobody answered. The poor man

hadn't wit enough to see that he had blundered, but asked his question

again. Again there was no response. It was embarrassing for him. In

his confusion he chose the wrong course, did the wrong thing--began the

anecdote. Began it in a deep and hostile stillness, where had been such

life and stir and warm comradeship before. He delivered himself of the

brief details of the diary's first day, and did it with some confidence

and a fair degree of eagerness. It fell flat. There was an awkward

pause. The two rows of men sat like statues. There was no movement, no

sound. He had to go on; there was no other way, at least none that an

animal of his calibre could think of. At the close of each day's diary,

the same dismal silence followed. When at last he finished his tale and

sprung the indelicate surprise which is wont to fetch a crash of

laughter, not a ripple of sound resulted. It was as if the tale had been

told to dead men. After what seemed a long, long time, somebody sighed,

somebody else stirred in his seat; presently, the men dropped into a low

murmur of confidential talk, each with his neighbor, and the incident was

closed. There were indications that that man was fond of his anecdote;

that it was his pet, his standby, his shot that never missed, his

reputation-maker. But he will never tell it again. No doubt he will

think of it sometimes, for that cannot well be helped; and then he will

see a picture, and always the same picture--the double rank of dead men;

the vacant deck stretching away in dimming perspective beyond them, the

wide desert of smooth sea all abroad; the rim of the moon spying from

behind a rag of black cloud; the remote top of the mizzenmast shearing a

zigzag path through the fields of stars in the deeps of space; and this

soft picture will remind him of the time that he sat in the midst of it

and told his poor little tale and felt so lonesome when he got through.

Fifty Indians and Chinamen asleep in a big tent in the waist of the ship

forward; they lie side by side with no space between; the former wrapped

up, head and all, as in the Indian streets, the Chinamen uncovered; the

lamp and things for opium smoking in the center.

A passenger said it was ten 2-ton truck loads of dynamite that lately

exploded at Johannesburg. Hundreds killed; he doesn't know how many;

limbs picked up for miles around. Glass shattered, and roofs swept away

or collapsed 200 yards off; fragment of iron flung three and a half

miles.

It occurred at 3 p.m.; at 6, L65,000 had been subscribed. When this

passenger left, L35,000 had been voted by city and state governments and

L100,000 by citizens and business corporations. When news of the

disaster was telephoned to the Exchange L35,000 were subscribed in the

first five minutes. Subscribing was still going on when he left; the

papers had ceased the names, only the amounts--too many names; not enough

room. L100,000 subscribed by companies and citizens; if this is true, it

must be what they call in Australia "a record"--the biggest instance of a

spontaneous outpour for charity in history, considering the size of the

population it was drawn from, $8 or $10 for each white resident, babies

at the breast included.

Monday, May 4. Steaming slowly in the stupendous Delagoa Bay, its dim

arms stretching far away and disappearing on both sides. It could

furnish plenty of room for all the ships in the world, but it is shoal.

The lead has given us 3 1/2 fathoms several times and we are drawing

that, lacking 6 inches.

A bold headland--precipitous wall, 150 feet high, very strong, red color,

stretching a mile or so. A man said it was Portuguese blood--battle

fought here with the natives last year. I think this doubtful. Pretty

cluster of houses on the tableland above the red-and rolling stretches of

grass and groups of trees, like England.

The Portuguese have the railroad (one passenger train a day) to the

border--70 miles--then the Netherlands Company have it. Thousands of

tons of freight on the shore--no cover. This is Portuguese allover

--indolence, piousness, poverty, impotence.

Crews of small boats and tugs, all jet black woolly heads and very

muscular.

Winter. The South African winter is just beginning now, but nobody but

an expert can tell it from summer. However, I am tired of summer; we

have had it unbroken for eleven months. We spent the afternoon on shore,

Delagoa Bay. A small town--no sights. No carriages. Three 'rickshas,

but we couldn't get them--apparently private. These Portuguese are a

rich brown, like some of the Indians. Some of the blacks have the long

horse beads and very long chins of the negroes of the picture books; but

most of them are exactly like the negroes of our Southern States round

faces, flat noses, good-natured, and easy laughers.

Flocks of black women passed along, carrying outrageously heavy bags of

freight on their heads. The quiver of their leg as the foot was planted

and the strain exhibited by their bodies showed what a tax upon their

strength the load was. They were stevedores and doing full stevedores

work. They were very erect when unladden--from carrying heavy loads on

their heads--just like the Indian women. It gives them a proud fine

carriage.

Sometimes one saw a woman carrying on her head a laden and top-heavy

basket the shape of an inverted pyramid-its top the size of a soup-plate,

its base the diameter of a teacup. It required nice balancing--and got

it.

No bright colors; yet there were a good many Hindoos.

The Second Class Passenger came over as usual at "lights out" (11) and we

lounged along the spacious vague solitudes of the deck and smoked the

peaceful pipe and talked. He told me an incident in Mr. Barnum's life

which was evidently characteristic of that great showman in several ways:

This was Barnum's purchase of Shakespeare's birthplace, a quarter of a

century ago. The Second Class Passenger was in Jamrach's employ at the

time and knew Barnum well. He said the thing began in this way. One

morning Barnum and Jamrach were in Jamrach's little private snuggery back

of the wilderness of caged monkeys and snakes and other commonplaces of

Jamrach's stock in trade, refreshing themselves after an arduous stroke

of business, Jamrach with something orthodox, Barnum with something

heterodox--for Barnum was a teetotaler. The stroke of business was in

the elephant line. Jamrach had contracted to deliver to Barnum in New

York 18 elephants for $360,000 in time for the next season's opening.

Then it occurred to Mr. Barnum that he needed a "card" He suggested

Jumbo. Jamrach said he would have to think of something else--Jumbo

couldn't be had; the Zoo wouldn't part with that elephant. Barnum said

he was willing to pay a fortune for Jumbo if he could get him. Jamrach

said it was no use to think about it; that Jumbo was as popular as the

Prince of Wales and the Zoo wouldn't dare to sell him; all England would

be outraged at the idea; Jumbo was an English institution; he was part of

the national glory; one might as well think of buying the Nelson

monument. Barnum spoke up with vivacity and said:

"It's a first-rate idea. I'll buy the Monument."

Jamrach was speechless for a second. Then he said, like one ashamed

"You caught me. I was napping. For a moment I thought you were in

earnest."

Barnum said pleasantly--

"I was in earnest. I know they won't sell it, but no matter, I will not

throw away a good idea for all that. All I want is a big advertisement.

I will keep the thing in mind, and if nothing better turns up I will

offer to buy it. That will answer every purpose. It will furnish me a

couple of columns of gratis advertising in every English and American

paper for a couple of months, and give my show the biggest boom a show

ever had in this world."

Jamrach started to deliver a burst of admiration, but was interrupted by

Barnum, who said:

"Here is a state of things! England ought to blush."

His eye had fallen upon something in the newspaper. He read it through

to himself, then read it aloud. It said that the house that Shakespeare

was born in at Stratford-on-Avon was falling gradually to ruin through

neglect; that the room where the poet first saw the light was now serving

as a butcher's shop; that all appeals to England to contribute money (the

requisite sum stated) to buy and repair the house and place it in the

care of salaried and trustworthy keepers had fallen resultless. Then

Barnum said:

"There's my chance. Let Jumbo and the Monument alone for the present

--they'll keep. I'll buy Shakespeare's house. I'll set it up in my

Museum in New York and put a glass case around it and make a sacred thing

of it; and you'll see all America flock there to worship; yes, and

pilgrims from the whole earth; and I'll make them take their hats off,

too. In America we know how to value anything that Shakespeare's touch

has made holy. You'll see."

In conclusion the S. C. P. said:

"That is the way the thing came about. Barnum did buy Shakespeare's

house. He paid the price asked, and received the properly attested

documents of sale. Then there was an explosion, I can tell you. England

rose! That, the birthplace of the master-genius of all the ages and all

the climes--that priceless possession of Britain--to be carted out of the

country like so much old lumber and set up for sixpenny desecration in a

Yankee show-shop--the idea was not to be tolerated for a moment. England

rose in her indignation; and Barnum was glad to relinquish his prize and

offer apologies. However, he stood out for a compromise; he claimed a

concession--England must let him have Jumbo. And England consented, but

not cheerfully."

It shows how, by help of time, a story can grow--even after Barnum has

had the first innings in the telling of it. Mr. Barnum told me the story

himself, years ago. He said that the permission to buy Jumbo was not a

concession; the purchase was made and the animal delivered before the

public knew anything about it. Also, that the securing of Jumbo was all

the advertisement he needed. It produced many columns of newspaper talk,

free of cost, and he was satisfied. He said that if he had failed to get

Jumbo he would have caused his notion of buying the Nelson Monument to be

treacherously smuggled into print by some trusty friend, and after he had

gotten a few hundred pages of gratuitous advertising out of it, he would

have come out with a blundering, obtuse, but warm-hearted letter of

apology, and in a postscript to it would have naively proposed to let the

Monument go, and take Stonehenge in place of it at the same price.

It was his opinion that such a letter, written with well-simulated

asinine innocence and gush would have gotten his ignorance and stupidity

an amount of newspaper abuse worth six fortunes to him, and not

purchasable for twice the money.

I knew Mr. Barnum well, and I placed every confidence in the account

which he gave me of the Shakespeare birthplace episode. He said he found

the house neglected and going-to decay, and he inquired into the matter

and was told that many times earnest efforts had been made to raise money

for its proper repair and preservation, but without success. He then

proposed to buy it. The proposition was entertained, and a price named

--$50,000, I think; but whatever it was, Barnum paid the money down,

without remark, and the papers were drawn up and executed. He said that

it had been his purpose to set up the house in his Museum, keep it in

repair, protect it from name-scribblers and other desecrators, and leave

it by bequest to the safe and perpetual guardianship of the Smithsonian

Institute at Washington.

But as soon as it was found that Shakespeare's house had passed into

foreign hands and was going to be carried across the ocean, England was

stirred as no appeal from the custodians of the relic had ever stirred

England before, and protests came flowing in--and money, too, to stop the

outrage. Offers of repurchase were made--offers of double the money that

Mr. Barnum had paid for the house. He handed the house back, but took

only the sum which it had cost him--but on the condition that an

endowment sufficient for the future safeguarding and maintenance of the

sacred relic should be raised. This condition was fulfilled.

That was Barnum's account of the episode; and to the end of his days he

claimed with pride and satisfaction that not England, but America

--represented by him--saved the birthplace of Shakespeare from destruction.

At 3 P.M., May 6th, the ship slowed down, off the land, and thoughtfully

and cautiously picked her way into the snug harbor of Durban, South

Africa.

CHAPTER LXV.

In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the

moralities.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

FROM DIARY:

Royal Hotel. Comfortable, good table, good service of natives and

Madrasis. Curious jumble of modern and ancient city and village,

primitiveness and the other thing. Electric bells, but they don't ring.

Asked why they didn't, the watchman in the office said he thought they

must be out of order; he thought so because some of them rang, but most

of them didn't. Wouldn't it be a good idea to put them in order? He

hesitated--like one who isn't quite sure--then conceded the point.

May 7. A bang on the door at 6. Did I want my boots cleaned? Fifteen

minutes later another bang. Did we want coffee? Fifteen later, bang

again, my wife's bath ready; 15 later, my bath ready. Two other bangs;

I forget what they were about. Then lots of shouting back and forth,

among the servants just as in an Indian hotel.

Evening. At 4 P.M. it was unpleasantly warm. Half-hour after sunset

one needed a spring overcoat; by 8 a winter one.

Durban is a neat and clean town. One notices that without having his

attention called to it.

Rickshaws drawn by splendidly built black Zulus, so overflowing with

strength, seemingly, that it is a pleasure, not a pain, to see them

snatch a rickshaw along. They smile and laugh and show their teeth--a

good-natured lot. Not allowed to drink; 2s per hour for one person; 3s

for two; 3d for a course--one person.

The chameleon in the hotel court. He is fat and indolent and

contemplative; but is business-like and capable when a fly comes about

--reaches out a tongue like a teaspoon and takes him in. He gums his

tongue first. He is always pious, in his looks. And pious and thankful

both, when Providence or one of us sends him a fly. He has a froggy

head, and a back like a new grave--for shape; and hands like a bird's

toes that have been frostbitten. But his eyes are his exhibition

feature. A couple of skinny cones project from the sides of his head,

with a wee shiny bead of an eye set in the apex of each; and these cones

turn bodily like pivot-guns and point every-which-way, and they are

independent of each other; each has its own exclusive machinery. When I

am behind him and C. in front of him, he whirls one eye rearwards and the

other forwards--which gives him a most Congressional expression (one eye

on the constituency and one on the swag); and then if something happens

above and below him he shoots out one eye upward like a telescope and the

other downward--and this changes his expression, but does not improve it.

Natives must not be out after the curfew bell without a pass. In Natal

there are ten blacks to one white.

Sturdy plump creatures are the women. They comb their wool up to a peak

and keep it in position by stiffening it with brown-red clay--half of

this tower colored, denotes engagement; the whole of it colored denotes

marriage.

None but heathen Zulus on the police; Christian ones not allowed.

May 9. A drive yesterday with friends over the Berea. Very fine roads

and lofty, overlooking the whole town, the harbor, and the sea-beautiful

views. Residences all along, set in the midst of green lawns with shrubs

and generally one or two intensely red outbursts of poinsettia--the

flaming splotch of blinding red a stunning contrast with the world of

surrounding green. The cactus tree--candelabrum-like; and one twisted

like gray writhing serpents. The "flat-crown" (should be flat-roof)

--half a dozen naked branches full of elbows, slant upward like artificial

supports, and fling a roof of delicate foliage out in a horizontal

platform as flat as a floor; and you look up through this thin floor as

through a green cobweb or veil. The branches are japanesich. All about

you is a bewildering variety of unfamiliar and beautiful trees; one sort

wonderfully dense foliage and very dark green--so dark that you notice it

at once, notwithstanding there are so many orange trees. The

"flamboyant"--not in flower, now, but when in flower lives up to its

name, we are told. Another tree with a lovely upright tassel scattered

among its rich greenery, red and glowing as a firecoal. Here and there a

gum-tree; half a dozen lofty Norfolk Island pines lifting their fronded

arms skyward. Groups of tall bamboo.

Saw one bird. Not many birds here, and they have no music--and the

flowers not much smell, they grow so fast.

Everything neat and trim and clean like the town. The loveliest trees

and the greatest variety I have ever seen anywhere, except approaching

Darjeeling. Have not heard anyone call Natal the garden of South Africa,

but that is what it probably is.

It was when Bishop of Natal that Colenso raised such a storm in the

religious world. The concerns of religion are a vital matter here yet.

A vigilant eye is kept upon Sunday. Museums and other dangerous resorts

are not allowed to be open. You may sail on the Bay, but it is wicked to

play cricket. For a while a Sunday concert was tolerated, upon condition

that it must be admission free and the money taken by collection. But

the collection was alarmingly large and that stopped the matter. They

are particular about babies. A clergyman would not bury a child

according to the sacred rites because it had not been baptized. The

Hindoo is more liberal. He burns no child under three, holding that it

does not need purifying.

The King of the Zulus, a fine fellow of 30, was banished six years ago

for a term of seven years. He is occupying Napoleon's old stand--St.

Helena. The people are a little nervous about having him come back, and

they may well be, for Zulu kings have been terrible people sometimes

--like Tchaka, Dingaan, and Cetewayo.

There is a large Trappist monastery two hours from Durban, over the

country roads, and in company with Mr. Milligan and Mr. Hunter, general

manager of the Natal government railways, who knew the heads of it, we

went out to see it.

There it all was, just as one reads about it in books and cannot believe

that it is so--I mean the rough, hard work, the impossible hours, the

scanty food, the coarse raiment, the Maryborough beds, the tabu of human

speech, of social intercourse, of relaxation, of amusement, of

entertainment, of the presence of woman in the men's establishment.

There it all was. It was not a dream, it was not a lie. And yet with

the fact before one's face it was still incredible. It is such a

sweeping suppression of human instincts, such an extinction of the man as

an individual.

La Trappe must have known the human race well. The scheme which he

invented hunts out everything that a man wants and values--and withholds

it from him. Apparently there is no detail that can help make life worth

living that has not been carefully ascertained and placed out of the

Trappist's reach. La Trappe must have known that there were men who

would enjoy this kind of misery, but how did he find it out?

If he had consulted you or me he would have been told that his scheme

lacked too many attractions; that it was impossible; that it could never

be floated. But there in the monastery was proof that he knew the human

race better than it knew itself. He set his foot upon every desire that

a man has--yet he floated his project, and it has prospered for two

hundred years, and will go on prospering forever, no doubt.

Man likes personal distinction--there in the monastery it is obliterated.

He likes delicious food--there he gets beans and bread and tea, and not

enough of it. He likes to lie softly--there he lies on a sand mattress,

and has a pillow and a blanket, but no sheet. When he is dining, in a

great company of friends, he likes to laugh and chat--there a monk reads

a holy book aloud during meals, and nobody speaks or laughs. When a man

has a hundred friends about him, evenings, be likes to have a good time

and run late--there he and the rest go silently to bed at 8; and in the

dark, too; there is but a loose brown robe to discard, there are no

night-clothes to put on, a light is not needed. Man likes to lie abed

late there he gets up once or twice in the night to perform some

religious office, and gets up finally for the day at two in the morning.

Man likes light work or none at all--there he labors all day in the

field, or in the blacksmith shop or the other shops devoted to the

mechanical trades, such as shoemaking, saddlery, carpentry, and so on.

Man likes the society of girls and women--there he never has it. He

likes to have his children about him, and pet them and play with them

--there he has none. He likes billiards--there is no table there. He

likes outdoor sports and indoor dramatic and musical and social

entertainments--there are none there. He likes to bet on things--I was

told that betting is forbidden there. When a man's temper is up he likes

to pour it out upon somebody there this is not allowed. A man likes

animals--pets; there are none there. He likes to smoke--there he cannot

do it. He likes to read the news--no papers or magazines come there. A

man likes to know how his parents and brothers and sisters are getting

along when he is away, and if they miss him--there he cannot know. A man

likes a pretty house, and pretty furniture, and pretty things, and pretty

colors--there he has nothing but naked aridity and sombre colors. A man

likes--name it yourself: whatever it is, it is absent from that place.

From what I could learn, all that a man gets for this is merely the

saving of his soul.

It all seems strange, incredible, impossible. But La Trappe knew the

race. He knew the powerful attraction of unattractiveness; he knew that

no life could be imagined, howsoever comfortless and forbidding, but

somebody would want to try it.

This parent establishment of Germans began its work fifteen years ago,

strangers, poor, and unencouraged; it owns 15,000 acres of land now, and

raises grain and fruit, and makes wines, and manufactures all manner of

things, and has native apprentices in its shops, and sends them forth

able to read and write, and also well equipped to earn their living by

their trades. And this young establishment has set up eleven branches in

South Africa, and in them they are christianizing and educating and

teaching wage-yielding mechanical trades to 1,200 boys and girls.

Protestant Missionary work is coldly regarded by the commercial white

colonist all over the heathen world, as a rule, and its product is

nicknamed "rice-Christians" (occupationless incapables who join the

church for revenue only), but I think it would be difficult to pick a

flaw in the work of these Catholic monks, and I believe that the

disposition to attempt it has not shown itself.

Tuesday, May 12. Transvaal politics in a confused condition. First the

sentencing of the Johannesburg Reformers startled England by its

severity; on the top of this came Kruger's exposure of the cipher

correspondence, which showed that the invasion of the Transvaal, with the

design of seizing that country and adding it to the British Empire, was

planned by Cecil Rhodes and Beit--which made a revulsion in English

feeling, and brought out a storm against Rhodes and the Chartered Company

for degrading British honor. For a good while I couldn't seem to get at

a clear comprehension of it, it was so tangled. But at last by patient

study I have managed it, I believe. As I understand it, the Uitlanders

and other Dutchmen were dissatisfied because the English would not allow

them to take any part in the government except to pay taxes. Next, as I

understand it, Dr. Kruger and Dr. Jameson, not having been able to make

the medical business pay, made a raid into Matabeleland with the

intention of capturing the capital, Johannesburg, and holding the women

and children to ransom until the Uitlanders and the other Boers should

grant to them and the Chartered Company the political rights which had

been withheld from them. They would have succeeded in this great scheme,

as I understand it, but for the interference of Cecil Rhodes and Mr.

Beit, and other Chiefs of the Matabele, who persuaded their countrymen to

revolt and throw off their allegiance to Germany. This, in turn, as I

understand it, provoked the King of Abyssinia to destroy the Italian army

and fall back upon Johannesburg; this at the instigation of Rhodes, to

bull the stock market.

CHAPTER LXVI.

Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

When I scribbled in my note-book a year ago the paragraph which ends the

preceding chapter, it was meant to indicate, in an extravagant form, two

things: the conflicting nature of the information conveyed by the citizen

to the stranger concerning South African politics, and the resulting

confusion created in the stranger's mind thereby.

But it does not seem so very extravagant now. Nothing could in that

disturbed and excited time make South African politics clear or quite

rational to the citizen of the country because his personal interest and

his political prejudices were in his way; and nothing could make those

politics clear or rational to the stranger, the sources of his

information being such as they were.

I was in South Africa some little time. When I arrived there the

political pot was boiling fiercely. Four months previously, Jameson had

plunged over the Transvaal border with about 600 armed horsemen at his

back, to go to the "relief of the women and children" of Johannesburg; on

the fourth day of his march the Boers had defeated him in battle, and

carried him and his men to Pretoria, the capital, as prisoners; the Boer

government had turned Jameson and his officers over to the British

government for trial, and shipped them to England; next, it had arrested

64 important citizens of Johannesburg as raid-conspirators, condemned

their four leaders to death, then commuted the sentences, and now the 64

were waiting, in jail, for further results. Before midsummer they were

all out excepting two, who refused to sign the petitions for release; 58

had been fined $10,000 each and enlarged, and the four leaders had gotten

off with fines of $125,000 each with permanent exile added, in one case.

Those were wonderfully interesting days for a stranger, and I was glad.

to be in the thick of the excitement. Everybody was talking, and I

expected to understand the whole of one side of it in a very little

while.

I was disappointed. There were singularities, perplexities,

unaccountabilities about it which I was not able to master. I had no

personal access to Boers--their side was a secret to me, aside from what

I was able to gather of it from published statements. My sympathies were

soon with the Reformers in the Pretoria jail, with their friends, and

with their cause. By diligent inquiry in Johannesburg I found out

--apparently--all the details of their side of the quarrel except one--what

they expected to accomplish by an armed rising.

Nobody seemed to know.

The reason why the Reformers were discontented and wanted some changes

made, seemed quite clear. In Johannesburg it was claimed that the

Uitlanders (strangers, foreigners) paid thirteen-fifteenths of the

Transvaal taxes, yet got little or nothing for it. Their city had no

charter; it had no municipal government; it could levy no taxes for

drainage, water-supply, paving, cleaning, sanitation, policing. There

was a police force, but it was composed of Boers, it was furnished by the

State Government, and the city had no control over it. Mining was very

costly; the government enormously increased the cost by putting

burdensome taxes upon the mines, the output, the machinery, the

buildings; by burdensome imposts upon incoming materials; by burdensome

railway-freight-charges. Hardest of all to bear, the government reserved

to itself a monopoly in that essential thing, dynamite, and burdened it

with an extravagant price. The detested Hollander from over the water

held all the public offices. The government was rank with corruption.

The Uitlander had no vote, and must live in the State ten or twelve years

before he could get one. He was not represented in the Raad

(legislature) that oppressed him and fleeced him. Religion was not free.

There were no schools where the teaching was in English, yet the great

majority of the white population of the State knew no tongue but that.

The State would not pass a liquor law; but allowed a great trade in cheap

vile brandy among the blacks, with the result that 25 per cent. of the

50,000 blacks employed in the mines were usually drunk and incapable of

working.

There--it was plain enough that the reasons for wanting some changes made

were abundant and reasonable, if this statement of the existing

grievances was correct.

What the Uitlanders wanted was reform--under the existing Republic.

What they proposed to do was to secure these reforms by, prayer,

petition, and persuasion.

They did petition. Also, they issued a Manifesto, whose very first note

is a bugle-blast of loyalty: "We want the establishment of this Republic

as a true Republic."

Could anything be clearer than the Uitlander's statement of the

grievances and oppressions under which they were suffering? Could

anything be more legal and citizen-like and law-respecting than their

attitude as expressed by their Manifesto? No. Those things were

perfectly clear, perfectly comprehensible.

But at this point the puzzles and riddles and confusions begin to flock

in. You have arrived at a place which you cannot quite understand.

For you find that as a preparation for this loyal, lawful, and in every

way unexceptionable attempt to persuade the government to right their

grievances, the Uitlanders had smuggled a Maxim gun or two and 1,500

muskets into the town, concealed in oil tanks and coal cars, and had

begun to form and drill military companies composed of clerks, merchants,

and citizens generally.

What was their idea? Did they suppose that the Boers would attack them

for petitioning, for redress? That could not be.

Did they suppose that the Boers would attack them even for issuing a

Manifesto demanding relief under the existing government?

Yes, they apparently believed so, because the air was full of talk of

forcing the government to grant redress if it were not granted

peacefully.

The Reformers were men of high intelligence. If they were in earnest,

they were taking extraordinary risks. They had enormously valuable

properties to defend; their town was full of women and children; their

mines and compounds were packed with thousands upon thousands of sturdy

blacks. If the Boers attacked, the mines would close, the blacks would

swarm out and get drunk; riot and conflagration and the Boers together

might lose the Reformers more in a day, in money, blood, and suffering,

than the desired political relief could compensate in ten years if they

won the fight and secured the reforms.

It is May, 1897, now; a year has gone by, and the confusions of that day

have been to a considerable degree cleared away. Mr. Cecil Rhodes, Dr.

Jameson, and others responsible for the Raid, have testified before the

Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry in London, and so have Mr. Lionel

Phillips and other Johannesburg Reformers, monthly-nurses of the

Revolution which was born dead. These testimonies have thrown light.

Three books have added much to this light:

"South Africa As It Is," by Mr. Statham, an able writer partial to the

Boers; "The Story of an African Crisis," by Mr. Garrett, a brilliant

writer partial to Rhodes; and "A Woman's Part in a Revolution," by Mrs.

John Hays Hammond, a vigorous and vivid diarist, partial to the

Reformers. By liquifying the evidence of the prejudiced books and of the

prejudiced parliamentary witnesses and stirring the whole together and

pouring it into my own (prejudiced) moulds, I have got at the truth of

that puzzling South African situation, which is this:

1. The capitalists and other chief men of Johannesburg were fretting

under various political and financial burdens imposed by the State (the

South African Republic, sometimes called "the Transvaal") and desired to

procure by peaceful means a modification of the laws.

2. Mr. Cecil Rhodes, Premier of the British Cape Colony, millionaire,

creator and managing director of the territorially-immense and

financially unproductive South Africa Company; projector of vast schemes

for the unification and consolidation of all the South African States,

one imposing commonwealth or empire under the shadow and general

protection of the British flag, thought he saw an opportunity to make

profitable use of the Uitlander discontent above mentioned--make the

Johannesburg cat help pull out one of his consolidation chestnuts for

him. With this view he set himself the task of warming the lawful and

legitimate petitions and supplications of the Uitlanders into seditious

talk, and their frettings into threatenings--the final outcome to be

revolt and armed rebellion. If he could bring about a bloody collision

between those people and the Boer government, Great Britain would have to

interfere; her interference would be resisted by the Boers; she would

chastise them and add the Transvaal to her South African possessions. It

was not a foolish idea, but a rational and practical one.

After a couple of years of judicious plotting, Mr. Rhodes had his reward;

the revolutionary kettle was briskly boiling in Johannesburg, and the

Uitlander leaders were backing their appeals to the government--now

hardened into demands--by threats of force and bloodshed. By the middle

of December, 1895, the explosion seemed imminent. Mr. Rhodes was

diligently helping, from his distant post in Cape Town. He was helping

to procure arms for Johannesburg; he was also arranging to have Jameson

break over the border and come to Johannesburg with 600 mounted men at

his back. Jameson--as per instructions from Rhodes, perhaps--wanted a

letter from the Reformers requesting him to come to their aid. It was a

good idea. It would throw a considerable share of the responsibility of

his invasion upon the Reformers. He got the letter--that famous one

urging him to fly to the rescue of the women and children. He got it two

months before he flew. The Reformers seem to have thought it over and

concluded that they had not done wisely; for the next day after giving

Jameson the implicating document they wanted to withdraw it and leave the

women and children in danger; but they were told that it was too late.

The original had gone to Mr. Rhodes at the Cape. Jameson had kept a

copy, though.

From that time until the 29th of December, a good deal of the Reformers'

time was taken up with energetic efforts to keep Jameson from coming to

their assistance. Jameson's invasion had been set for the 26th. The

Reformers were not ready. The town was not united. Some wanted a fight,

some wanted peace; some wanted a new government, some wanted the existing

one reformed; apparently very few wanted the revolution to take place in

the interest and under the ultimate shelter of the Imperial flag

--British; yet a report began to spread that Mr. Rhodes's embarrassing

assistance had for its end this latter object.

Jameson was away up on the frontier tugging at his leash, fretting to

burst over the border. By hard work the Reformers got his starting-date

postponed a little, and wanted to get it postponed eleven days.

Apparently, Rhodes's agents were seconding their efforts--in fact wearing

out the telegraph wires trying to hold him back. Rhodes was himself the

only man who could have effectively postponed Jameson, but that would

have been a disadvantage to his scheme; indeed, it could spoil his whole

two years' work.

Jameson endured postponement three days, then resolved to wait no longer.

Without any orders--excepting Mr. Rhodes's significant silence--he cut

the telegraph wires on the 29th, and made his plunge that night, to go to

the rescue of the women and children, by urgent request of a letter now

nine days old--as per date,--a couple of months old, in fact. He read

the letter to his men, and it affected them. It did not affect all of

them alike. Some saw in it a piece of piracy of doubtful wisdom, and

were sorry to find that they had been assembled to violate friendly

territory instead of to raid native kraals, as they had supposed.

Jameson would have to ride 150 miles. He knew that there were suspicions

abroad in the Transvaal concerning him, but he expected to get through to

Johannesburg before they should become general and obstructive. But a

telegraph wire had been overlooked and not cut. It spread the news of

his invasion far and wide, and a few hours after his start the Boer

farmers were riding hard from every direction to intercept him.

As soon as it was known in Johannesburg that he was on his way to rescue

the women and children, the grateful people put the women and children in

a train and rushed them for Australia. In fact, the approach of

Johannesburg's saviour created panic and consternation; there, and a

multitude of males of peaceable disposition swept to the trains like a

sand-storm. The early ones fared best; they secured seats--by sitting in

them--eight hours before the first train was timed to leave.

Mr. Rhodes lost no time. He cabled the renowned Johannesburg letter of

invitation to the London press--the gray-headedest piece of ancient

history that ever went over a cable.

The new poet laureate lost no time. He came out with a rousing poem

lauding Jameson's prompt and splendid heroism in flying to the rescue of

the women and children; for the poet could not know that he did not fly

until two months after the invitation. He was deceived by the false date

of the letter, which was December 20th.

Jameson was intercepted by the Boers on New Year's Day, and on the next

day he surrendered. He had carried his copy of the letter along, and if

his instructions required him--in case of emergency--to see that it fell

into the hands of the Boers, he loyally carried them out. Mrs. Hammond

gives him a sharp rap for his supposed carelessness, and emphasizes her

feeling about it with burning italics: "It was picked up on the

battle-field in a leathern pouch, supposed to be Dr. Jameson's saddle-bag.

Why, in the name of all that is discreet and honorable, didn't he eat it!"

She requires too much. He was not in the service of the Reformers

--excepting ostensibly; he was in the service of Mr. Rhodes. It was the

only plain English document, undarkened by ciphers and mysteries, and

responsibly signed and authenticated, which squarely implicated the

Reformers in the raid, and it was not to Mr. Rhodes's interest that it

should be eaten. Besides, that letter was not the original, it was only

a copy. Mr. Rhodes had the original--and didn't eat it. He cabled it to

the London press. It had already been read in England and America and

all over Europe before, Jameson dropped it on the battlefield. If the

subordinate's knuckles deserved a rap, the principal's deserved as many

as a couple of them.

That letter is a juicily dramatic incident and is entitled to all its

celebrity, because of the odd and variegated effects which it produced.

All within the space of a single week it had made Jameson an illustrious

hero in England, a pirate in Pretoria, and an ass without discretion or

honor in Johannesburg; also it had produced a poet-laureatic explosion of

colored fireworks which filled the world's sky with giddy splendors, and,

the knowledge that Jameson was coming with it to rescue the women and

children emptied Johannesburg of that detail of the population. For an

old letter, this was much. For a letter two months old, it did marvels;

if it had been a year old it would have done miracles.

CHAPTER LXVII.

First catch your Boer, then kick him.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Those latter days were days of bitter worry and trouble for the harassed

Reformers.

From Mrs. Hammond we learn that on the 31st (the day after Johannesburg

heard of the invasion), "The Reform Committee repudiates Dr. Jameson's

inroad."

It also publishes its intention to adhere to the Manifesto.

It also earnestly desires that the inhabitants shall refrain from overt

acts against the Boer government.

It also "distributes arms" at the Court House, and furnishes horses "to

the newly-enrolled volunteers."

It also brings a Transvaal flag into the committee-room, and the entire

body swear allegiance to it "with uncovered heads and upraised arms."

Also "one thousand Lee-Metford rifles have been given out"--to rebels.

Also, in a speech, Reformer Lionel Phillips informs the public that the

Reform Committee Delegation has "been received with courtesy by the

Government Commission," and "been assured that their proposals shall be

earnestly considered." That "while the Reform Committee regretted

Jameson's precipitate action, they would stand by him."

Also the populace are in a state of "wild enthusiasm," and "46 can

scarcely be restrained; they want to go out to meet Jameson and bring him

in with triumphal outcry."

Also the British High Commissioner has issued a damnifying proclamation

against Jameson and all British abettors of his game. It arrives January

1st.

It is a difficult position for the Reformers, and full of hindrances and

perplexities. Their duty is hard, but plain:

1. They have to repudiate the inroad, and stand by the inroader.

2. They have to swear allegiance to the Boer government, and distribute

cavalry horses to the rebels.

3. They have to forbid overt acts against the Boer government, and

distribute arms to its enemies.

4. They have to avoid collision with the British government, but still

stand by Jameson and their new oath of allegiance to the Boer government,

taken, uncovered, in presence of its flag.

They did such of these things as they could; they tried to do them all;

in fact, did do them all, but only in turn, not simultaneously. In the

nature of things they could not be made to simultane.

In preparing for armed revolution and in talking revolution, were the

Reformers "bluffing," or were they in earnest? If they were in earnest,

they were taking great risks--as has been already pointed out. A

gentleman of high position told me in Johannesburg that he had in his

possession a printed document proclaiming a new government and naming its

president--one of the Reform leaders. He said that this proclamation had

been ready for issue, but was suppressed when the raid collapsed.

Perhaps I misunderstood him. Indeed, I must have misunderstood him, for

I have not seen mention of this large incident in print anywhere.

Besides, I hope I am mistaken; for, if I am, then there is argument that

the Reformers were privately not serious, but were only trying to scare

the Boer government into granting the desired reforms.

The Boer government was scared, and it had a right to be. For if Mr.

Rhodes's plan was to provoke a collision that would compel the

interference of England, that was a serious matter. If it could be shown

that that was also the Reformers' plan and purpose, it would prove that

they had marked out a feasible project, at any rate, although it was one

which could hardly fail to cost them ruinously before England should

arrive. But it seems clear that they had no such plan nor desire. If,

when the worst should come to the worst, they meant to overthrow the

government, they also meant to inherit the assets themselves, no doubt.

This scheme could hardly have succeeded. With an army of Boers at their

gates and 50,000 riotous blacks in their midst, the odds against success

would have been too heavy--even if the whole town had been armed. With

only 2,500 rifles in the place, they stood really no chance.

To me, the military problems of the situation are of more interest than

the political ones, because by disposition I have always been especially

fond of war. No, I mean fond of discussing war; and fond of giving

military advice. If I had been with Jameson the morning after he

started, I should have advised him to turn back. That was Monday; it was

then that he received his first warning from a Boer source not to violate

the friendly soil of the Transvaal. It showed that his invasion was

known. If I had been with him on Tuesday morning and afternoon, when he

received further warnings, I should have repeated my advice. If I had

been with him the next morning--New Year's--when he received notice that

"a few hundred" Boers were waiting for him a few miles ahead, I should

not have advised, but commanded him to go back. And if I had been with

him two or three hours later--a thing not conceivable to me--I should

have retired him by force; for at that time he learned that the few

hundred had now grown to 800; and that meant that the growing would go on

growing.

For,--by authority of Mr. Garrett, one knows that Jameson's 600 were only

530 at most, when you count out his native drivers, etc.; and that the

530 consisted largely of "green" youths, "raw young fellows," not trained

and war-worn British soldiers; and I would have told. Jameson that those

lads would not be able to shoot effectively from horseback in the scamper

and racket of battle, and that there would not be anything for them to

shoot at, anyway, but rocks; for the Boers would be behind the rocks, not

out in the open. I would have told him that 300 Boer sharpshooters

behind rocks would be an overmatch for his 500 raw young fellows on

horseback.

If pluck were the only thing essential to battle-winning, the English

would lose no battles. But discretion, as well as pluck, is required

when one fights Boers and Red Indians. In South Africa the Briton has

always insisted upon standing bravely up, unsheltered, before the hidden

Boer, and taking the results: Jameson's men would follow the custom.

Jameson would not have listened to me--he would have been intent upon

repeating history, according to precedent. Americans are not acquainted

with the British-Boer war of 1881; but its history is interesting, and

could have been instructive to Jameson if he had been receptive. I will

cull some details of it from trustworthy sources mainly from "Russell's

Natal." Mr. Russell is not a Boer, but a Briton. He is inspector of

schools, and his history is a text-book whose purpose is the instruction

of the Natal English youth.

After the seizure of the Transvaal and the suppression of the Boer

government by England in 1877, the Boers fretted for three years, and

made several appeals to England for a restoration of their liberties,

but without result. Then they gathered themselves together in a great

mass-meeting at Krugersdorp, talked their troubles over, and resolved to

fight for their deliverance from the British yoke. (Krugersdorp--the

place where the Boers interrupted the Jameson raid.) The little handful

of farmers rose against the strongest empire in the world. They

proclaimed martial law and the re-establishment of their Republic. They

organized their forces and sent them forward to intercept the British

battalions. This, although Sir Garnet Wolseley had but lately made

proclamation that "so long as the sun shone in the heavens," the

Transvaal would be and remain English territory. And also in spite of

the fact that the commander of the 94th regiment--already on the march to

suppress this rebellion--had been heard to say that "the Boers would turn

tail at the first beat of the big drum."--["South Africa As It Is,"

by F. Reginald Statham, page 82. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897.]

Four days after the flag-raising, the Boer force which had been sent

forward to forbid the invasion of the English troops met them at

Bronkhorst Spruit--246 men of the 94th regiment, in command of a colonel,

the big drum beating, the band playing--and the first battle was fought.

It lasted ten minutes. Result:

British loss, more than 150 officers and men, out of the 246.

Surrender of the remnant.

Boer loss--if any--not stated.

They are fine marksmen, the Boers. From the cradle up, they live on

horseback and hunt wild animals with the rifle. They have a passion for

liberty and the Bible, and care for nothing else.

"General Sir George Colley, Lieutenant-Governor and Commander-in-Chief in

Natal, felt it his duty to proceed at once to the relief of the loyalists

and soldiers beleaguered in the different towns of the Transvaal." He

moved out with 1,000 men and some artillery. He found the Boers encamped

in a strong and sheltered position on high ground at Laing's Nek--every

Boer behind a rock. Early in the morning of the 28th January, 1881, he

moved to the attack "with the 58th regiment, commanded by Colonel Deane,

a mounted squadron of 70 men, the 60th Rifles, the Naval Brigade with

three rocket tubes, and the Artillery with six guns." He shelled the

Boers for twenty minutes, then the assault was delivered, the 58th

marching up the slope in solid column. The battle was soon finished,

with this result, according to Russell--

British loss in killed and wounded, 174.

Boer loss, "trifling."

Colonel Deane was killed, and apparently every officer above the grade of

lieutenant was killed or wounded, for the 58th retreated to its camp in

command of a lieutenant. ("Africa as It Is.")

That ended the second battle.

On the 7th of February General Colley discovered that the Boers were

flanking his position. The next morning he left his camp at Mount

Pleasant and marched out and crossed the Ingogo river with 270 men,

started up the Ingogo heights, and there fought a battle which lasted

from noon till nightfall. He then retreated, leaving his wounded with

his military chaplain, and in recrossing the now swollen river lost some

of his men by drowning. That was the third Boer victory. Result,

according to Mr. Russell--

British loss 150 out of 270 engaged.

Boer loss, 8 killed, 9 wounded--17.

There was a season of quiet, now, but at the end of about three weeks Sir

George Colley conceived the idea of climbing, with an infantry and

artillery force, the steep and rugged mountain of Amajuba in the night--a

bitter hard task, but he accomplished it. On the way he left about 200

men to guard a strategic point, and took about 400 up the mountain with

him. When the sun rose in the morning, there was an unpleasant surprise

for the Boers; yonder were the English troops visible on top of the

mountain two or three miles away, and now their own position was at the

mercy of the English artillery. The Boer chief resolved to retreat--up

that mountain. He asked for volunteers, and got them.

The storming party crossed the swale and began to creep up the steeps,

"and from behind rocks and bushes they shot at the soldiers on the

skyline as if they were stalking deer," says Mr. Russell. There was

"continuous musketry fire, steady and fatal on the one side, wild and

ineffectual on the other." The Boers reached the top, and began to put in

their ruinous work. Presently the British "broke and fled for their

lives down the rugged steep." The Boers had won the battle. Result in

killed and wounded, including among the killed the British General:

British loss, 226, out of 400 engaged.

Boer loss, 1 killed, 5 wounded.

That ended the war. England listened to reason, and recognized the Boer

Republic--a government which has never been in any really awful danger

since, until Jameson started after it with his 500 "raw young fellows."

To recapitulate:

The Boer farmers and British soldiers fought 4 battles, and the Boers won

them all. Result of the 4, in killed and wounded:

British loss, 700 men.

Boer loss, so far as known, 23 men.

It is interesting, now, to note how loyally Jameson and his several

trained British military officers tried to make their battles conform to

precedent. Mr. Garrett's account of the Raid is much the best one I have

met with, and my impressions of the Raid are drawn from that.

When Jameson learned that near Krugersdorp he would find 800 Boers

waiting to dispute his passage, he was not in the least disturbed. He

was feeling as he had felt two or three days before, when he had opened

his campaign with a historic remark to the same purport as the one with

which the commander of the 94th had opened the Boer-British war of

fourteen years before. That Commander's remark was, that the Boers

"would turn tail at the first beat of the big drum." Jameson's was, that

with his "raw young fellows" he could kick the (persons) of the Boers

"all round the Transvaal." He was keeping close to historic precedent.

Jameson arrived in the presence of the Boers. They--according to

precedent--were not visible. It was a country of ridges, depressions,

rocks, ditches, moraines of mining-tailings--not even as favorable for

cavalry work as Laing's Nek had been in the former disastrous days.

Jameson shot at the ridges and rocks with his artillery, just as General

Colley had done at the Nek; and did them no damage and persuaded no Boer

to show himself. Then about a hundred of his men formed up to charge the

ridge-according to the 58th's precedent at the Nek; but as they dashed

forward they opened out in a long line, which was a considerable

improvement on the 58th's tactics; when they had gotten to within 200

yards of the ridge the concealed Boers opened out on them and emptied 20

saddles. The unwounded dismounted and fired at the rocks over the backs

of their horses; but the return-fire was too hot, and they mounted again,

"and galloped back or crawled away into a clump of reeds for cover, where

they were shortly afterward taken prisoners as they lay among the reeds.

Some thirty prisoners were so taken, and during the night which followed

the Boers carried away another thirty killed and wounded--the wounded to

Krugersdorp hospital." Sixty per cent. of the assaulted force disposed

of--according to Mr. Garrett's estimate.

It was according to Amajuba precedent, where the British loss was 226 out

of about 400 engaged.

Also, in Jameson's camp, that night, "there lay about 30 wounded or

otherwise disabled" men. Also during the night "some 30 or 40 young

fellows got separated from the command and straggled through into

Johannesburg." Altogether a possible 150 men gone, out of his 530. His

lads had fought valorously, but had not been able to get near enough to a

Boer to kick him around the Transvaal.

At dawn the next morning the column of something short of 400 whites

resumed its march. Jameson's grit was stubbornly good; indeed, it was

always that. He still had hopes. There was a long and tedious

zigzagging march through broken ground, with constant harassment from the

Boers; and at last the column "walked into a sort of trap," and the Boers

"closed in upon it." "Men and horses dropped on all sides. In the

column the feeling grew that unless it could burst through the Boer lines

at this point it was done for. The Maxims were fired until they grew too

hot, and, water failing for the cool jacket, five of them jammed and went

out of action. The 7-pounder was fired until only half an hour's

ammunition was left to fire with. One last rush was made, and failed,

and then the Staats Artillery came up on the left flank, and the game was

up."

Jameson hoisted a white flag and surrendered.

There is a story, which may not be true, about an ignorant Boer farmer

there who thought that this white flag was the national flag of England.

He had been at Bronkhorst, and Laing's Nek, and Ingogo and Amajuba, and

supposed that the English did not run up their flag excepting at the end

of a fight.

The following is (as I understand it) Mr. Garrett's estimate of Jameson's

total loss in killed and wounded for the two days:

"When they gave in they were minus some 20 per cent. of combatants.

There were 76 casualties. There were 30 men hurt or sick in the wagons.

There were 27 killed on the spot or mortally wounded."

Total, 133, out of the original 530. It is just 25 per cent.--[However,

I judge that the total was really 150; for the number of wounded carried

to Krugersdorp hospital was 53; not 30, as Mr. Garrett reports it. The

lady whose guest I was in Krugerdorp gave me the figures. She was head

nurse from the beginning of hostilities (Jan. 1) until the professional

nurses arrived, Jan. 8th. Of the 53, "Three or four were Boers"; I quote

her words.]--This is a large improvement upon the precedents established

at Bronkhorst, Laing's Nek, Ingogo, and Amajuba, and seems to indicate

that Boer marksmanship is not so good now as it was in those days. But

there is one detail in which the Raid-episode exactly repeats history.

By surrender at Bronkhorst, the whole British force disappeared from the

theater of war; this was the case with Jameson's force.

In the Boer loss, also, historical precedent is followed with sufficient

fidelity. In the 4 battles named above, the Boer loss, so far as known,

was an average of 6 men per battle, to the British average loss of 175.

In Jameson's battles, as per Boer official report, the Boer loss in

killed was 4. Two of these were killed by the Boers themselves, by

accident, the other by Jameson's army--one of them intentionally, the

other by a pathetic mischance. "A young Boer named Jacobz was moving

forward to give a drink to one of the wounded troopers (Jameson's) after

the first charge, when another wounded man, mistaking his intention; shot

him." There were three or four wounded Boers in the Krugersdorp

hospital, and apparently no others have been reported. Mr. Garrett, "on

a balance of probabilities, fully accepts the official version, and

thanks Heaven the killed was not larger."

As a military man, I wish to point out what seems to me to be military

errors in the conduct of the campaign which we have just been

considering. I have seen active service in the field, and it was in the

actualities of war that I acquired my training and my right to speak.

I served two weeks in the beginning of our Civil War, and during all that

tune commanded a battery of infantry composed of twelve men. General

Grant knew the history of my campaign, for I told it him. I also told

him the principle upon which I had conducted it; which was, to tire the

enemy. I tired out and disqualified many battalions, yet never had a

casualty myself nor lost a man. General Grant was not given to paying

compliments, yet he said frankly that if I had conducted the whole war

much bloodshed would have been spared, and that what the army might have

lost through the inspiriting results of collision in the field would have

been amply made up by the liberalizing influences of travel. Further

endorsement does not seem to me to be necessary.